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OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
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2003
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Introduction •••
The United Kingdom is very fortunate to have an active Kant Society. It is also fortunate to have in Peter Strawson not just one of the greatest living philosophers, but also the leading proponent of analytic Kantianism. Strawson's seminal Individuals rehabilitated metaphysics as a respectable enterprise within analytic philosophy. It also inaugurated a distinctly Kantian project-descriptive metaphysics-and placed the idea of transcendental arguments at the centre of epistemological, metaphysical, and methodological debate. It was followed by The Bounds of Sense, a brilliant and provocative discussion of the first Critique, which continues to influence I(ant scholarship by way of inspiration and opposition alike. It was only natural, therefore, for the UK Kant Society to devote one of its annual conferences to Strawson. The conference was hosted by the Departn1ent of Philosophy at the University of Reading, and took place on 17-19 September 1999. It was the first conference on Strawson in Britain for a long time, and the very first to concentrate on his relation to Kant. In this latter respect, the proceedings of the conference complement three other collections of essays on Strawson, in which Kantian themes are mentioned only in passing. 1 Furthern10re, the date was particularly appropriate in that Sir Peter turned 80 in 1999. I was fortunate to secure the collaboration not just of Sir Peter himself, but also of some of his eminent pupils, admirers, and critics. The papers divide loosely into three kinds. Some of them, namely those by Strawson, Hacker, Bird, Cassam, Stroud, and n1yself, deal with general questions concerning the nature of Strawson's Kantianism and of his rehabilitation of metaphysics. Others, by Westphal, Rosefeldt, de Gaynesford, Allison, and Forster, are devoted to more specific topics in Kant. In the remainder, by Grundn1ann and Misselhorn, Stern, and Hyman, the focus is more on Strawson than on Kant. Taken as a whole, the collection ranges from Kant interpretation and the history of analytic philosophy through philosophical logic, metaphysics, and epistemology to the philosophy of mind and
1 Z. van Straaten (ed.), Philosophical Subjects: Essays Presented to P. F. Strawson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980); P. K. Sen and R. R. Verma (eds.), The Philosophy of P. F. Strawson (New Delhi: Indian Council of Philosophical Research, 1995); and L. E. Hahn (ed.), The Philosophy of P. F. Strawson, The Library of Living Philosophers, xxvi (Peru, Ill.: Open Court, 1998).
2
Introduction
aesthetics. In this, it reflects the range of Peter Strawson's own philosophical interests and achievements. The following abstracts, provided by the authors themselves, give a more detailed picture of their contents. Peter Strawson's opening essay falls into three parts. The first discusses his relationship to Kant, and in what respect Kant's influence on him is a special one. The second part features a (partly appreciative, partly critical) discussion of Rae Langton's recent interpretation of Kant in Kantian Humility. The third part returns to the topic of intellectual autobiography. It turns to some other influences on Strawson's work, especially that of Wittgenstein. Among other things, it mentions points of contrast, such as Wittgenstein's disregard for the constructive and systematic aspects of philosophy, and his more sceptical view of subjective experience and, in particular, of abstract objects. My own contribution first discusses the role of Strawson's Individuals and Bounds of Sense in the rise of what I call 'analytic Kantianism', the distinctly analytic interpretation, defence, and elaboration of Kant's ideas. In the sequel I defend Strawson's particular branch of analytic Kantianism against some widely accepted criticisms: that it is unfaithful to the general idea of transcendental philosophy; that it wrongly dismisses transcendental idealism and transcendental psychology; and that transcendental arguments could only ever establish that we must believe certain things to be the case, not that they are the case. I end by arguing that Strawson has provided us with a special kind of conceptual analysis, one that con1bines certain methods of the analytic tradition with important Kantian ideas. Peter Hacker's essay places Strawson's rehabilitation of metaphysics within the history of metaphysics. Periods of metaphysical system building tend to be followed by brief periods of anti-metaphysical reaction. In this vein, Strawson's Individuals marks a return to metaphysics following the attacks on it by the logical positivists. The paper starts with a sketch of Strawson's distinction between descriptive and revisionary metaphysics. In the second section it argues that descriptive metaphysics preserves only the letter but not the spirit of traditional metaphysics. Instead of purporting to delineate the ultimate structure of the world, descriptive metaphysics investigates the connections between the fundamental concepts we use to describe the world. The final section discusses whether revisionary metaphysics as Strawson describes it conforms to the intentions behind the metaphysical systems of the past, and whether it constitutes a coherent enterprise. Graham Bird discusses the relation between Kant's descriptive metaphysics and that of Strawson. In Individuals Strawson outlined what he called a 'descriptive metaphysics', and it is at least natural to suppose that the views of Kant that Strawson approved in The Bounds of Sense fall under the same heading. Bird takes it that both Kant and Strawson share such a project of descriptive metaphysics; but he argues that their projects
Introduction
3
are nevertheless not the san1e. He distinguishes them under three headings: relations to traditional scepticism and the appeal to transcendental arguments; the two projects' methods; linguistic analysis and transcendental psychology; the nature of necessary, a priori, features of experience. In his essay on a priori concepts Quassim Cassam distinguishes between the view that a priori concepts are justificationally a priori and the view that they are derivationally a priori. He discusses various ways of understanding the notion of justificational apriority, and questions the derivational apriority of at least some of the Kantian categories. Barry Stroud deals with the synthetic a priori in Strawson's Kantianism. Kant's question of how synthetic a priori judgements are possible was in part a question of how philosophical results with the distinctive status of those he reached in the Critique of Pure Reason could be reliably arrived at. Stroud asks whether there is a parallel question about the results of the more 'austere' Kantian project Strawson pursues, while repudiating transcendental idealism and even, apparently, any appeal to a priori knowledge. Stroud argues that conclusions with the special, distinctive status Strawson has in mind can be reached if necessary connections can be discovered between the possession of certain conceptual capacities and others, and that no reliance on the analytic/synthetic distinction or on the idea that we know son1e things a priori is required for the success of that project. The main topic of Kenneth Westphal's piece is Kant's Refutation of Idealism. Mainstream analytic Kant commentary has sought a purely conceptual, broadly 'analytic' argument in Kant's Refutation of Idealism, and then has despaired and criticized Kant when no such plausible argument can be reconstructed from his text. According to Westphal, these disappointments overlook two key features of Kant's response to scepticism: his non-Cartesian philosophy of mind and his non-Cartesian method of 'transcendental reflection'. His paper highlights the nature and role of transcendental reflection in four key thought-experiments through which Kant purports to show that we sense, and do not merely imagine, objects and events in the spatio-temporal world around us. The contribution by Tobias Rosefeldt is concerned with the problem of the self. Kant would accept Strawson's claim that we can have genuine knowledge about ourselves only if we refer to ourselves as persons, i.e. beings whose bodies provide empirically applicable criteria for their identity through time. But he also holds that beyond empirical selfknowledge we have a priori self-consciousness whose object is not the 'real subject of inherence' or the self as a real entity but the 'logical subject of thought' or 'the logical I', which has only 'logical identity'. In his paper Rosefeldt tries to elucidate these notoriously obscure remarks by giving a detailed account of what Kant means by characterizing something as 'logical'.
Introduction Max de Gaynesford is also concerned with Kant and Strawson on the first person. One influential explanation of the divergence between the two is as follows: Kant's 'criterionless self-ascription' thesis (that the immediate self-ascription of thoughts and experiences involves no application of empirical criteria of personal identity) was an unparalleled insight; but, because of residual Cartesianism, Kant failed to press it home. The paper expresses certain reservations about this diagnosis; in particular about whether, for all Strawson shows, Kant held the thesis, and whether it would have been correct, or even consistent, for him to have done so. With Henry Allison's piece we leave the first for the third Critique. Allison analyses the principle of the purposiveness of nature and the deduction that Kant provides for it in the introduction to the Critique of Judgement. He argues that, in spite of its merely subjective nature as a principle of reflective judgement, this principle is a genuine transcendental condition of empirical knowledge qua empirical, and that Kant's justification of it constitutes his definitive answer to Hun1e regarding the vindication of induction broadly construed. Eckart Forster is also concerned with the third Critique, but with the nature of aesthetic judgement. In his recent 'Intellectual Autobiography' that opens the Library of Living Philosophers volume in his honour, Strawson reviews, among other things, his various publications on Kant subsequent to The Bounds of Sense. In this context he writes: 'More recently I paid tribute to his [Kant's] insight into the nature of aesthetic judgement.' It is this tribute, or rather its two central claims with regard to Kant's aesthetics, that Forster discusses in his paper. Thomas Grundmann and Catrin Misselhorn consider the relation between transcendental arguments and realism. Transcendental arguments are supposed to show on a purely a priori basis that the necessary conditions of thought and experience are not only psychological conditions of our thinking and experiencing objects, but also conditions that are true of these objects. Realists protest that psychological facts cannot entail any conclusions whatsoever about non-psychological reality. For this reason Stroud and Strawson have recently argued that transcendental arguments can establish at most psychological truths about what we must believe. In their paper Grundmann and Misselhorn discuss the prospects of a more ambitious strategy for realists, namely the attempt of vindicating our basic procedures of justification in general by means of semantic externalism. Robert Stern's paper concerns Strawson's appeal to a certain kind of Humean naturalism, particularly in his response to scepticism. First, it argues that Strawson's naturalistic turn is in tension with his earlier positions. Second, it argues that the naturalism Strawson appeals to is not adequate as a response to scepticism, and that many of Strawson's earlier arguments can be better understood and defended on their own terms, 4
Introduction
5
without any such appeal, so that it was misguided of Strawson to take this naturalistic path. John Hyman, finally, discusses the modern causal theory of perception, of which Strawson is a leading advocate. The causal theory combines two claims: first, that it is a conceptual truth that our perceptions are caused by the material objects we perceive; and, secondly, that we are immediately aware of these objects themselves, rather than their mental proxies. Since this theory is not committed to the doctrine that the immediate objects of perception are mental entities, it is generally thought to escape the difficulty faced by the classical causal theory in explaining how the ordinary beliefs we acquire when we perceive material objects can be justified. Hyman argues, first, that it faces the same difficulty; and, secondly, that the theory depends on a false view about the nature of perceptual experience.
