Jonathan Knowles

Many philosophers think propositional attitudes like beliefs, desires, and states of knowledge that can only be properly attributed to language-using crea- tures and that explaining behaviour in terms of them is answerable to rational norms that have no echo in nature. Many philosophers also think this view is consistent with thinking that what Ryle called knowing how can be attributed to animals and hence is a natural psychological kind. This chapter argues this combination of views is less easy to sustain than is commonly thought.

Relationalism, also called ‘the Relational View’, is a theory of perceptual experience which sees at least a central core of such experience as consisting in a non-representational relation between subjects and features of their environment—a relation that is also seen as at least analogous to Russellian acquaintance. In addition to phenomenological support, relationalism is according to one of its major proponents John Campbell needed to solve what he calls ‘Berkeley’s puzzle’: how it can be that we can gain a conception of objects as mind-independent from sensory experience. I examine Campbell’s arguments for this claim and suggest they fail to convince insofar as it is unclear that experience is necessary to acquire a conception of mind-independent objects. I close by showing how phenomenological externalism can do justice to our conflicting intuitions regarding Berkeley’s puzzle.

According to many so-called anti-representationalists, once one gives up on the idea that language functions by standing in genuine semantic relations to bits of the world, many of the traditional projects of metaphysics lapse (see, e.g., Price 2004). Amie Thomasson also subscribes to anti-representationalism but has her own take on metaphysics. Traditional metaphysics is certainly suspect, but many questions of ontology can be resolved by what Thomasson calls the “easy” approach, which sees questions about existence as following from the understanding of our own language plus relevant empirical input. Thomasson argues further that we should construe what appear to remain contentious metaphysical issues not as concerning inquiries into hidden truths but as instead veiled “metalinguistic negotiations” (Plunkett and Sundell 2013) with pragmatic aims in mind. The present paper takes the view that this line threatens to render philosophy largely irrelevant to culture: to reduce the philosopher to a kind of political activist. But nor, it argues, is Thomasson's way of holding open the door for contentious metaphysical debate the only one for anti-representationalists.

This chapter is a critical discussion global expressivism (GE), the version of ARTL that Price defends. It revolves around two main issues. The first is Price’s idea that by rejecting Representationalism we can, without abjuring naturalism, sidestep metaphysical questions concerning how entities and phenomena of the common sense world fit into the natural world, in the way many naturalists and physicalists take it they must to be real. I defend this argument of Price’s against various recent critiques. The second concerns the issue of whether GE is the best or only way of defending and/or substantiating ARTL. I argue, pace Price, that GE is not the only coherent way of defending ARTL, and that even if one adopts his subject naturalistic approach, there are other ways of substantiating ARTL than GE.

This chapter and the next form of unit. In this one, I present and explore two further representationalist versus anti-representationalist debates that are prevalent in contemporary philosophical discussion: one concerning the nature of perceptual experience (indeed, experience more generally), the other how we should think of a scientific psychology or cognitive science. I lay out the interconnections between the different views in these debates and how they impact on and relate to different understandings of ARTL (here consider I amongst other things Rorty’s and John McDowell’s views on perception). The main argumentative aim of the chapter is to develop an alternative and in my view superior framework for a subject naturalistic substantiation of ARTL to that Price has offered through GE. I do this by advocating two other kinds of anti-representationalist position. The first of these I call phenomenological externalism (PE), a view that can be motivated by an assessment of the debate about perceptual experience, and involves the idea that, while experience is not a matter of representation, what we perceive in experience is something like a world for us, not the world in itself as described by physics. The other, which I see as providing a deeper, naturalistic undergirding of PE insofar as it is a position within cognitive science, is enactivism, under a certain understanding of what this position involves.

ARTL rejects metaphysical realism (MR): it sees Representationalism as integral to this idea, and since Representationalism is incoherent, so is MR. However, ARTL does not for that reason see itself as an idealistic or anti-realistic doctrine, in any substantive sense. In this chapter, I defend (a) the idea (rejected by Horwich, Devitt and Searle, inter alia) that the kind of realism MR embodies depends on Representationalism, and (b) the idea that ARTL can uphold a full-blown common sense form of realism without MR. Task (b) involves amongst other things arguing against Putnam’s doctrine of conceptual relativity, which I suggest is undesirable in inevitably leading, pace Putnam’s protestations to the contrary, to a Kantian picture on which our talk and thought falls short of an unknowable or even unthinkable reality. While what I have to say in this chapter is meant to be consistent with what has been argued for in Chapters 3, 4, and 5, it is also meant to stand largely independently of those issues.

