Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy (37 page)

Philonous inoculates us against this specious argument of
Moore's. It is we who accept the invitation to think of these worlds.
And we bring to them our own aesthetic responses, which no
doubt include a love of the countryside and a dislike of cinders and
garbage. But we haven't got behind those responses or put them
into abeyance as we respond to the imagined worlds. On the contrary, it is these very responses that we voice in our verdicts. All that
Moore really succeeds in showing is that we can deem things to be
beautiful regardless of whether we think they are actually seen, and
this does not refute the idealist or subjective view that beauty
nevertheless lies in the eye of the beholder.

I suspect most people find Moore's argument fishy, and thus far
they sympathize with Philonous. But then most people find Philonous fishy as well. If we want to reject Moore and Philonous together, we will need to work hard to find a stable place to stand. We
might think Kant points the way. Concede things like beauty and
secondary qualities to Philonous, but hold that the `eye of the beholder' is not quite so involved with more important categories of
thought, such as the notions of space, time, physical objects, the
self, causation. But in the next section we glance briefly at ways
even this promise of a synthesis runs into choppy water.

RULES, UNIVERSALS

The idealist tradition in philosophy stresses the inescapable and
vital place that the shape of our own minds plays in `constructing'
the world as we understand it. It can select different features shaping our minds. Berkeley and the empiricist tradition start with the
subjective nature of sense experience, particularly experience of
secondary qualities. It is the fact that they `lie in the eye of the beholder' that proves so bothersome.

At the present time, cultural and especially linguistic factors are
more prominent. We worry not so much about the subjectivity of
experience as the variations of culture. So, many contemporary
philosophers applaud a line of thought found in Wittgenstein: the
so-called rule-following considerations. Wittgenstein considers
the moment of understanding, when some concept is explained to
us, and we realize `Now I can go on' or `Now I know what is meant'.
We seem to have grasped a rule or principle that separates correct
application of a term from incorrect applications. This is a real feat.
Some people and animals are too dumb or different to catch on
(we have already met the example of the way in which dogs cannot
follow the activity of pointing, and incline to look at your finger in
stead). The way we perform that feat, and the fact that sufficiently
often we do so in just the same way is, as it were, a fact of natural
history. It makes communication and shared understanding possible. But it is not just a given, or to be taken for granted, that we all
do it in the same way, or in any one particular way. It requires that our minds are shaped the same way. But what shapes our minds
one way or another?

This is in fact the ancient topic, much pondered by Greek
philosophers, of universals. To understand things and describe
them requires using concepts that are rule-governed in the minimal way just described. But what is the `reality' behind these rules?
Three main positions are traditionally distinguished:

■ REALISM (sometimes PLATONISM).These rules have a
real, objective existence. They determine the proper application of concepts over past, present, future, and possible
instances. We grasp them by some mysterious act of apprehension, which cannot easily be understood in natural
terms.

■ CONCEPTUALISM. These rules are the creatures of the
mind. They are conjured into existence by our shared responses arising from our shared human natures, or perhaps our educated and culturally shaped natures. In this
way all concepts are `response dependent': artefacts of our
own dispositions to respond to things.

• NOMINALISM. There aren't really any rules at all. There
are just human beings with their dispositions to apply
words or withhold them. There is no real `correctness' or
`incorrectness' in this, although as so often people whose
applications diverge from those of the herd will find themselves being called incorrect.

It may help to think of an example, where each position might have
its attractions. Consider a rather doubtful concept, such as that of
`hysteria' or `neurasthenia: A realist, using the concept,.will suppose that there is here a real phenomenon, with real boundaries (some people who carry on are hysterics, and others not). In using
the term we `carve nature at the joints, to use a rather unpleasant
metaphor. A conceptualist will reject the metaphor. He may, however, embrace the concept of hysteria itself, supposing that it marks
a useful principle or category with which to draw the boundaries
around a particular kind of medical or psychological condition. It
classes together cases that strike us as similar, and that, at the end of
the day, is all that any concept does. Finally a nominalist says that
the word is as good as any other. People are disposed to use it; well
and good, for that is all there is to the use of any term at all.

Naturally these positions come in slightly different flavours, and
each has its apparent strengths and weaknesses. To the realist or
Platonist, the others open the door to the pit of idealism: the mind
constructing or making up its own reality (if hysteria is not a real
unified phenomenon, we have no business describing the world in
terms of it. We cannot get at objective truth that way). To both the
Platonist and the conceptualist, nominalism is completely untenable: a denial that meaning and concept-application, and in fact
thought at all, are real. It is a kind of `eliminativism' or denial of the
very act of thinking. No mind is just as good as a mind that simply
blurts out verbal responses to stimuli, with nothing governing
truth or correctness. But to the nominalist, Platonism is incredible,
and conceptualism simply embraces the rhetoric of rule-following
without delivering on the substance. For what is the difference between rules that are `constituted' by our dispositions or responses,
and rules that we make up as we go along? And what is the difference between those and no rules at all? A conceptualist, on this
view, is just a nominalist who is too cowardly to admit it.