I
A Bit of Intellectual Autobiography P. F. STRAWSON
• ••
Most of what I have to say under the heading of intellectual autobiography has already appeared in the Library of Living Philosophers volume published in 1998.1 But perhaps I can add something bearing mainly, though not exclusively, on my attitude to the work of Kant. Instead of coming at this directly, I would like to begin by recalling Kantrelated episodes in the lives of two other English philosophers of this century. In a well-known passage in his autobiography2 R. G. Collingwood relates that at the age of 8 he read Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, presumably in an English translation. He did not, he says, understand it; but he knew at once that this was for him; that the climate of this kind of thinking was to be his climate, the air of philosophical thought the air he must breathe; as he did (though not exclusively, since he was also an eminent historian). The other episode concerns a younger philosopher; namely, A. J. Ayer. His biographer 3 reports that while sailing to Africa in 1943 to undertake a special-operations exercise Ayer undertook to reread Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and, in the early stages of sunstroke, underwent a remarkable epiphany during which he understood for the first time the full force of Kant's argument. Unfortunately, once he had recovered from his fever he was unable to regain the insight. Sympathetic though one may find both these Kant-inspired experiences, I cannot n1yself report any close parallel to either. Nevertheless, Kant, or more exactly Kant's first Critique, does have a distinctive place in my own intellectual history, such as it is, in a way I will try to make clear. For some years after my first .academic appointment just after the war the questions I was
1 L. E. Hahn (ed.), The Library of Living Philosophers, xxvi, The Philosophy of P. R Strawson (Peru, Ill.: Open Court, 1998). 2 R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938). 3 B. Rogers, A.]. Ayer (London: Chatto and Windus, 1999).
Strawson
8
mainly concerned with fell in the general area of philosophy of language and logic: questions about reference, truth, entailment, the constants of formal logic and their natural-language counterparts, analyticity, etc. Wrestling with these problems, one had, of course, to wrestle with the work of those philosophers whose views on the questions concerned were at the time, and sometimes still are, influential or even dominant-most notably Russell, Quine, and Austin. Indeed, it was sometimes precisely the views that one or another of these had expressed that fired my concern with the question. Nevertheless, closely as one might study the relevant passages in the writings of the philosopher concerned, it was precisely and only because of their relevance to the question at issue that those passages demanded and received such close attention. It was not because those passages were, or seemed to be, an integral part of some wider system of thought associated specifically with the name of that philosopher, perhaps because initiated by him: And this is where the difference with my relation to Kant or, to be more exact, to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason comes in. It was that complete work itself, rather than any of the many particular issues with which it deals, that became the focus of my concern. Indeed, it is the only work, and Kant the only author of such a work, of which, and of whom, I can say this. The reasons for it are, of course, largely internal to the work itself; but also, I must confess, partly historical-to do, in fact, with the structure of the PPE school in Oxford before the war. Anyone reading for that school at that time who wanted to specialize in philosophy was offered no choice of philosophical special subjects; there were just two on offer, and no more: Logic and Kant, the latter to be studied in just two works, the first Critique and the Groundwork. The Groundwork, though like Collingwood I found it deeply impressive, conceived its subject, as I thought then and still think, altogether too narrowly, whereas in the Critique of Pure Reason I found a depth, a range, a boldness, and a power unlike anything I had previously encountered. So I struggled with parts of it as an undergraduate, and later as a college tutor teaching those few pupils intrepid enough to take it on, until finally, having been subtly and in part consciously influenced by it in my own independent thinking about metaphysics and epistemology (in Individuals 4 ), I decided I must try to get to grips with the work as a whole. So I began to give a regular series of lectures on it, a series that ultimately issued in the publication of The Bounds of Sense. 5 In that book I tried to preserve and present systematically what I took to be the major insights of Kant's work, while detaching them from those parts of the total doctrine that, if they had any substantial import at all, I took to
4 5
P. F. Strawson, Individuals (London: Methuen, 1959). P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen, 1966).
A Bit of Intellectual Autobiography
9
be at best false, at worst mysterious to the point of being barely comprehensible. My book was, you n1ight say, a somewhat ahistorical attempt to recruit Kant to the ranks of the analytical metaphysicians, while discarding those metaphysical elements that refused any such absorption. My position on all this I have subsequently sought to elaborate or clarify a little, particularly in the first two of the four Kantian studies included at the end of the collection Entity and Identity.6 Of course I am not foolish enough to suppose that I have got all or any of these things quite right; and I am sure that there are plenty of philosophers willing to show me ,,,here I have gone wrong. But I can take sonle comfort in the thought that, when I have erred, I have done so in the company of most, if not all, of those who have been brave enough to undertake the interpretation and criticism of Kant's critical philosophy. I shall not here and now undertake anything by way of further elaboration, modification, or defence of the views advanced in my book or the subsequent articles. Instead I should like to consider briefly a recent and, I think, novel attempt to elucidate and defend a central Kantian thesis: the thesis, namely, that we are and must remain ignorant of the nature of things as they are in themselves. I refer to a book published in 1997 by Rae Langton, which is called Kantian Humility? and which is certainly a most interesting, impressive, and scholarly exercise in Kantian interpretation. Early on in the work she refers, effectively by way of comparison and contrast with her own, to another philosopher's solution of the problem posed by the Kantian doctrine of our necessary ignorance of things as they are in themselves. The view in question is Professor Allison's, and, as she rightly remarks, his solution is both elegant and ingenious. It also has what in her view are distinctive merits. It preserves the objective reality of the natural world as studied by the physical sciences; and it disposes completely of the picture of two distinct realms of being: the one the realm of supersensible things in thenlselves, the other the realm of phenomena, however conceived. But also-and this is where her approval ends-it completely draws the sting of the doctrine of necessary ignorance, rendering it harmless, anodyne, even trivial. For it does not have the consequence that there must be anything real at all of which we are necessarily ignorant, though of course there may be much of which we are and may remain contingently ignorant. And this is where Professor Langton jibs. For in her view it is an essential part of Kant's doctrine that there really is something substantial of which we are necessarily ignorant and of which our necessary ignorance is a source of necessarily vain, but humanly natural, regret. Things in then1selves affect our sensibility and thereby make knowledge possible; but they affect us in virtue
6 7
P. F. Strawson, Entity and Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). R. Langton, Kantian Humility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Strawson
10
of their extrinsic, relational, causal properties, which are essentially forces constituting the natural world, phenomenal substance, the subject matter of physical science. But these forces, phenomenal substances with which we are acquainted and of which we can have knowledge, though real enough are but extrinsic, relational properties of things in themselves; and as subjects of these relational properties-substances in the pure sense-things in themselves must also have intrinsic properties; and these intrinsic properties are necessarily unknown to us, since it is only the matter-constituting forces of which we can become sensibly aware. So, though we have knowledge of their relational properties that constitute nature, of things as they are in themselves or intrinsically we remain necessarily ignorant. Of course these few sentences of mine are only a sketch-possibly, though I hope not, a travesty-of what is a very subtly and carefully worked-out position. It is a position, moreover, that Professor Langton skilfully supports with an impressive array of references, not only to the Critique itself and Kant's other writings, but also, and often in a critical vein, to the work of his philosophical predecessors, most notably Leibniz; and to that of many commentators. At the end of her book Professor Langton acknowledges one prima-facie difficulty for her position. This is Kant's clear and repeated assertion of the ideality of space, its subjective source; for this may seem to bring into question her firm belief that the objective reality of the material world, the subject matter of the physical sciences, is an integral part of the critical doctrine. It may seem to threaten us (and Kant) with commitment to a kind of phenomenalistic, or even to the Berkeleian, idealism that Kant himself emphatically repudiates. Professor Langton is convinced that the threat is only apparent, and considers briefly a number of ways of circumventing it. The solution that she finds most satisfactory consists in drawing a distinction: the dynamical forces that constitute bodies are genuinely objective properties, but relational not intrinsic properties, of things as they are in themselves; space, though its source is subjective and hence spatial relations are ideal, is simply the form in which we have intuitive awareness of real dynamical relations; spatial relations are ideal, but they make experience of real dynamical relations possible. Professor Langton is aware that more work would need to be done on this solution. She says: 'the connection Kant sees between dynamical and spatial relations must be regarded as unfinished business.'8 But she seems to have no doubt that a solution on these lines must be correct. It seems to n1e, however, that there is another and quite different difficulty for Professor Langton's interpretation, a difficulty of which she takes no account at all. This difficulty relates not to the objects of outer sense, of