This chapter picks up where the previous one left off. I first explore in more detail how the notion of the umwelt from enactivism can undergird the distinction between the world for us and the world in itself that informs PE, such that these ideas can provide a cogent alternative subject naturalistic grounding for ARTL to GE. I then take up various matters arising from the various discussions of Chap. 3 and Sect. 4.2. Firstly, I explain how two varieties of (non-classical) representationalist cognitive can also be seen as conducive to or compatible with PE, taking up amongst other things the recently popular predictive processing model of cognition. Secondly, I give an overview of various outstanding issues concerning the notions of content, information, concepts and knowledge, and the role they can play in my enactivist-based version of ARTL. Lastly, I clarify in what way and to what extent my version of ARTL differs from Price’s, amongst other things focussing on his concept of e-representation.

In this introductory chapter I introduce the idea of anti-representationalism as a counterpoint to the prevailing representationalism of modern and much contemporary philosophy, illustrating in relation to perceptual experience, cognitive science, and the notion of truth. I then outline the fundamental ideas behind a view that I will elaborate and defend in the book that I dub anti-representationalism about thought and language (ARTL). This is a position I associate first and foremost with the neo-pragmatists Richard Rorty and Huw Price, but is also influenced by various other philosophers such as Carnap, Quine, Sellars, Horwich, and Brandom. Central to ARTL is the rejection of what Price calls (‘Big-R’) ‘Representationalism’, to the effect that language has meaning and relates to the world in virtue of substantial semantic relations of truth and reference. This has important implications for how we should think about truth, meaning, existence and reality, but does not mean we have to see as ARTL as in any way an anti-realistic or anti-naturalistic position.I end the chapter by outlining the contents of the rest of the book. Central here will be my argument that while we should accept the basic tenets of ARTL, the specific forms of this view that Rorty and Price (and several others) defend should give way to a version that relates it explicitly to other forms of anti-representationalist philosophy concerning experience and cognitive science.

This chapter is a relatively self-standing essay that takes up how we should best understand the famous ‘brains in vats’ (BIV) thought experiment and relates it to the ideas of Chaps. 3 and 4. Hilary Putnam, another central neo-pragmatist philosopher, argued we cannot be brains in vats (at least, eternally so) and used this result as part of his argument against a view he called ‘metaphysical realism’ (MR): the idea that there an absolute reality consisting of mind-independent objects, properties, relations, structures etc. with a wholly determinate nature which set the ultimate standard for our cognitive practices. I have previously argued in Chaps. 1 and 2 that MR falls along with what Price calls Representationalism, and for similar reasons to Putnam’s so-called ‘model-theoretic’ arguments; hence I am also broadly sympathetic with Putnam’s BIV argument, at least understood as a reductio of MR. In this chapter I present Tim Button’s recent defence of Putnam’s arguments against MR, but also critique how he responds to them. I then consider and defend David Chalmers’ view that the BIV scenario (or Matrix scenario, or simulation hypothesis) is, contra Putnam and Button, epistemically possible, but does not threaten our everyday knowledge. I finally consider what I call, following Hubert Dreyfus, the ‘existential phenomenological take’ on the BIV thought experiment which I suggest involves an improvement on Chalmers’ view, and can be seen as cohering with the idea behind PE that we must draw a distinction between the experiential world for us and the world in itself.

In Chap. 2 I upheld Price’s argument that ARTL has negative repercussions for the metaphysical programme that seeks to understand how various different common sense categories can be placed in the natural world. But is there room for other forms of metaphysics within the parameters of ARTL? This chapter focuses on Amie Thomasson’s view that there is no defensible substantively epistemic metaphysical project once one embraces ARTL, especially the aspect of her view that seemingly intractable and inexorably contentious metaphysical disputes – about, say, what a person is, or a work of art – involve metalinguistic negotiation about the use of certain concepts with pragmatic aims in mind. Thomasson’s picture can seem attractive for a supporter of ARTL insofar as it paints a picture of philosophers, in particular metaphysicians, as engaged in meaningful and important work in spite of not being in the business of ‘mapping out the fundamental structure of reality’. My aim in this chapter is however to question Thomasson’s picture of what metaphysics amounts to for ARTL, and to offer my own account of this. I will be arguing that her understanding of metaphysics as metalinguistic negotiation is problematic both because it fails to demarcate appropriately between those debates that plausibly are and those that aren’t contentious, and, more seriously, because it does not afford the input philosophers might provide to these debates any special significance beyond that which politicians, lawyers or other professional (or for that matter, non-professional) people or groups might provide. Moreover, I will suggest that her view that there are clearly demarcated analytic claims on the one hand, and clearly demarcated empirical claims on the other, which is central to her case, is problematic both in itself, and in running counter to the spirit of ARTL. In place of Thomasson’s view, and more in line with ARTL, I will suggest a view of metaphysics as something perpetually ongoing – though probably also never-ending – through our very use and reflection on language and concepts in relation to the goal of expressing our beliefs, i.e. what we hold to be true. Finally, and more speculatively, I draw on ideas defended earlier in the book to provide a kind of subject naturalistic account of a more principled divide between metaphysics and science.

