The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (9 page)

8
A word, incidentally, about the beginning of this sentence. Here we see the first explicit reference in this book to a ‘conception’ of metaphysics. That makes this an apt point at which to comment on my use of the two terms ‘concept’ and ‘conception’, each of which will pervade the book. While I do not profess to have a rigorously defined distinction in mind, my intention is roughly to follow John Rawls’ usage in Rawls (
1971
) (see in particular p. 5). On this usage, various relatively determinate ‘conceptions’ of a thing, such as justice or metaphysics, can all be said to correspond to the same relatively indeterminate ‘concept’ of that thing.

9
Cf. Burnyeat (
1981
); and Lear (
1988
),
Ch. 1
.

10
I am presupposing that not all knowledge is knowledge that something is the case; for dissent, see Stanley and Williamson (
2001
).

11
Cf. Moore (
1997a
),
Ch. 8
.

12
See Adorno (
1973
), esp. Pt 3, §III.

13
For an interpretation of Aristotle whereby his work serves as an even more striking example, see Lear (
1988
),
Ch. 6
, passim, but esp. §3.

14
For some fascinating insights into the relations between self-consciousness and self-confidence, specifically in relation to ethics, but with relevance to metaphysics too, see Williams (
2006o
), Chs 8 and 9.

15
There is a muffled echo in these three questions of a tripartite classification that Kant imposes on his philosophical predecessors in the final section of Kant (
1998
). He classifies them: first, with regard to what they take their subject matter to be (objects of the senses or objects of the understanding); second, with regard to what they take the source of their knowledge to be (experience or pure reason); and third, with regard to what they take their methodology to be (an appeal to common sense or something more scientific and more systematic). It takes only a little strain to hear the echo of these in the Transcendence Question, the Creativity Question, and the Novelty Question, respectively.

16
This question will come to prominence in
Ch. 10
, §4, and again in
Ch. 21
, §7(c).

17
There is a hint here of what may have been an equally important fourth question: is there scope for our making unified sense of everything, or are we limited to making separate sense of separate things? Cf. the Archilochean distinction between ‘the hedgehog’, who ‘knows one big thing’, and ‘the fox’, who ‘knows many things’, a distinction developed in Berlin (
1978
) and further exploited in Hacker (
1996
),
Ch. 5
, §1. (In the former Isaiah Berlin argues that Tolstoy was a fox by nature, but a hedgehog by conviction. In the latter P.M.S. Hacker argues that Wittgenstein, by contrast, ‘was by nature a hedgehog, but … transformed himself … into a paradigmatic fox’ (ibid., p. 98). (Hacker is talking about the transition from Wittgenstein’s early work to his later work: see Chs 9 and 10, esp. §2 of the latter, in this book.) Another thinker in whom we find a similar contrast between temperament and practice is David Lewis: in
Ch.
13, §2, I shall cite a passage which shows him to have been a reluctant hedgehog.)

18
The first clear manifestation of it will occur in
Ch. 5
, §8, when I introduce what I there call the Limit Argument.

19
See further ibid., pp. 9–11. See also P.F. Strawson (
1992
),
Ch. 1
, where he distinguishes a more negative version of the view that metaphysics has to be descriptive (metaphysics as therapy) from a more positive version (metaphysics as conceptual analysis). And see Davidson (1984a) for scepticism about the idea that there even
are
radically different structures.

Note: in
Ch. 17
we shall see reason not to link the Creativity Question too tightly to Strawson’s revisionary/descriptive distinction (see n. 75 of that chapter).

20
I shall return briefly to this possibility in
Ch. 21
, §7(c).

21
For a more sensible conservative respect for ‘ordinary language’, see J.L. Austin (
1970
), p. 185. At the end of that passage, Austin memorably summarizes his view in the following way: ‘Ordinary language is
not
the last word: in principle it can everywhere be supplemented and improved upon and superseded. Only remember, it
is
the
first
word’ (emphasis in original). See further
Ch. 10
, n. 9.

22
These paradoxes are generally attributed to Zeno of Elea and are reported by Aristotle in his
Physics
, Bk VI,
Ch. 9
. We shall return to them briefly in
Ch. 16
, §6. For discussion, see Moore (
2001a
), Introduction, §1, and
Ch. 4
, §3.

23
We shall see other reasons in Part Three: see esp.
Ch. 15
, §6, and
Ch. 21
, §6.

24
Cf. Snowdon (
2006
), pp. 41–43.

25
Derek Parfit would say the former. He describes his own work, in which he challenges many of our beliefs but retains the concepts we use, as revisionary: see Parfit (
1984
), p. x.

26
For a particularly robust defence of the first alternative, see Wright (
2002
), §9. A similarly ‘realist’ position is defended in Lowe (
1998
),
Ch. 1
. The latter alternative is more Wittgensteinian: see Hacker (
1986
),
Ch. VII
, and see below,
Ch. 10
, §3.

Note that, for convenience, I shall sometimes treat this reversal of the original question as presenting the same pair of alternatives, though we should not rule out the possibility that there is scope
both
for our being creative in our sense-making
and
for our discovering the sense that things themselves already make. Indeed it is clear that, in many projects of
non
-metaphysical sense-making, there are elements of both. That is to say, there are elements both of creation and of discovery: it is less clear whether there are any individual elements that are elements of both. (See further
Ch. 16
, §6(c), and
Ch. 18
, §6.)