8
R. Langton, Kantian Humility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 217.
A Bit of Intellectual Autobiography
I I
which space is the form, but to the contents of inner sense, of which time is the form: in other words, the contents of empirical self-consciousness, which Kant, somewhat like Hume, represents as a succession of constantly changing subjective states, a flux (his own word) of thoughts, perceptions, feelings. How are these to be accommodated in Professor Langton's scheme of interpretation? They are certainly not intrinsic properties of any thing (presumably, in this case, a self) as it is in itself. They are firmly. declared, like the objects of outer sense, to be appearances. But again they cannot have the reality of those real, but extrinsic, relational, causal, dynamic properties of things in themselves that constitute the objects of outer sense, the subject matter of the physical sciences. Yet they cannot just be left in the air, as it were; they must be found a place in the scheme of things, since without them no experience, and hence no knowledge of the objective world, the subject matter of the physical sciences, would be possible at all. They are indeed recognized by Kant as a fit subject for what he called empirical (as opposed to rational) psychology and picturesquely describes as a kind of physiology of inner sense. If Professor Langton is to find a place for them, then, it looks as if she must find besides those real but extrinsic dynamic properties of things in themselves that constitute bodies son1e analogous real but extrinsic properties of things in themselves that are capable of constituting minds or, perhaps better, empirical consciousness. No such account is forthcoming, however; and, even if it were, she would face a problem parallel to that apparently created for the objective reality of bodies by the ideality of space; for time also, the form of inner sense, is declared to be ideal. For these reasons, though not for these alone, I am unconvinced by Professor Langton's work, interesting, impressive, and scholarly as it is. Yet I recommend it for these, its own, certainly intrinsic, properties. After that critical interlude, perhaps I should say a little more to justify the title of this chapter. It might reasonably be thought that in order to do that I should at least say, first, whether any other philosopher has had an influence upon me at all comparable with that of Kant, and, second, whether any particular view I have come to hold seems to me of outstanding importance. For reasons I have already made clear, no single other philosopher and no single work of any other philosopher has had in my philosophical history the position that Kant and the first Critique have had. But I can mention other more diffuse influences. First, then: Russell and Moore, the founding fathers, at least as far as England is concerned, of analytical philosophy in our period. Their influence related to the questions and problems they discussed rather than the answers and solutions they gave. Second: the brightest lights that shone on the Oxford philosophical scene in the 1950s-those of Ryle, Austin, and Grice-though here too it was more ------------------------------
12
Strawson
a matter of style of thought than any particular doctrines to which I responded. And, finally, I must mention Wittgenstein; for, if I share anyone's conception of what our general philosophical aim or objective should be, it is, if I have understood him correctly, that of Wittgenstein, at least in his later period. That is, our essential, if not our only, business is to get a clear view of our most general working concepts or types of concept and of their place in our lives. We should, in short, be aiming at general human conceptual self-understanding. Wittgenstein saw that a necessary condition of achieving this was to liberate ourselves from false understanding; to tear away the veil of simple seductive illusions or pictures that pervaded or constituted much existing philosophical theory and that prevented us from seeing clearly, from getting the clear view we needed. To this task Wittgenstein devoted much of his formidable powers and did so with the unique effectiveness of genius. But I must add, as I think, that his almost obsessive anxiety to liberate us from false pictures, from the myths and fictions of philosophical theory, led to a certain loss of balance in his thinking. It did so in two ways. First, it led to a distrust of systematic theorizing in general-and hence to a disregard of the possibility, indeed, to my mind, the fact, that the most general concepts and categories of human thought do forn1 in their connections and interdependencies an articulated structure that it is possible to describe without falsification. Indeed, what I tried to show in my work on Kant is that the first Critique contains, besides much else that is more questionable, the general outline of many essential features of just such a description. Second, this same anxiety to Ii berate us from false theory led Wittgenstein, as I think, to minimize or dismiss, or at least give too little acknowledgement to, some pervasive features of our experience and of our ordinary non-philosophical thought. It is true of these features that they can, in philosophical thinking, lend themselves to gratuitous inflation, to mythologizing, to false imaginary pictures-all of these proper targets of Wittgenstein's hostility and scorn, the 'houses of cards' it was part of his mission to destroy. But that is no reason for failing to acknowledge them fully as the harmless, inescapable features that they are. So what are these features? I have in mind two things: the first is the reality of subjective experience in all its richness and complexity or, as one of our most distinguished contemporaries expressed it, in all its 'heady luxuriance'the phrase is Quine's; the other is the inescapable presence in our thought of abstract intensional objects. Both, as I remarked just now, are easily misunderstood, prime sources of the generation of 'pictures to hold us captive'. But neither should for that reason be downplayed or denied the character it actually has in our experience or our thought. Another thing I suggested I should do in order to justify my chapter title is to answer the question whether there is any particular view that I have
A Bit of Intellectual Autobiography
13
come to hold that I regard as of outstanding importance. Well, there is such a view: it is by no means new and I do not think I am alone in holding it. It is not exciting: it is even, I think, a truism. But it has been overshadowed and regarded with suspicion in recent times. It is not a view that I myself have con1e to merely recently. Indeed, I had already grasped it in an incomplete and inchoate form before 1950. But a sense of its importance and ramifications has steadily grown with me since. It is this: that the fundamental bearers of the properties of truth or falsity, the fundamental subjects of the predicates 'true' and 'false', are not linguistic items, neither sentences nor utterances of sentences. It is not, when we speak or write, the words we then use, but what we use then1 to say, that is in question. It is whatever may be believed, doubted, hypothesized, suspected, supposed, affirmed, stated, denied, declared, alleged, etc. that is or may be true. Any of these verbs may be followed by a noun clause of the form 'that p', and it is precisely the items designated or referred to by these noun clauses, as used on this or that occasion, that are the bearers of the properties of truth or falsity. We do not have, in common use, a general word for these items. We do not have such a word because we do not in practice need it; in practice, we always use a nominalization of one of the verbs in question as the subject of the predicate (for example, 'your belief', 'his allegation', 'that statement', etc.) or a noun phrase such as 'what she has just said' or even the form 'that p' itself. Philosophers have, at various times, made various attempts to supply this deficiency. Frege's 'thought' is one; Austin groped towards it when he distinguished the 'locutionary' act (in terms of sense and reference) from the 'phatic' on the one hand and the 'illotutionary' on the other;9 G. E. Moore and others have happily used the term 'proposition', which, more recently, has shown a tendency to be replaced by 'propositional content' or merely 'content'; an older term still is 'judgement'. Whatever term we use for items of this kind-and I perhaps date myself by being content with old-fashioned 'proposition'-the essential point is that such an item is not to be identified with an inscription or an utterance or a type of inscription or utterance; it is an abstract, intensional entity, but nonetheless an item of a kind such as we constantly think of and refer to whenever we think of, or comment on, what someone has said or written (in the declarative mode) or indeed on a thought that has, as we say, just entered our own heads. It is objected that there is no clear general criterion of identity for such items. Never mind: we get on well enough, and communicate well enough, without one. With the admission of propositions or judgements or thoughts as abstract intensional entities there goes along of course the admission of
9 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. Press, 1962).
J. o. Urmson
(Oxford: Oxford University
Strawson others: of senses, of concepts, of properties and universals in general. It is here, most obviously, that the risk of inflation comes in: the risk of seductive images, pictures to hold us captive, myths and fantasies that are often fathered, justly or not, on Plato. But in order to acknowledge the items in question as the harmless necessary things they are, regularly recognized in ordinary thought and talk, there is no need to be thus seduced, no need to be taken captive by such pictures. So I have spoken up for subjective experience on the one hand (the contents of inner sense, as Kant would say) and for abstract intensional entities on the other. And this prompts me to remark, in conclusion, on one mildly ironical feature of our subject in the early twenty-first century. If anyone is entitled to be called the founder of our subject, it is generally acknowledged to be Plato: and if anyone could be called the father of its modern development, most of us would nominate Descartes. The irony is that to accuse a philosopher of Platonism or Cartesianism is currently felt to be a seriously damaging charge. But if, and in so far as, I have exposed myself to it, I an1 unrepentant. Of course both these great men were guilty of exaggerations and more or less grave Inistakes. But each had a grasp, however uncertain, of features of our thought and experience that it would be a ll1uch graver mistake to overlook, to deny, or to minimize. 14
2
Strawson and Analytic Kantianism HANS-JOHANN GLOCK
••
It is a commonplace that the reputation of, and interest in, philosophers of the past waxes and wanes from decade to decade. But while even the greatest members of the philosophical pantheon can become unfashionable, some of them have never been neglected entirely. Plato and Aristotle belong to that select group, and so do the founder of modern philosophy, Descartes, and its most eminent representative, Kant. Still, there was a time when interest in Kant was mainly historical in nature, roughly between the 1920S and the 1960s. After the First World War the neo-Kantianism that had dominated academic philosophy on the Continent for fifty years finally ran out of steam. As a dynamic motor of philosophical development neoKantianism was replaced by phenomenology and its hermeneutic offspring on the one hand, by analytic philosophy on the other. The rise of analytic philosophy is often described as a sustained revolt against Kant. There is some truth in this idea. After flirtations with Kant and Hegel, Moore and Russell rebelled against idealism and initiated the complementary programmes of conceptual and logical analysis. Subsequently, the credo of the most influential school of analytic philosophers, the logical positivists, was the rejection of Kant's idea that there are synthetic judgements a priori. Next, proponents of Oxford conceptual analysis frowned upon the system building that characterized both Kant and neo-Kantianism, and replaced it by piecemeal investigations into the use of philosophically relevant expressions. Finally, in the wake of Quine, analytic philosophy has increasingly been dominated by naturalism, and hence by the anti-Kantian idea that philosophy is identical or at least continuous with empirical science. Nevertheless, the received contrast between Kant and analytic philosophy is untenable. For one thing, there is a distinctive anti-naturalist tradition within analytic philosophy, which insists that philosophy-especially logic, epistemology, and semantics-differs from natural science not just quantitatively but qualitatively. Among its godfathers are not just proclaimed adversaries of
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Kant, like Bolzano and Moore, but also Frege and Wittgenstein. Both of these thinkers developed Kant's anti-naturalism, albeit in strikingly different ways.l For another, Kant's account of metaphysics and a priori knowledge set the agenda even for those who rejected the synthetic a priori. More importantly, in spite of their anti-Kantian rhetoric, many logical positivists accepted the Kantian idea that philosophy is a second-order discipline. Unlike science or common sense, philosophy is a priori not because it describes objects of a peculiar kind, such as the abstract entities or essences postulated by Platonism and Aristotelianism, but because it reflects on the conceptual scheme that science and common sense employ in their empirical descriptions and explanations of reality. This Kantian undercurrent is no coincidence. The Tractatus, arguably the most important text in the rise of analytic philosophy, sets philosophy the Kantian task of drawing 'the limit of thought', rather than that of adding to our scientific knowledge of the world. Schlick and Carnap accepted the division of labour suggested by Wittgenstein, presun1ably because they were steeped in neo-Kantian ideas through their philosophical apprenticeship in Germany. Indeed, there is only a single step from the claim of the Marburg school that philosophy is the meta-theory of science to Carnap's slogan that philosophy is the 'logic of science' ,2 that step being the linguistic turn of the Tractatus, according to which the logical limits of thought are to be drawn in language. Accordingly, the mainstream of analytic philosophy from Frege to Quine is not just decisively shaped by Kantian problems, it also includes important Kantian strands. At the same time, none of these strands amounts to anything one might call analytic Kantianism; namely, a distinctly analytic interpretation, defence, and elaboration of Kant's ideas. 3 It is hardly surprising that the 1 See, respectively, my 'Vorsprung durch Logik: The German Analytic Tradition', in A. O'Hear (ed.), German Philosophy since Kant, Lectures of the Royal Institute of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and 'Kant and Wittgenstein: Philosophy, Necessity and Representation', International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 5 (1997), 285-305. References to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason are to the first (A) and second (B) edition, and to his other works according to the Akademie Ausgabe (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1902- ), volume number followed by page number. 2 The Logical Syntax of Language (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1937), 279. 3 In the German literature one often encounters the term Analytische Transzendentalphilosophie (e.g. R. Aschenberg, Sprachanalyse und Transzendentalphilosophie (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982), 28-34; T. Grundmann, Analytische Transzendentalphilosophie (Paderborn: Schoningh, 1994). But 'analytic Kantianism' is superior to 'analytic transcendental philosophy', and not just for reasons of elegance. In Kant himself we find conflicting accounts of what Transzendentalphilosophie amounts to. For example, he often seems to equate transcendental philosophy with the critique of pure reason (explicitly in Reflections §4897), while officially regarding it as the complete critical metaphysics for which the critique provides the foundations (A 10-161B 24-30). In the same passage he unequivocally confines transcendental philosophy to theoretical reason, which implies that the label is unsuitable for the important attempts to develop Kant's moral philosophy in an analytic vein (see below).