It is said that the students of medieval Paris came to blows in the
streets over the question of universals. The stakes are high, for at
issue is our whole conception of our ability to describe the world
truly or falsely, and the objectivity of any opinions we frame to
ourselves. It is arguable that this is always the deepest, most profound, problem of philosophy. It structures Plato's (realist) reaction to the sophists (nominalists). What is often called
`postmodernism' is really just nominalism, colourfully presented
as the doctrine that there is nothing except texts. It is the variety of
nominalism represented in many modern humanities, paralysing
appeals to reason and truth. `Analytical' philosophy plays Plato to
its sophistry, trying to silence its siren appeals.

In recent years a kind of `naturalized' realism, avoiding the mysteries of Platonism, has seemed plausible to sonic philosophers.
According to this there really are properties that things have, quite
independently of whether we regard them one way or another. And
our minds are built in response to these properties. Evolution and
success shape us to be responsive to the real causal kinds that things
fall into. While conceptualists are right to stress the contingent
shape of our minds, they are wrong to forget that those minds do
not exist in a vacuum. Our minds are naturally shaped by the
causal structures of the world we inhabit. In favourable circumstances, we all `go on in the same way' because, in the context of the
world, that is the right way to go on. Such a naturalism might, for
instance, make contact with the sketch we gave of colour science in
Chapter 2. It would try to show that the way in which even secondary-quality classifications take place is far from arbitrary. And
if they regain some `realistic'status, others ought to follow suit.

This is a comfortable view, and it ties in nicely with the `natural
foundationalism' or evolutionarily inspired defence of harmony
between our minds and the world that we met at the end of Chapter L. We may indeed hope that it survives in the seas of thought I
have tried to stir up in this chapter. But it does require confidence
that our troubles are over, that the scientific or absolute image of
the world is comfortably in place alongside the manifest image. We
would need to believe, in effect, that Kant or a sucessor has successfully steered us between Philonous and Moore, or solved
Hume's problem with `the modern philosophy' without giving too
much to idealism. Not everyone is convinced of that.

So FAR WE HAVE BEEN concerned with our understanding of the
world. We have been concerned with the nature of things, and our
knowledge of them, and ways of reasoning about them. But much
of our reasoning is not so much theoretical, or concerned with how
the world is, as practical, or concerned with how to act in it. We
think about what to do, and muster considerations and arguments
in favour of one course or another. How are we to think about that?
Whole treatises and encyclopaedias are devoted to this subjectethics and moral philosophy form its core, although they do not
exhaust it, since practical reasonings are by no means exclusively
moral in nature. We have technical and aesthetic questions to address as well as moral problems. In this final chapter, l have no intention of covering the ground such treatises occupy. That cannot
he done in such a short space. But I think there exist some building
blocks of adequate thought in these areas, and I shall try to suggest
what these are.

REAL CONCERNS

Much practical thinking is technological in nature. We have a goal,
and our problem is how to meet it. We try to adapt means to ends,
with the ends given in advance. The end is set: we want to fix the refrigerator or grow flowers or build a bridge. Obviously we can be
more or less good at these things. There is no single `way of thinking' that enables us to achieve our goals across the board, any more
than the person who knows how to fix the refrigerator necessarily
knows how to grow the flowers or build the bridge. Acquiring the
necessary skills requires understanding the system in question,
and knowing which changes to effect, and how to effect them, in
order to deliver the desired end.

It is commonly said that our goals are fixed by our desires, so
that means-ends reasoning is a matter of efficiently satisfying our
desires. This is often true, at least as an approximation. But it can be
misleading. If desires are thought of as states of enthusiasm for an
end-things that put a gleam in our eye-then we often act because we have particular concerns, when desire is not the right
word. Here I am cutting the grass when I would like to be out sailing. Why? Not really because I desired to cut the grass. Perhaps I
hate it. But it was time to do it, or it had to be done. I am concerned
to get the grass cut. I set about adopting efficient means to that end.
Having a concern here means being moved by the thought that the
grass needs to he cut. I may think that it is my role to cut the grass.
Or, I may just think `It is time to do it, without self-consciously
thinking about my role as householder or whatever. Nevertheless, I typically recognize that someone else's grass needs cutting without being moved to do it myself. So it is my role as householder that
has made me especially sensitive to the thought that mygrass needs
cutting, even if I don't self-consciously think about that role.