27
See Craig (
1987
). Craig himself would regard the Creativity Question, and the choice that it presents between what he calls ‘the Insight Ideal’ and ‘the Practice Ideal’, as pivotal to my historical project: see ibid., passim.

28
Cf. Williams (
2006m
).

29
But see the caveat in n. 26.

30
For some interesting observations on the use of the word as a derogatory term, see Armstrong (
1965
). See also Locke (
1965
), Bk III,
Ch. X
, §2, for an early pejorative use of ‘metaphysicians’ in the context ‘schoolmen and metaphysicians’. Hume famously castigates ‘school metaphysics’ in the final paragraph of Hume (
1975a
); for discussion, see
Ch. 4
, §4 in this book. Kant, in Kant (
2002a
), 4:258 n., claims to find a much more complimentary reference to ‘metaphysics’ in Hume: he cites a German translation of Hume (
1741
–1742), Vol. 2, p. 79. But his quotation contains an ellipsis that somewhat distorts Hume’s statement. (Here I am indebted to the editors’ n. 6 on p. 473 of Kant (
2002a
).)

31
For a similarly glib account of how making sense of things connects with the three ‘maxims of the common understanding’ which Kant identifies in Kant (
2000
), 5:294–295, see Moore (
2003a
), pp. 87–88.

32
For defence of this idea, see Moore (
2003a
), esp. Variations Two.

33
Here I echo Wittgenstein (
1967a
), Pt I, §271.

34
This view is stoutly defended by F.C.S. Schiller in Schiller (
1912
), an essay revealingly entitled ‘The Ethical Basis of Metaphysics’. See passim, but esp. p. 1, n. 1, and pp. 7–8.

35
For an account of the history of this question, see Franklin (
1993
).

36
Cf. Bernard Williams’ comments concerning arguments about God in Williams (
2006o
), p. 33.

37
But see
Ch. 3
, §2, for an important difference between the way in which it is exemplified in the first two and the way in which it is exemplified in the third.

38
Cf. Cockburn (
1997
),
Ch. 9
.

39
But only a little. For one thing, enormous philosophical work would be required to show that neither of the philosophical doctrines in question had implications whose costs outweighed its ethical benefits. I do not for a moment want to downplay the complexities of these issues, and I trust that my somewhat breezy presentation of this example is not misleading in this regard. For a very illuminating discussion of some of the complexities, see Gibson (
2007
). For a discussion of another example, in this case a metaphysical doctrine whose ethical payoff is to help us to make sense of ethics itself, see Moore (
2007a
), esp. §4. (Might a third example be idealism of the sort that Berkeley defends in Berkeley (
1962a
)? Might that connect better than any realist alternative with our sense of importance, by reducing the starry heavens in whose midst even our planet is a mere speck to tiny packages of information in our own voluminous, teeming minds? It might. But then again it might place intolerable strains on our understanding when we properly think it through.)

40
See Williams (
2006o
), pp. 140ff.; and Williams (
1995a
), pp. 205–210. I discuss action-guiding concepts at greater length in Moore (
2003a
), esp. Variations One, passim. A helpful discussion is Diamond (
1988
), of which pp. 276–277 are especially relevant to what I go on to say in this section.

41
See Moore (
2003a
), Variations One, §2, and p. 42. Cf. Wittgenstein (
1967a
), Pt I, §§569 and 570.

42
See Moore (
2003a
), pp. 83 and 95; and cf. Williams (
2006o
), pp. 56–57 and 114–115.

43
Locke (
1965
), Bk II, Ch. 27, in which the observation occurs at §26.

44
At one stage I toyed with borrowing an idea from Philip Turetzky and, instead of referring to ‘the analytic tradition’ and ‘non-analytic traditions’, referring to ‘the spear side’ and ‘the distaff side’: see Turetzky (
1998
), p. 211 and p. 245, n. 1. This would have carried a number of suggestions: principally, that there are links on the non-analytic side, just as much as there are on the analytic side, but less obvious links; perhaps also, given the sexism of the terms, that the distinction was being drawn from one particular, implicated point of view. But the links that exist on the non-analytic side are not in fact less obvious, unless the distinction is drawn from a point of view that is so blinkered as to be of no concern to me. (I intend no criticism of Turetzky here; his use of the metaphor is importantly different.)

45
This is reported by Maurice Drury: see Rhees (
1984
), p. 157. The quotation from
King Lear
occurs in Act I, Scene IV, ll. 99–100.

46
Even that is not quite right. As we shall see in Chs. 4 and 5, it is a vital and signal feature of both Hume’s philosophy and Kant’s philosophy.

Part One The Early Modern Period

Chapter 1 Descartes Metaphysics in the Service of Science

1. Introduction

René Descartes (1596–1650) held that some truths are beyond doubt. Among these he held that some are necessary, in a sense robust enough to mean that not even God could have made them false. And he held that metaphysics consists largely in the pursuit of such truths.