Strawson and Analytic Kantianism 17 initial pioneers of analytic philosophy-Frege, Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein, and the logical positivists-were not interested in this kind of endeavour, even if they were indebted to Kant. To be sure, there were soon philosophers who combined an acquaintance with analytic philosophy with a sympathetic interest in Kant. C. D. Broad, for example, regularly lectured on Kant in Cambridge both before and after the Second World War. But these lectures were published only in 1978. Stephan Korner's Kant of 1955 was far more influential. But, although it has deservedly been popular in courses on Kant, it did not spark a flurry of publications by analytic philosophers. 4 A major breakthrough came in 1959 with Peter Strawson's masterwork Individuals. s Together with Ryle and Austin, Strawson was the leading representative of conceptual analysis, a loose movement inspired by Moore and Wittgenstein that flourished mainly though not exclusively in Oxford between the 1940S and the 1970s. Ideal-language philosophers like Frege, Russell, and the logical positivists held that natural languages engender philosophical confusion because they suffer from various logical defects, and that they must therefore be replaced by an ideal language-an interpreted logical calculus. By contrast, conceptual analysis tries to resolve philosophical problems by clarifying rather than replacing the concepts that give rise to them. And this analysis or clarification proceeds by describing the use of those words in which philosophically troublesome concepts are expressed. That analytic Kantianism should receive its main impetus from conceptual analysis rather than from ideal-language philosophy is unsurprising. While conceptual analysts tended to be suspicious of metaphysics, they did not display the anti-metaphysical fervour of the logical positivists. They were far less obsessed with denouncing the synthetic a priori, and showed a fair degree of syn1pathy towards Kant. In Ryle this sympathy may have been reinforced by reading the Tractatus and by conversations with its author. In any event, in articles from the 1930S and 1950S Ryle applauded Kant's separation of philosophy from science. He also commended his programme of identifying the categories by looking at forms of judgement while sharply condemning its execution, setting a precedent that later analytic commentators on the Metaphysical Deduction were to follow. 6 There was also an institutional reason for the association between Kant and Oxford conceptual analysis. As Strawson informs us in Chapter I, students specializing in philosophy as part of the PPE course at Oxford
4 See c. D. Broad, Kant: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978) and S. Korner, Kant (London: Pelican, 1955). 5 Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (London: Methuen, 1959). 6 See G. Ryle, Collected Papers, ii (London: Hutchinson, 1976), 366, 176-9, and J. Bennett, Kant~s Analytic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), ch. 6.
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were forced to study Kant. As a result, Strawson struggled with the Critique of Pure Reason both as an undergraduate and as a college tutor. But there is no direct sign of this struggle in his early writings. Rather, Strawson came to fame by criticizing orthodoxies of logical analysis. Natural languages, he maintained, are distorted by being forced into the Procrustean bed of formal logic, and hence the latter is not a sufficient instrument for revealing all the logically and philosophically relevant features of our language. For my current topic, the most interesting case in point is Strawson's attack on Russell's theory of descriptions. According to Strawson, a sentence like 'The present king of France is bald' is neither true nor false rather than simply false. Furthermore, it presupposes rather than entails the existence of the present king of France; i.e., that existence is a necessary precondition of the statement being either true or false. Finally, by trying to paraphrase away singular referring expressions of the form 'the so-and-so', Russell ignores the distinctive and indispensable role that these expressions play within our language. The tenor of Individuals is more constructive than that of Strawson's previous work. The focus shifts from the description of ordinary use to what Strawson calls descriptive metaphysics. Descriptive metaphysics differs from the revisionary metaphysics one finds in Descartes, Leibniz, or Berkeley, among others, in that it 'is content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world', rather than attempting 'to produce a better structure'. It differs from previous Oxford analysis in its greater scope and generality, since it seeks to 'lay bare the most general features of our conceptual structure'. These are visible not in the motley of ordinary use, but in fundamental functions of thought and discourse, notably those of reference-picking out an individual item-and predication-saying something about it (pp. 9-10). In spite of the shift marked by Individuals, therefore, there is an abiding concern in Strawson's work; namely, with describing the most general and pervasive features of human thought about the world, in particular 'the operation of reference and predication', and with the presuppositions of such operations. 7 Alongside Aristotle, Individuals lists Kant as the most eminent representative of descriptive metaphysics. Strawson's conception of metaphysics also owes a more specific debt to Kant. As Peter Hacker points out in Chapter 3, by contrast to traditional metaphysics, descriptive metaphysics yields insights not into the necessary structure of reality, but into our 'conceptual schen1e', the connections between the fundamental concepts we use to think about and describe the world. This shift of focus from reality
7 See 'My Philosophy', in P. K. Sen and R. R. Verma (eds.), The Philosophy of P. R Strawson (New Delhi: Indian Council of Philosophical ~~e~~~~~~5J,_I~ - -
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to our thought or discourse is familiar from the linguistic turn of analytic philosophy, yet it is also a Kantian legacy (see Sect. I below). At an even more specific level, part I of Individuals elaborates a Kantian idea; namely, that our reference to objects depends on our capacity to identify and reidentify them, which in turn depends on the possibility of locating them within a single public and unified framework, the framework of the spatiotemporal world (pp. 62-3, 119). Finally, Individuals maintains that philosophical scepticism distorts or ignores the essential structure of our conceptual scheme. Making his debt to Kant explicit, Strawson used the label 'transcendental argument' for a type of argument that rebuts scepticism on the grounds that these distortions are self-refuting. The Kantian themes in Individuals are unmistakable, though diverse and combined with distinctly Strawsonian ideas in philosophical logic. It is no coincidence, therefore, that among the results of the book was a new kind of debate about Kant. On the one hand, this debate was less historical and deferential than previous Kant scholarship, including anglophone commentaries like those of Paton or Kemp Smith. On the other hand, it was more exegetical and scrupulous in its treatment of Kant than the passing animadversions and commendations of previous analytic philosophers. 8 One important early instance of this new style was Graham Bird's Kant~s Theory of Knowledge of 1962. Its main positive aim was to clarify the relation between appearances and things as they are in themselves, a topic that does not feature in Individuals. But the book explicitly sets out to provide an exegetical basis for the kind of analytic discussion of Kant exemplified by Individuals, and it includes a sustained comparison of Kant and Strawson on the self and personhood (p. ix; ch. II). A slightly later example of analytic Kantianism is Bennett's Kant~s Analytic of 1966. It sets out to fight Kant 'tooth and nail' (p. viii), and treats him as a contemporary analytic philosopher to be compared and contrasted with other contemporaries, Strawson pre-en1inent among them. In the san1e year Strawson himself entered the fray once more. Having been 'subtly and in part consciously influenced' by the first Critique in his independent work on metaphysics and epistemology, he decided to get to grips with the work as a whole, and for its own sake. He started offering lecture courses on the Critique in 1959, and these lectures eventually led to the publication of The Bounds of Sense in 1966.9 The book is not a straightforward commentary on Kant's masterpiece, but an essay that
8 In some respects, Rawls's A Theory of Justice had a similar impact in the sphere of moral philosophy. It is a highly original work, yet subtly influenced by Kant. And although it did not itself purport to interpret Kant's moral philosophy, it spawned numerous such attempts. 9 The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (London: Methuen, 1966). Unless otherwise specified, page references in the text are to this book.
