Useless -isms June 2, 2008
Posted by Colin in Methodology.trackback
I don’t know, maybe its just me. Saw these two posts and it made me think about use of the term ‘naturalism’. This strikes me as one of the most useless -isms around. Think about all the myriad of ways people use the concept of what is natural. This reading of the text seems more natural than that one. Food and health products often contrast what is natural with what is man-made, ‘chemical’ or artificial. The natural world is supposed to be, what, the world insofar as it remains untouched by the ill effects of human invention (or convention)? I really don’t know.
Naturalists of course disagree about what they mean by ‘naturalism’ in the philosophical context. Richard says that naturalism is “a metaphysical thesis that claims that everything that exists does so in one single space-time system.” Barry says that naturalism is “the research project whose goal is the reduction of everything to matter.” Those are pretty different interpretations, not to mention that we have better concepts for both. The first description is more perspicuously captured by ‘closure’ theses while the latter is more perspicuously captured by ‘materialism’ or ‘physicalism’ depending on what is intended there by the term ‘matter’.
This might come off as a stupid terminological gripe, but I don’t mean it that way. I think that when we use -isms it is to save time and effort in reiterating a certain set of assumptions that we want to defend or attack, as the case may be. This can be very helpful to furthering the dialectic by situating ourselves within a literature and getting down to business rather than spending lots of time of exposition. But this only works when the -ism itself is well-defined. It seems to me that ‘naturalism’ is an -ism we could do well without.
Hey Colin,
What Barry calls natuarlism is what Armstrong and I, following him, would call materialism or physicalism. It is more restrictive than naturalism in the sense that I used it in my post. You are right about causal closure, but it is supposed to be an argument for naturalism, and then for materialism. That is why Barry casts it in terms of reduction. He is aking the question that RC and company are interested in, which is ‘do we need to add anything to a completed physics or will all the truths about numbers, qualia, etc follow from that physics? I have argued that this isn’t really reduction in any important sense but that really is the question of materialism. So, why isn’t it useful to have these distinctions and categorize various views as falling within them?
That’s odd because it seems to me like what you call ‘naturalism’ is just different from what Barry calls ‘naturalism’ (not, as you say, that he is talking about a restricted version of what you are talking about). Whether or not everything exists in a closed space-time system looks to me like a separate issue from whether or not all existing things somehow reduce to matter. These are different issues, no? Anyway, all I meant was that — as you nicely illustrate — we have better, more perspicuous terminology for the topics of debate: closure, reductionism, etc. So why use a term like ‘naturalism’ which is, at best, ambiguous? I guess this may be a stylistic gripe.