This book provides an original perspective on the debate about anti-representationalism and the nature of philosophy. This debate has come to prominence in recent years through the work of people like Richard Rorty, Paul Horwich, Huw Price and Amie Thomasson. It is the first book to explicitly consider this well-known pragmatist kind of anti-representationalism in relation to anti-representationalist views in other areas of philosophy, in particular the philosophy of perception and cognitive science. Taking as its point of departure the neo-pragmatism of Rorty and Price, it critiques the way these (and other) thinkers develop, on this basis, a positive view of philosophy and its remit. By examining the debate about representationalism versus anti-representationalism in perception and cognitive science it provides a different way of understanding the significance of neo-pragmatism, as well as providing an independently interesting perspective on these other debates. A central idea in this perspective involves distinguishing between a world-for-us and a world-in-itself, though in a different way from Kant and many other philosophers. The book extends these reflections to examine questions about realism and the limits of metaphysics for anti-representationalist pragmatism, arguing the view can uphold a common sense kind of realism, as well as the value of distinctively philosophical enquiry in metaphysics.

A perennial issue in contemporary philosophy is the question of how, in Wilfrid Sellars’ terms, categories of the ‘manifest image’ relate to those of the ‘scientific image’. A widespread kind of naturalism assumes that the categories of science have a certain kind of ontological priority and that other categories (meaning, mind, morality and so on) have to be somehow placed or located in the world of science to be fully vindicated. Huw Price has argued in several papers that if one gives up a view of how language functions he calls ‘representationalism’ then this way of understanding placement problems—object naturalism—necessarily lapses. Price argues that in foregoing representationalism and embracing semantic deflationism we should remain naturalists, but subject naturalists, seeking to understand the function our different discourses play in our lives as natural beings: the project of global expressivism. This argument has recently been challenged by several authors who argue that object naturalism can coherently and rationally be pursued within a semantic deflationist framework. I will argue that these objections to Price’s view are all ultimately unconvincing given a wide enough purview of the dialectic. The viability and coherence of global expressivism itself, and whether it is the only possible form of subject naturalism, are briefly addressed in conclusion.

Bertrand Russell famously distinguished between ‘Knowledge by Acquaintance’ and ‘Knowledge by Description’. For much of the latter half of the Twentieth Century, many philosophers viewed the notion of acquaintance with suspicion, associating it with Russellian ideas that they would wish to reject. However in the past decade or two the concept has undergone a striking revival in mainstream ‘analytic’ philosophy – acquaintance is, it seems, respectable again. This is the first collection of new essays devoted to the topic of acquaintance, featuring contributions from many of the world’s leading experts in this area. The volume showcases the great variety of topics in philosophy of mind, epistemology and philosophy of language for which philosophers are currently employing the concept of acquaintance. This book features an extensive introduction by one of the editors, which provides some historical background as well as summarizing the main debates and issues in contemporary philosophy where appeals to acquaintance are currently being made. The remaining thirteen essays are grouped thematically into the following four sections: (1) Phenomenal Consciousness, (2) Perceptual Experience, (3) Reference, (4) Epistemology.

Davidson and Chomsky, though differing on much in the study of language, are united in the view that the traditional notion of a shared language, such as English or Norwegian, has no part to play in a scientific or philosophical understanding of linguistic competence and communication. Davidson accepts Chomsky's ideas about our linguistic ability as underpinned by dedicated and possibly hard-wired aspects of the mind/brain, but does not see this as relevant to a constitutive account of meaning and communication; Chomsky sees Davidson's philosophy of language, like all others based on semantic notions, as doomed to obscurity. Against this background I subject Davidson's argument from malapropisms for the view that there are no such things as languages to critical scrutiny. I conclude that it fails to show that communication does not rest on shared languages, but only that we speak a lot more such languages than we are ordinarily inclined to suppose. This consequence, of interest in its own right, also seems absurd. In the context of a Chomsky-Davidson debate, in which one is sceptical of the traditional concept of a language, this provides a corresponding lift for Chomsky's overall perspective on language and the study thereof.