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provides a reconstruction of some of its central ideas in the style of analytic philosophy. As Strawson puts it in this volume, it was a 'somewhat ahistorical attempt to recruit Kant to the ranks of the analytical metaphysicians, while discarding those metaphysical elements that refused any such absorption'. The basic interpretative idea of Bounds of Sense is ingeniously epitomized by the title. There are three strands to the Critique. On the one hand, against empiricism Kant maintains that 'a certain minimal structure is essential to any conception of experience which we can make truly intelligible to ourselves' (p. II, see pp. 24,44). On the other hand, against rationalism he insists that concepts-including the categorial concepts that define this n1inimal structure-cannot be applied beyond the limit of possible experience. In these two regards, Kant seeks to draw, respectively, the lower and the upper bounds of sense. But he does so from within a framework that itself transgresses the bounds of sense, a framework that consists of the untenable metaphysics of transcendental idealism and the 'imaginary subject of transcendental psychology' (p. 32). The first two strands constitute the fruitful side of the Critique, the third constitutes its 'dark side', which is 'no longer acceptable, or even promising'. The central task of the interpreter is that of 'disentangling' an 'analytical argument' that 'proceeds by analysis of the concept of experience in general' from its idealist and psychologistic surroundings (pp. 16, 3 I). Strawson has done more than anyone else to stimulate interest in Kant among analytic philosophers, and to show how the Critique can be approached in an analytic spirit. To this extent he is the n10st important source of analytic Kantianism in a wide sense of the term. Furthermore, his own approach amounts to an analytic Is Rehabilitation of Metaphysics
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'an event that was neither earlier than, later than, nor simultaneous with such-and-such present event'. We are not expressing insights of pure reason into what nature can or cannot do, but reminding ourselves that we attach no significance to such expressions. To be sure, we could attach significance to them-after all, nothing is stopping us. All we have to do is lay down additional rules for the use of the relevant terms. But if we do, we are thereby changing their meanings and speaking of something different. It was a confusion of traditional metaphysics to project insights into the structure of our conceptual scheme on to the objects described by our employment of it. In so doing, it confused rules determining the correct use of words and the licit inferences that their application licenses, which conjunctively define the essences of things, with objective, language-independent necessities and necessary connections in the world. The putative necessities in reality are merely the shadows cast by rules for the use of words in our language that are partly constitutive of their meanings. The question of whether the propositions in question are analytic or synthetic (with all the unclarities associated with these categories) can be sidestepped. For the status of such propositions is clarified in recognizing that they are rules of representation, not descriptions of reality. They can be said to be true only in the sense in which it is true that the chess king n10ves one square at a time. The possibility of knowledge of such propositions is relatively unproblematic, since it is knowledge of, or recognition of, the rules we follow in using the relevant words of our language correctly. Why then is it not trivially easy to attain? Largely because of the generality at which we operate in this domain and because of the ramifications and interrelations of the rules, which are anything but easy to survey. Hence to the extent to which we wish to speak of attaining knowledge here (as opposed to attaining understanding), it takes the form of realization rather than discovery. Metaphysics thus construed yields no insight into reality, but only into our forms of description of reality. So it is just more grammar, in Wittgenstein's extended sense of the term. The generality at which we operate in the domain of Strawsonian descriptive metaphysics is manifest not only in the generality of the concepts and concept types that are the focal point of the investigation but also in the fact that they constitute, as he surely rightly points out, structural elements of our conceptual scheme. Precisely because such concepts as space and time, substance and property, cause and effect are, roughly speaking, categorial, their rule-governed connectedness ramifies throughout our conceptual scheme. The formal or categorial concepts of substance and attribute, or of cause and effect, subsume thousands of material concepts that are in constant employment in our daily discourse. And their forms of connectedness determine our thinking and inferring in all our description, reflection, and action. Small wonder that at least some of these categories
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seem non-contingent; for without thenl we would not engage in the thought and intentional action of the kind that characterizes our form of life. We could no more decide to abandon these categories of concepts than we could decide to cease to be human beings. What then of ontology, which Strawson, in a monlent of exuberance, dignifies by the name of 'the general theory of being'?2o It seems to me that ontology is no more than an investigation of what is meant by saying of itenlS belonging to a certain general category that they exist, obtain, occur, or go on. We say that material things come into existence and pass away; we refer, unashamedly, to general characteristics of things or to the occurrence of events and the obtaining of states of affairs; some philosophers insist-perfectly reasonably under some interpretation-that there are objective values; and we assert without qualms that there are so-and-so many primes between m and n. Ontology, if it is anything, is surely the elucidation of what is meant, from case to case, by such existence claims. Its task is not to draw up inventories of the contents of the universe, nor can it be illuminatingly described as the study of being qua being. So it is not so nluch a general theory of being, but rather a matter of connective analysis, concerned in particular with existence claims and with the elucidation of conceptual dependencies involved in such claims. It might be thought, although I do not think that Strawson ever suggested as much, that Strawson's descriptive metaphysics yields transcendental arguments that prove the existence of the external world or of other minds. But that is, I think, mistaken. It would be absurd to argue fronl conceptual connections in thought to existential truths about the world, or, in Wittgensteinian idiom, fronl gramnlatical propositions to empirical ones. Strawson argued that a condition for the intelligibility of criterionless selfascription of experience is the adequacy of the behavioural grounds for other-ascription of experience. This conceptual connection does not prove that there are other experience-enjoying beings-what it proves is the incoherence of scepticism about other minds that adnlits self-ascription of experience and simultaneously denies the adequacy of the criteria for other-ascription. And it can be argued, although I shall not attempt to argue it here, both that the demand for a proof of the existence of the 'external world' or of other minds is itself incoherent and that we have a vast hoard of genuine knowledge about objects in the world around us and about our fellow human beings and the experiences they enjoy, without per impossibile possessing any such proof. It should be noted that, although some of Strawson's conclusions echo Kantian synthetic a priori propositions, e.g. concerning causal regularities
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Strawson, Analysis and Metaphysics, 35.
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and the existence of substance, these are not transcendental deductions of the necessity that every event have a cause or of the existence of an external world. They are rather observations upon the background conditions for the exercise of such concepts that enable a subject of experience to ascribe experience to hin1self. For, Strawson argues persuasively, the concept of subjective experience only gets a grip to the extent that the concepts of independently existing objects of experience get a grip, and both obtain a purchase only to the extent that such objects of experience are generally connected by causal regularities. But this is no proof of the existence of an external world or of the principle of sufficient reason. Scepticism is to be refuted by showing that it makes no sense-not by producing a proof of the existence of objects. We do indeed know of the existence of multitudinous objects around us, as we know of innumerable causal connections between substances and the events they make happen-but not on the grounds that the existence of substances and of widespread causal regularity is a condition for the employment of concepts of experience and its objects, nor on the grounds that we do enjoy subjective experiences. Does descriptive metaphysics differ in its method from connective analysis in general? The examination of the use of words, Strawson averred, is the only sure way in philosophy, but the structures that the descriptive n1etaphysician wishes to reveal are not displayed on the surface of language and the connections he wishes to establish are too far-reaching to be discernible by scrutiny of the use of words. So he must abandon his only sure guide when that guide cannot take him to the peaks of abstraction that he aims to scale. What method should he then use? Strawson offers us disappointingly little-'I know of no procedure or recipe for getting at the answers except to think about those ideas and questions as hard as you can' .21 It is true that there is a sense in which ordinary usage offers few hints or clues to philosophical insight when it comes to such concepts as space and time, substance and accident, subject and object of experience. The terms do not offer that variegated field of subtle distinctions that is to be found, as Austin noted, in such domains of discourse as excuses. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the connections Strawson seeks-and finds-are not in any sense submerged beneath the surface of ordinary usage. The use of the term of art 'substance concept' is not likely to offer the philosopher much help. The use of the term 'cause' may be positively misleading, since 'cause' and 'reason' are, over a range of contexts, interchangeable, while the insightful philosopher interested in causation will wish to differentiate causes from reasons-and will indeed find ample
21 P. F. Strawson, 'My Philosophy', in P. K. Sen and R. R. Verma (eds.), The Philosophy of P. F. Strawson (New Delhi: Indian Council of Philosophical Research, 1995), 17.
62 Iiacker reason to do so fronl a more careful examination of the use of these two terms. The clues the descriptive metaphysician seeks, and the only tribunal before which his claims can be adjudicated, are the general pattern or patterns of use of the multitudinous substance concepts and causal concepts that abound in natural language. Those patterns are in full view, even if it takes uncommon skill to discern them. Strawson, it therefore seems to me, saved the letter of traditional metaphysics, but abandoned its spirit. Descriptive metaphysics is distinctive, and unlike other philosophical endeavours, in so far as it strives to disclose the most general forms of connectedness that permeate our conceptual scheme and to reveal the conceptual involvements of the most general kinds of speech functions that characterize our use of language-indeed, not only of our language and our conceptual scheme, but of any language and any conceptual scheme in which certain kinds of distinction are drawn and certain fundamental kinds of speech acts performed. But it is also like other philosophical endeavours within the field of connective analysis and unlike the aspirations of traditional nletaphysics. It yields no knowledge of reality, let alone insight into the necessary structure of reality-but only insight into the forms and structures of our thought about reality. It might indeed be said to be the legitimate heir to what used to be conceived of as metaphysics, but a dethroned heir, deprived of the ancestral crown and orb. It is metaphysics without its nimbus.
IV. IS THERE ANY SUCH THING AS REVISIONARY METAPHYSICS?
Price pleaded for the preservation of metaphysics understood as 'alternative modes of conceptual arrangement', and recommended that philosophers should continue to be engaged upon devising different unified conceptual schemes. And he suggested that the works of the great metaphysicians of the past should be viewed as directed at such a goal. This seems akin· to Strawson's conception of revisionary metaphysics in Individuals. The first question to address is: was this the project of the great system-building philosophers of the past? Were Descartes, Leibniz, and Berkeley-to mention only those whom Strawson characterized as revisionary metaphysicianstrying to construct a different language, with a fundamentally different grammar, from the natural languages of mankind? I can see no trace of such an intent in their works. Descartes, for example, was not recommending that we adopt a new form of language. He was trying to describe the world and the fundamental kinds of substance that exist in it, to characterize their essential natures and their modes of interaction. Leibniz's monadology did not advocate a change in notation, but elaborated a putative insight into the
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constitution of reality. Berkeley was not recommending that we adopt a language without names of material substances, which would merely be better for certain needs we have than our existing language. He too was trying to specify the nature of the vvorld and of what exists in it. And he thought that any talk of material substance, understood as he took Locke to understand the term, was not an inoffensive part of our ordinary conceptual scheme, but incoherent nonsense lying at the heart of Locke's mistaken metaphysics of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Indeed, the putative proof that it was nonsense, and not just 'an alternative conceptual scheme', was a crucial step in Berkeley's endeavour to confound sceptics and atheists. If that was not what traditional metaphysicians were trying to do, was that in effect what they actually did? Did Descartes or Berkeley or Leibniz construct a language, different from our natural languages but equally fitted for describing the world and our experience of it? Surely not. Cartesian, Leibnizian, or Berkeleian metaphysics does not provide a novel grammar, constitutive of a novel conceptual scheme. Rather, these metaphysical systems, thus interpreted, would result in an incoherent grammar that at crucial points specifies kinds of particular without any associated criteria of identity, introduces psychological predicates that would only have a sense if they were, per impossibile, definable by private ostensive definition, and retains many of our concepts while simultaneously severing them from the web of connections to other concepts that alone makes them intelligible. Of course, it does not follow that the attempt to reconstruct these grand systems in this fashion may not be instructive. If one cannot reasonably interpret the metaphysical systems of the past as recomn1endations to adopt a new conceptual scheme, can it be argued, as Price suggested and Strawson, in Individuals, intimated, that devising alternative conceptual schemes is a task that metaphysics might reasonably undertake? Is there any sense in which such an endeavour might, as Strawson suggested, be at the service of descriptive n1etaphysics? It is noteworthy that the only philosopher who comes to n1ind in association with the idea of a philosophical programme of constructing alternative languages that could be deemed to constitute alternative conceptual schemes was the most fervent anti-metaphysical crusader of the twentieth century, namely Rudolf Carnap. He would rightly have been surprised to learn that doing so was a form of metaphysics. 22 It is difficult to see the point of such endeavours within philosophy, unless they are aimed at constructing fragments of a conceptual scheme, which can then be held up as a useful
22 It is also noteworthy that his idea that we have a choice between a sense-datum language and a n1aterial-object language is wholly incoherent. His endeavour to construct a sense-datum language necessarily fails inasmuch as the concept of a sense-datum is parasitic on our general concepts of objects of which the sense-data are data.
