[This is an invited guest post by Joel Katzav--ES]
Marie Collins Swabey completed her PhD at Cornell in 1920, under the supervision of James Edwin Creighton. Her topic was the nature of laws of nature. She subsequently translated, with her husband, Ernst Cassirer’s Substance and Function and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity into English as well as wrote five books, including Logic and Nature (1930), Theory of the Democratic State (1937), The Judgement of History (1954) and Comic Laughter: A Philosophical Essay (1961).
My focus here is on her criticism of naturalism in her 1929 paper, ‘Reason and Nature’, a paper which is largely reproduced in Logic and Nature. Her criticism includes the worry that naturalism is paradoxically committed to taking nature to be the cause of, and a product of, our minds, and the worry that, given a commitment to naturalism, the theory-laden nature of observation undermines the theory-fact distinction. This criticism, we will see, targets two kinds of naturalism, one (‘extreme naturalism’) is close to Dewey’s naturalism and the other (‘sophisticated naturalism’) fits that of Creighton. Further, her critique of these forms of naturalism is part of a broader, early twentieth century response to pragmatism and other early forms of naturalism, a response that includes the development of the naturalism (recall) of Grace and (recall) Theodore de Laguna. Finally, Creighton’s naturalism, and Swabey’s and the de Lagunas’ responses to his naturalism, are mirrored in the second half of the same century by Quine’s naturalism and responses to it.[1]
According to Swabey, extreme naturalism posits that all action, including that of reason, is a response to a specific environment, a response that serves the evolved function of self-preservation and that can be explained as an evolutionary adaptation. Since this form of naturalism takes reason to be an adaptive response to specific evolutionary circumstances, it “denies the pretensions of reason to envisage genuinely formal and universal, as opposed to material and particular, objects. Concepts or generic notions are accounted as nothing more than “generalizations”; while theoretical grounds and reasons are denied causal efficacy, being considered as idle compensatory “rationalizations” after the event” (1929, p. 399). Swabey sees a number of obvious criticisms of extreme naturalism. Chiefly, she complains that, by its own lights, it is a kind of idle, compensatory rationalization. The hypothesis that life has the teleological function of maintaining life is “a teleological-metaphysical theory about the world which goes far beyond the warrant of direct experience, yet which seemingly must be granted if the results of the sciences are to be construed as either trustworthy or significant” (1929, p. 400). The problem here, according to Swabey, is that naturalism of this kind presupposes, but cannot justify, its own truth.
According to sophisticated naturalism, reason is still a proper part of nature but is distinguished by its ability to address general problems. Reason makes use of abstract schemas of objects without grasping them as particulars and is able to do this because of the relational nature of its concepts (ibid., p. 402). Another mark of reason, on this form of naturalism, is that it tends to organise data into systems, thus disclosing previously unknown relations between objects. Further,
[i]n conformity with this inclination, understanding never apparently accepts a “fact” off-hand at its face value or takes an isolated judgement as more than provisional; but requires that each shall be confirmed by linkage with other facts and judgments which mutually sustain and support it….
In the end, although reasoning presumably never realizes the ideal which is that of a single, all-inclusive system with no grounds outside of itself, it is customary to assume that, other things being equal, the more comprehensive a coherent body of judgments is and the richer in interconnections, the more reliable it is likely to be (ibid., pp. 402-3).
Swabey, however, thinks that sophisticated naturalism, no less than extreme naturalism, undermines itself. On her view, if we assume that our minds are proper parts of nature, we will be committed to the paradoxical assumption that nature is both the cause of, and a construct of, our minds (pp. 403-404). She offers a number of supporting arguments for this claim. Here is one: if we are proper parts of nature, our experience of any aspect of nature will be partial. But then any theory of any aspect of nature will always extend beyond what experience might by itself support. In particular, experience will then never be able to provide any reason to suppose that survival value is a test of the truth of our theories. So, the naturalist will be forced to conclude that nature is, contrary to her initial assumption, a construct rather than a cause of our minds (ibid., pp. 405-406). Another of Swabey’s supporting arguments tells us that even the distinction between theory and fact will have to be taken to be a construct of the mind once the naturalist accepts that “our contact with facts is always in the context of theory” (ibid., p. 404).
Swabey names no proponents of extreme naturalism, but its assumption that reason is designed to address specific problems and is limited to empirical, as opposed to theoretical, phenomena is close to John Dewey’s pragmatism. Indeed, Swabey states that one variant of extreme naturalism is committed to the idea that the reflex arc is the unit of ‘functional activity’. Dewey, famously, articulates this idea in his 1896 paper on the reflex arc (Dewey 1896). The more sophisticated naturalism described by Swabey, including its meaning and confirmation holism, is close to that of Creighton and has affinities with the naturalism of two other early twentieth century critics of pragmatism and of Creighton’s holism, namely Grace and Theodore de Laguna (Katzav forthcoming).
The theory of meaning and confirmation underpinning the sophisticated naturalism that Swabey targets is, of course, also close to the meaning and confirmation holism adopted by Willard V. Quine decades later in his paper, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” Moreover, her criticism of sophisticated naturalism is close to later criticism of Quine’s naturalistic epistemology. Barry Stroud and Michael Williams, like Swabey, think that sophisticated naturalism will, when applied to itself, lead to scepticism (Stroud 1981; Williams 1996). Interestingly, the de Lagunas’ 1910 criticism of Creightonian holism, e.g., their objection that it fails to recognise the existence of contextual standards of justification in science, is also mirrored by later criticism of “Two Dogmas” (see Katzav forthcoming and here).
References
Dewey, J. (1896) “The concept of the reflex arc,” The Psychological Review, 3(4): 357-370.
De Laguna, T. and de Laguna, G. A. (1910) Dogmatism and Evolution: Studies in Modern Philosophy, the MacMillan Company.
Katzav, J. (forthcoming) “The de Lagunas’ Dogmatism and Evolution: a tale of the overcoming of modern philosophy and the making of post-Quinean analytic philosophy.”
Stroud, B. (1981) “The Significance of Naturalized Epistemology,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 6: 455–71.
Swabey, M. C. (1929) “Reason and Nature,” The Monist, 39: 395-417.
Williams, M. (1996) Unnatural Doubts: Epistemological Realism and the Basis of Scepticism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
[1] Alexander Guerrero has written about Swabey’s political philosophy (see https://peasoup.typepad.com/peasoup/2015/02/ethics-discussions-at-pea-soup-alexander-guerrero-on-marie-collins-swabeys-publicity-and-measurement.html).
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