This paper motivates and defends “Rortian realism,” a position that is Rortian in respect of its underlying philosophical theses but non-Rortian in terms of the lessons it draws from these for cultural politics. The philosophical theses amount to what the paper calls Rorty's “anti-representationalism”, arguing that AR is robust to critique as being anti-realist, relativist, or sceptical, invoking Rorty's historicism/ethnocentrism as part of the defence. The latter, however, creates problems for Rorty in so far as his reformative views on the nature of philosophical and academic activity are meant to be foisted on an academy that ex hypothesi holds views different from these. The paper suggests we can motivate a different conception of the consequences of AR more amenable to the academy: Rortian realism, a view that makes greater concessions to realism and a kind of scientific naturalism than Rorty would like, but that for those very reasons is more likely to allow AR to prevail.

"A critical investigation of modern naturalism is vitally needed for a deeper understanding of pragmatism's ability to offer enriching perspectives on contemporary philosophy of science. The kind of non-reductive naturalism so often associated with pragmatism needs to be assessed for its plausibility, as does whether a pragmatist perspective on different human ways of conceiving of the world can mediate between different points of view, especially those of natural science and common sense"-- Publisher summary.

In recent work Huw Price has defended what he calls a global expressivist approach to understanding language and its relation to the physical world. Global expressivism rejects a representationalist picture of the language-world relation and thereby, by intention at least, also a certain metaphysical conception of what are commonly known as placement problems: how entities of the everyday, common sense world like mental states, meanings, moral values, modalities and so on fit into the natural world. Global expressivism upholds a commitment to substantive enquiry into the naturalistic basis of thought about the world, but pursues this in a pragmatist or non-representationalist ’key’, thereby rendering—as it sees things—traditional metaphysical questions otiose. I am in broad sympathy with many of Price’s arguments and ideas. However, I believe the specific sub-variety of non-representationalism he develops actually fails to secure the anti-metaphysical results he seeks. My arguments have their starting point in the Carnap-Quine debate. Given Price’s view of this, which I endorse, I think it can be made clear that Quine’s view, or something very close to it, presents us with a coherent example of a non-representationalist metaphysical placement project. Though one might reasonably doubt the rationality of or motivation for such a view, Price’s own strongly naturalistic assumptions, as these are evinced in his so-called ’subject’ naturalism, make that move dialectically unavailable to him. I end with a brief sketch of an alternative non-representationalist and anti-metaphysical position.

I seek to show that we do not need norms in a genuinely naturalistic epistemology. The argumentation is launched against a common conception of such norms as derived through a process of wide reflective equilibrium, where one aims to bring general normative statements into accord with concrete, possibly expert, intuitions about particular cases, taking simultaneously into account relevant scientific findings -- including facts about human psychological abilities -- and philosophical theories. According to this line, it is possible thus to arrive at genuine, general normative statements concerning how we should reason. I maintain that such statements are superfluous or illegitimate for several interlocking reasons. The central arguments are i) that certain norms simply repeat the content of descriptive statements which in any case would have to be taken account of in scientific reasoning; ii) if norms are merely meant to systematize an intuitive capacity for reasoning and forming beliefs, we can make do with honing that capacity; iii) there is no reason to regard principles in a psychological reasoning module as norms rather than simply prescursors of behaviour; iv) we cannot make sense of experts in relation to epistemic rationality; v) making play with the idea of purely philosophical constraints on theories of norms involves reneging on naturalism.

I focus on Fodor’s model of the relationship between special sciences and basic physics, and on a criticism of this model, that it implies that the causal stability of, e.g., the mental in its production of behaviour is nothing short of a miraculous coincidence. David Papineau and Graham Macdonaldendorse this criticism. But it is far less clear than they assume that Fodor’s picture indeed involves coincidences, which in any case their injection of a teleological supplement cannot explain. Papineau’s and Macdonald’s problem is subtly different from a similar one presented by Adrian Cussins. This is no more effective against Fodor’s picture, but the kind of account of the relation between the physical and the psychological which could constitute a solution to Cussins’ problem is one which, for independent reasons, a physicalist of Fodor’s stripe ought to provide.