Ilacker object of comparison highlighting features, uses, and forms of contextual dependencies of the corresponding fragment of our own. It is only in this sense that something akin to revisionary metaphysics could be thought to be part of the task of philosophy and indeed at the service of descriptive metaphysics, i.e. general connective analysis. But part of the usefulness of revisionary metaphysics, thus conceived, runs counter to the Strawsonian vision, at least to a degree. For part of the point of devising an alternative gran1mar for, say, colour description (e.g. adoption of colour adverbs rather than adjectives), or ascription of experience (elimination of the first-person pronoun, as in 'There is pain' instead of 'I have a pain'), is precisely to show that our concepts and their articulations in these domains are not the only possible ones. For we are prone to think that our modes of conceptualization are uniquely correct or true to the facts, or that our concepts are necessary ones inasmuch as they uniquely match the logicometaphysical forms of reality. But over a wide range of concepts we can envisage different grammars to fulfil analogous tasks. And we can readily imagine such changes in us or in the world as would render such-and-such concepts useless and such-and-such other novel concepts more useful for our purposes in the novel contexts envisaged. The necessity we imagine associated with our conceptual scheme is a necessity internal to our conceptual apparatus-not a form of objective, language-independent necessity. In this manner, the invention of fragments of a different conceptual scheme, which fulfil roles akin to fragn1ents of our own, can be useful in disabusing us of some of the illusions of traditional metaphysics that incline us to think that our conceptual scheme pays homage to the objective metaphysical nature of the world. Nevertheless, it does not follow that, for us, with the kinds of conceptually moulded interests and purposes we have, there are serious alternatives to those major structural features of our conceptual schen1e that lie at the heart of Strawson's investigations. For, they constitute, as he says, 'the massive central core of human thinking' (p. 10). It is not merely that they are 'the indispensable core of the conceptual equipment' (ibid.) we deploy. Rather, they are partly constitutive of our nature as selfconscious human beings, involving concepts and categories that we could not abandon without ceasing to be human. Philosophy is in general a matter not of concept formation, but of concept description. Hence there is little role in it for the invention of (fragments of) conceptual schemes. Mathematics is concept formation, and the mathematician does indeed invent new forms of description that may be put to use by physicists in describing spatial relations and in the description and transformation of propositions about magnitudes, quantities, velocities, etc. and their relations-as Riemannian geometry proved fruitful for relativity theory, and as the calculus proved indispensable for Newtonian physics. However, the task of philosophy is not to devise alternative 64
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conceptual schemes, but to describe and elucidate our own. Part of that task is to elucidate the most general forms of connectedness that permeate our conceptual scheme and that are partly constitutive of our very general conceptions of substance, causation, person and personal experience, space and time, reference and predication, and so on-which Strawson has pursued with his characteristic elegance, economy, and profundity. With regard to revisionary metaphysics, Strawson's second thoughts were, 1 think, more accurate than the view so briefly sketched in Individuals. Traditional metaphysics, though it can sometimes be charitably interpreted as involving a recon1mendation to adopt a new conceptual scheme, 'in fact always involves paradox and perplexities ... and sometimes involves no rudimentary vision, but merely rudimentary mistakes'. So there is not really any such subject as revisionary metaphysics-although scientists are free to devise fragments of alternative conceptual schemes for their purposes, if the new scheme is more fruitful in the generation of explanatory and predictive theories than the existing one. Nevertheless, there is a connection between the idea of devising a fragn1ent of a novel conceptual schen1e and the products of the metaphysical tradition. For traditional metaphysics, e.g. representational realism, idealism, or solipsism, presents its doctrines as if they were correct descriptions of reality, as if it were truer to the facts to say 'There is pain' rather than '1 am in pain', since the self is not a constituent of the experience of pain, or to say 'Grass looks green (presents an idea or representation of green) to normal observers in normal conditions' rather than 'Grass is green', since objects are not in themselves coloured, but only have a power to produce a representation of colour in human observers. But, as Wittgenstein pointed out, this is to suppose that a form of representation could say something false even when the proposition expressed says something true. The only way in which '1 am in pain' can be false is by '1 am not in pain' being true, and the only way in which 'Grass is green' can be false is by grass not being green but some other colour. So 'the one party attack the normal form of expression as if they were attacking a statement; the others defend it as if they were stating facts recognized by every reasonable human being'.23 In this sense, one might interpret some of the writings of metaphysicians as recommendations to adopt a different conceptual scheme. But then it is noteworthy that these metaphysicians fail to carry through the idea, and conflate elements of the new notation with elements of the existing one, and conclude that other people don't really have pain, or that the objects around us are not really coloured. 24
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §4 02 . For more detailed discussion see P. M. S. Hacker, Wittgenstein~s Place in Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 117-23. 23
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Hacker
The conception of metaphysics characteristic of modern (post-Cartesian) philosophy, the idea of attaining a priori insights into the objective language-independent essences of things, was deeply rooted in the culture of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. The uprooting of this fiction required the labour of many thinkers, and took many decades. It is Strawson's signal achievement to have salvaged from the wreck of the traditional enterprise a form of general connective analysis, which he has called 'descriptive metaphysics'. What it aspires to is not knowledge of the essential nature of the world, but understanding of the general structure of our thought about the world. And that can be achieved. Since Strawson wrote Individuals, however, a new form of the old disease has broken out, and the mythology of metaphysics has been revived. Its roots lie deep in our contemporary culture-in the science and scientisrn of the late twentieth century. To eradicate it, will, I fear, be as difficult as it was to eradicate its more august ancestor. 25
25 I am grateful to Dr H.-J. Glock, Dr J. Hyman, and Sir Anthony Kenny for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
4 Kant's and Strawson's Descriptive Metaphysics GRAHAM BIRD
The project of descriptive metaphysics in Strawson's Individuals l is that of identifying fundamental features, such as the role of external objects and persons, in our ordinary experience, and it is natural to associate that project with the defensible part of Kant's epistemology identified in The Bounds of Sense. 2 Subsequently Strawson modified some of the views expressed in both early books, and I shall note some of those changes; but my main aim is to contrast Kant's position with those early accounts. Such an account of Kant contrasts with that of other commentators who, like Manfred Baum, regard Kant's first Critique as essentially ontological rather than epistemologicaP or who, like Michael Friedman, emphasize Kant's interest in the exact sciences rather than in ordinary experience. 4 It is not my intention here to defend Strawson's view against these alternative positions, for they need not exclude each other, but I accept that at least part of Kant's project is a descriptive metaphysics. My intention is, however, to claim that Kant's conception of such a descriptive metaphysics is not the same as Strawson's, and I identify three salient differences under the following headings: I. Relations to traditional scepticism (the appeal to transcendental arguments) II. The projects' methods (linguistic analysis and transcendental psychology) III. The nature of necessary, a priori, features of experience.
I shall try to show how these differences converge on a problem about understanding the modalities involved in descriptive metaphysics, but P. F. Strawson, Individuals (London: Methuen, r959). P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen, 1966). 3 Manfred Baum, Deduktion und Beweis in Kant's Transzendentalphilosophie (Konigstein: Athenaum Verlag, 1986) 43-4, 180-1. 4 Michael Friedman, Kant and the Exact Sciences (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). 1
2
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I want initially to make two related preliminary points about the comparison. The first is to note that I take the term 'descriptive metaphysics' seriously as a label for the project of accepting our experience as given without philosophical preconceptions in order to identify the fundan1ental principles that govern it. The second is to note the corollary that I am setting aside the claim that Kant's project is already invested with a commitment to traditional idealism. Henry Allison wrote a paper in 19695 that distinguished I(ant's project from Strawson's descriptive metaphysics, but he was primarily interested in correcting Strawson's account of Kant's commitment to traditional idealism. For Strawson, a major difference between the two projects was that while Kant's made such a commitment his own did not. Allison argued that the claimed commitment resulted from confusing transcendental idealism with what I(ant called empirical idealism, and I had also noted the same confusion, although I had not associated it with Strawson. 6 I therefore accept Allison's correction, and that is why a commitment to idealism does not appear among the three differences noted above between the two projects. But I know that there are still commentators who insist on ascribing a traditional idealist commitment to Kant, and some who do so by ascribing to Kant an empirical idealism that he plainly rejects. Since I assume, and take seriously, the philosophically non-committal starting-point of descriptive metaphysics, those commentators will have to read my argument as hypothetical. It will claim: or, better, even if, Kant's descriptive metaphysics is not traditionally idealist, nevertheless it still differs from Strawson's descriptive metaphysics in those three ways. 1. RELATIONS TO TRADITIONAL SCEPTICISM (THE APPEAL TO TRANSCENDENTAL ARGUMENTS)
In Individuals (p. 9) Strawson contrasted 'descriptive' and 'revisionary' metaphysics in the following way: Descriptive metaphysics is content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world, revisionary metaphysics is concerned to produce a better structure.
That contrast is open to the objection that it provides a cross-classification of the relevant philosophical positions, and so distorts the relation of descriptive metaphysics to scepticism. For revisionary metaphysics presupposes a question of justification, raised in the philosophical context by the traditional sceptic. In opposing descriptive to revisionary metaphysics Strawson implied 5
Henry Allison, 'Transcendental Idealism and Descriptive Metaphysics', Kant-Studien, 60
(19 69), 216-33' 6 Graham Bird, Kant)s Theory of Knowledge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962) chs. I and 3. I did not associate Strawson with the ascription of empirical idealism to Kant because The Bounds of Sense appeared only in 1966.
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that the former arose within the same context of justification, and differed from the latter only in its conclusion that the actual structure of our thought is justified. Descriptive metaphysics is thus represented as already containing an answer to traditional scepticism. The subsequent discussion of scepticism in Individuals (pp. 32-6, 106-9) and the later debates with Stroud7 over scepticism and transcendental arguments reinforce that account. They have given rise to a familiar discussion 8 of Kant's transcendental arguments the principal ingredients of which are: (I) Kant's transcendental arguments are specifically designed, like Strawson's, to refute scepticism directly; (2) they attempt this, as Strawson does, by outlining principles necessary for thought or meaning, so that the sceptic's claims become meaningless or inexpressible; (3) they focus, like Strawson's, on a global Cartesian scepticism about external objects and persons; (4) they appeal, like StraV\Tson's explicitly or implicitly, to a semantic verificationism. Later I underline how irrelevant this account is to the picture of Kant I shall give. One consequence of Strawson's taxonomy is that this sceptical background conflicts with his original claim that 'descriptive metaphysics is content to describe the actual structure of our thought'. That divergence, between mere description and philosophical justification, will arise unless it is assun1ed, as it was in some versions of common-sense or ordinary language philosophy, that merely to describe the actual structure is to justify it. In this way common-sense or ordinary-language philosophy in the 1960s was similarly ambiguous; some of its practitioners took it to offer a refutation of traditional scepticism, but others simply used it to disregard such traditional issues. 9 Without that dubious assumption Strawson's taxonomy remains ambiguous between the two accounts shown in Fig. I. The opposition between descriptive and revisionary metaphysics corresponds to scheme A, but the account of descriptive metaphysics as merely describing, and not justifying, our thought corresponds to schen1e B.10 It is 7 B. Stroud, 'Transcendental Arguments', Journal of Philosophy, 65 (1968); B. Stroud, 'Kantian Argument, Conceptual Capacities, and Invulnerability' and P. F. Strawson, 'The Problem of Realism and the A Priori', both in P. Parrini (ed.), Kant and Contemporary Epistemology (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994). 8 Examples of this account of Kant's and Strawson's transcendental arguments can be found in Ross Harrison's and Ralph Walker's contributions in Schaper and Vossenkuhl (eds.), Reading Kant (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). 9 Some 'ordinary language' philosophers, like Antony Flew, regarded appeal to a 'paradigmcase argument' as a refutation of traditional scepticism; others, like]. L. Austin in 'A Plea for Excuses', simply disregarded such a scepticism. 10 It is perhaps worth noting that even now many analytic philosophers still take for granted that scheme A is the only proper taxonomy for philosophy. It is an attitude which takes traditional scepticism as central to any genuine philosophy. Other philosophers adopt either the attitude of ]. L. Austin, mentioned in n. 9, or else that of]. McDowell, whose Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994) has as its aim (p. 113) 'not to answer sceptical questions, but to begin to see how it might be intellectually respectable to ignore them, to treat them as unreal, in the way that common sense has always wanted to'. Barry Stroud's The Quest for
7°
Bird
A. Issues of Philosophical Justification (scepticism)
Descriptive metaphysics (Rejects scepticism)
B. Metaphysics
Revisionary metaphysics (Accepts scepticism)
Descriptive
Justificatory (scepticism)
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No revision Revisionary (Rejects scepticism) (Accepts scepticism)
Fig.
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not difficult to see in The Bounds of Sense, and in the debates with Stroud, the belief that Kant's and Strawson's transcendental arguments have the same role of refuting traditional scepticism about external objects and persons. But I shall argue that the first difference between Strawson's and Kant's descriptive metaphysics is that while the former adopts scheme A the latter adopts B; while Strawson's transcendental arguments are directly aimed at such a traditional scepticism Kant's are not. Later, in Skepticism and Naturalism (p. 23), Strawson gave an account of descriptive metaphysics and its opposition to revisionary metaphysics that is closer to scheme B. For he there opposes descriptive metaphysics not just to 'revisionary' but to 'validatory', or what in scheme B is called 'justificatory', metaphysics. This change is, moreover, represented as a response to Stroud's criticisms of the anti-sceptical force of Strawsonian transcendental arguments, and in the context of a doubt (Skepticism and Naturalism, 10) whether transcendental arguments have any anti-sceptical point at all. It will be evident from what I say later that, as an account of Kant, I think this goes too far in the opposite direction. I(ant's transcendental arguments must have some anti-sceptical point; the problem is to say exactly what it is. Even if it is accepted that Strawson's descriptive metaphysics in Individuals was avowedly anti-sceptical, it may seem just as obvious that Kant's project is also anti-sceptical and so matches scheme A and not B. It may seem absurd to deny that Kant rejects scepticism. It is, however, not my intention to deny that; the question is not whether but how his descriptive metaphysics relates to sceptical issues. The point can be reinforced by noting that traditional scepticism comes in different forms, e.g. as Cartesian or Humean, global or local, not all of which may be explicitly targeted by Kant, and which may be variously the targets of different arguments, even transcendental arguments, in the Critique. Scheme B does not positively exclude any reference to these varieties of traditional scepticism; it offers initially a neutral description of our experience which may then be deployed Reality: Subjectivism and the Metaphysics of Colour (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) provides a recent example of the belief that scheme A is the fundamental taxonomy for philosophy.
Kant~s
and
Strawson~s Descriptive
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subsequently to resolve sceptical issues. I want to identify two such indirect strategies 11 that are closely integrated in the Critique. In the first Kant uses the project to address a global scepticism about experience in general in the challenge of the Copernican experiment and, for example, in the Transcendental Deduction. In the second he uses his descriptive project to address specific local scepticisms as he does in the Second Analogy against Hume's account of cause, and in the Refutation of Idealism against Berkeley's and Descartes's account of external objects. I have represented that second strategy elsewhere 12 as one in which Kant aims to correct sceptical misallocations, or misdescriptions, of priority between elements in experience. In the Refutation of Idealism the correction is to reverse the traditional idealist priority claimed for inner experience over outer; in the Second Analogy it is to reverse the empiricist priority claimed for particular causal connections over the general causal principle. Here I concentrate on the need to clarify the first, more general, strategy. The initial descriptive project of scheme B corresponds to Kant's expressed intention to provide an inventory of the a priori elen1ents in our experience (A xx), or to map the complex web of our beliefs (B 117: 'das sehr gemischte Gewebe'), so that we may successfully navigate a way around experience (B 128: 'to find for human reason safe conduct between these two rocks' (of dogmatism and scepticism) A 235-6). The use of such a map, as a navigational aid, is indirectly to correct errors in the sceptics' maps, as in the two examples given above; Kant expresses this strategy very clearly and well in the Prolegomena (iv. 262 13 ): We have become accustomed to see old, threadbare ideas newly refurbished and given new clothing; this is what most readers will now expect from the Critique. The Prolegomena will bring them to see that it provides a quite new science, never before conceived, and anticipated only in a hint in Hume's doubts, which, however ... led him to beach his ship on the strand of scepticism. My intention is to provide a pilot, who, with secure principles of navigation ... a complete map of the sea and a compass, can (as Hume wished) lead the ship to safety.
11 Sally Sedgwick suggested to me that the 'direct/indirect' distinction was not wholly clear. The primary point is that Kant's descriptive metaphysics of experience, as I understand it, provides initially a neutral survey of our experience, whose relevance to scepticism remains open and indirect. It turns out that for Kant the survey is relevant to a Hun1ean scepticism, or empiricism, which denies the existence of a priori concepts or intuitions. Strawson's anti-scepticism in Individuals is plainly very different from this in many ways. The taxonomy of scheme A, and the explicit rejection of scepticism in Individuals (pp. 33-6), suggest that for Strawson descriptive metaphysics already contains directly an anti-sceptical position. 12 Graham Bird, 'Kant's Transcendental Arguments', in Reading Kant, and 'A Reply to Ralph Walker' in Robert Stern (ed.), Transcendental Arguments: Problems and Prospects (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). 13 References to Kant's works, other than the Critique of Pure Reason, are given to the Akademie edition (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1902- ) by volume and page number.
Bird Even where Kant's descriptive metaphysics is used, as in those cases, against a local scepticism, for example, about external objects in the Refutation of Idealism, it does not already contain a direct, and potentially questionbegging, answer to such scepticism. It takes more seriously than Strawson's the neutral attitude of 'being content merely to describe experience', and so matches scheme B rather than A. Once that neutral description is available, however, it can be used as an indirect argument against a sceptical idealism to correct an erroneous priority in that doctrine; and then it meets the criticism I made earlier of Strawson's later doubts whether transcendental arguments have any anti-sceptical point at alL I have, however, also suggested that Kant uses his descriptive metaphysics in a more general context, namely that of the Copernican experin1ent; but I shall claim that not even that more general use of such a descriptive metaphysics is a direct refutation of traditional global scepticism. It would, of course, be merely question begging to assume that Kant, as a traditional philosopher, must have intended to use his descriptive n1etaphysics directly to refute traditional scepticism of whatever type. For the issue is precisely whether Kant should be treated as a standard traditional philosopher, when there are so many explicit indications, from the 'Copernican experiment' on (B xvi-xix), that he wished to reject the previous tradition. 14 Significant here is Kant's attitude of accepting science and experience but querying philosophy; in that way he reverses the posture of a traditional scepticism that accepts the authority of philosophy and questions aspects of science and ordinary experience. Kant's so-called Copernican revolution is not only a radically new direction for philosophy, but also a reversal of previous philosophical orthodoxy. That attitude is clearly expressed at B 119-20 and Prolegomena 40, but perhaps its most forceful statement is in the Logic (ix. 83-4), where Kant considers, and dismisses, traditional scepticism and replaces it with a legitimate 'sceptical method'. The central points in the passage are as follows: 72
scepticism destroys all our efforts to achieve certainty by casting doubt on all knowledge clain1s. The n10re damaging scepticism is, the more useful and fruitful is sceptical method, by which I understand a way of treating something as uncertain, testing it to the highest point of uncertainty, with the prospect of getting on the track of truth ... It is a method which holds out the prospect of achieving certainty. There is no place for scepticism in mathematics or physics. Only that
14 The language of the Copernican experiment gives one such indication. Another is in the opening page of the Prolegomena: 'it is absolutely necessary ... to set aside all previous work (in metaphysics), to regard its past as never having happened, and as a priority to ask whether metaphysics is even possible.' Kant's reply to Garve in the appendix to the Prolegomena (iv. 372-82) also offers a vehement expression of Kant's revolutionary intentions, in which he complains that Garve has simply failed to understand the radical change in metaphysics canvassed in the Critique.
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knowledge is vulnerable which is neither mathematical nor empirical; that is, pure philosophy. Absolute scepticism represents everything as illusory. It thus distinguishes illusion from truth, presupposes a criterion for distinguishing them, and so contradicts itself.
In the passage Kant reverses a traditional belief in the authority of a first philosophy over science, anticipates a Popperian hypothetico-deductive method for science, and indicates a sensitivity to the different kinds of 'certainty' appropriate for different disciplines, even a priori disciplines. It is true that Kant plainly intends to reject a general Humean scepticism and not just the local issues about cause, external objects, or personal identity, but we need to look more closely at the kind of general Humean scepticism that Kant rejects. Kant, after all, accepts Hume's scepticism about transcendent claims, and accepts many of Hume's analyses, for example of specific causal relations (B 793-4) and of the kaleidoscopic character of an empiricist self (B 132-4). The central point at which Kant rejects a general Humean scepticism concerns the question of a priori features of experience, to which both the Copernican experiment and the descriptive inventory of experience are immediately relevant. Kant's general rejection of scepticism is primarily directed at a Hun1ean en1piricist conception of the a priori as only analytic truth (B 20; B 793) .15 It is primarily a rejection of that empiricist conception, and indeed of empiricism generally. It is not a direct attempt to refute local scepticism about external objects and personal identity, but a wholesale rejection of an empiricism held to be responsible for scepticism. Such a response is indirect because it rests on the descriptive inventory of experience, and because that inventory yields a correction to a sceptical empiricism. Just as the treatment of local scepticisms corrects the n1isdescription of priorities in experience, so the treatment of this general scepticisn1 corrects the empiricist misdescription of the a priori in experience. The problem of scepticism is not resolved, in either strategy, directly by accepting the sceptics' framework; it is resolved indirectly by rejecting the frameworks, of traditional idealism and traditional empiricism, in which the problem arises. Since Strawson's conception of the a priori is closer to an empiricist Hume than to an anti-empiricist Kant,16 that issue underlines this fundamental difference between the two kinds of descriptive metaphysics.
15 Kant makes the point at B 20 and Prolegomena (iv. 272-3) that Hume would not have persisted with his empiricist scepticism if he had recognized that mathematical propositions were not all analytic truths, but that some were synthetic a priori. (See also B 127.) 16 Bounds of Sense, 43: 'it must be concluded that Kant really has no clear and genera] conception of the synthetic a priori at all.' The passage is compatible with a belief that there is a clear conception of the synthetic a priori even though Kant lacked it, but even in the later Skepticism and Naturalism (p. 91) Strawson focuses on the analytic a priori in his reference to Humean 'relations of ideas'.
Bird It may be immediately objected that Kant appeals to his non-empiricist conception of a priori principles precisely as a means of guaranteeing knowledge and so attempting to refute traditional scepticism within its own terms; but two initial responses can be made to this. First, the objection concedes the point that the initial, direct, response to a general Hun1ean scepticism arises over the status of the a priori principles disclosed in the project of a descriptive inventory. It concedes the central point represented by scheme B. Second, it pren1aturely answers the further question of the indi.rect relation between Kant's descriptive project and traditional scepticism when that response needs to be left open. It aSSUll1es, prematurely, that Kant's appeal to a priori principles is offered as a way of satisfying the sceptics' standard for 'knowledge'; that is, of providing a guarantee that sceptics would accept. Kant's appeal to scheme B as I have represented it, with its identification of a priori principles, certainly raises the question of its further implications for traditional scepticism, but does not yet answer it. In order to take that further step, more has to be said about Kant's conception of the a priori, and this will be considered in Section III. 74
II. THE PROJECTS' METHODS (LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND TRANSCENDENTAL PSYCHOLOGY)
Strawson's apparatus in his descriptive metaphysics is derived from semantic/ pragmatic aspects of language. The central notions of 'identification' and 'reidentification' are defined in terms of speaker/hearer con1munication. The apparatus reflects in that way the analytic philosophy of the 1960s, in which epistemological issues were rephrased in linguistic terms partly in order to avoid the supposed errors of an ambiguous 'psychologism'. Kant also makes important references to language and logic, but his central thesis concerns our cognitive powers. References in the Metaphysical Deduction to logical forms, and in the Transcendental Deduction (B) to judgement-conjunction (Verbindung) are at the service of that exploration of our cognitive powers. This marks the second major difference between the two projects: that within a philosophical framework Strawson's is primarily linguistic and Kant's primarily psychological. It is unsurprising in the light of a background hostility to psychologism that Strawson should have criticized Kant's project as the 'imaginary subject of transcendental psychology' (Bounds ofSense, 32). Later commentators have rightly rejected that criticism of Kant i ? and so long as
17 See Graham Bird, 'Kant's Transcendental Idealism', in G. Vesey (ed.), Idealism-Past and Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); P. Kitcher, Kant's Transcendental Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); A. Brook, Kant and the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
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there is an intelligible role for Kant's transcendental psychology it is difficult to see any reason for preferring Strawson's approach to Kant's. Both aim to identify conditions that are constitutive of our experience, and differ only in their diverse appeals to language or to cognition. Kant would certainly have claimed that his cognitive conditions are prior to Strawson's linguistic conditions, but I shall not defend that view here. Both projects have been accused of a failure to acknowledge the 'relativity' of their constitutive conditions. Strawson was criticized, for example, by Susan Haack, for treating a local feature of Indo-European languages, namely their use of subject-predicate forms of judgement, as if it were universal. 18 !(ant was criticized for treating the historical dominance of Euclid and Newton in the eighteenth century as if it were universal. Whether these criticisms are sound or not, the two projects face a related problem about their methods of enquiry, for the issue about 'relativity' is the obverse side of an issue about 'necessity'. At its most general the problem is to explain how a descriptive survey of contingent experience can be used to yield necessary a priori principles. A potential difficulty for Strawson's later views is expressed clearly by Michael Friedman,19 when he notes Strawson's 'un-Kantian' appeal to a 'sui generis rational intuition of such necessary, a priori, truths'. That appeal is not only un-Kantian but also, more seriously, leaves the relevant modalities in need of elucidation. As the comments about 'relativity' suggested, it is at best dangerous to infer necessary, universal, truths from the local character of experience, and unclear how such an inference can be made. These difficulties arise for Kant as well as for Strawson. It might even be said that they arise for Kant in a more intractable form, since he is committed to the controversial characterization of the fundamental principles as synthetic a priori. Kant has the advantage of adopting a quite definite classification, but the disadvantage that that classification is open to innumerable queries. Beyond that, however, !(ant has also an appeal to a method through which the a priori principles are to be identified, namely his 'abstraction' or 'isolation' procedure. The procedure, formally presented in the introduction (B 5-6) as a way of distinguishing a priori and a posteriori elements in experience, is evidently a primary resource for the descriptive inventory. The procedure is not extensively explained in the introduction, although many references are made to it throughout the Critique (e.g. A 116, A 119, B 144, B 162-3, etc.), and its importance is often overlooked or 18 See Susan Haack, 'Descriptive and Revisionary Metaphysics', Philosophical Studies, 35 (1979), 3 61 -7I. 19 In Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. lxxii (1998), 116-17, Friedman refers to Strawson's Scepticism and Naturalism (London: Methuen, 1985). In my reply to Friedman in the same volume, pp. 131-5 I, I disagree with Friedman's naturalism but accept his criticism of Strawson.
Bird 20 misunderstood. The outcome in those references is of an abstract, schematic, constitutive structure for experience whose principles are a priori or necessary. The abstraction procedure provides for Kant a transition from the survey of our contingent experience to items that are not themselves contingent but are constitutive of that experience. Nothing in such an account ensures that the transitional procedure is successful, or that its operation is even fully understood, but I suggest that Kant provides a more substantial account of it in his treatment of Inathematics and formal science,21 especially Euclidean geometry. For Kant's conception of Euclidean geometry provides a model in terms of which to understand the procedure in his metaphysics, despite the differences between the two disciplines which Kant repeatedly emphasizes. 22 Just as, for Kant, Euclid provides a schematic, abstract, representation of spatial experience, so descriptive metaphysics is to provide an abstract, schematic, representation of our experience as a whole. Just as Euclid provides such a schematic account of the structure of spatial experience, so Kant's metaphysical principles are to provide such an account of the structure of the whole of experience. Some provisos need to be made here. Kant's conception of Euclidean geometry is not that of a formal system in a contemporary sense, as Michael Friedman has persuasively argued. 23 I