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Mind, World and Value
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
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Naturalism is the dominant philosophy of the age. It might be characterized as the view that the only real facts are facts of natural science, or that only statements of natural science are really true. But perhaps this scientistic formulation underestimates the depth and everydayness of the dominance of naturalism. More informally, we might say that naturalism is the view that the world is a world of natural objects and natural phenomena, that the only properties of these objects are natural properties, and the relations between them are all natural relations – in short, there are only natural facts, natural truths.
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References
1 Kripke, S., Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), p. 37.Google Scholar
2 See, e.g., McDowell, J., Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 78–84.Google Scholar
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4 In this respect I am distancing myself from Kant, who held that there was a fundamental distinction between moral motivation and desire. It is unclear how Kant could accommodate the notion of what one should want.
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11 This notion of intrinsicness is here left unexplained. It needs to be explained as part of a fuller account of causation.
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17 A more direct argument against the causal account, on the ground that it is incompatible with freedom, is provided in my The Good and the True, chapter 8.
18 This conception is to be found in McDowell: see footnote 7 above.
19 We should therefore doubt the adequacy of counterfactual analyses of causation, if we accept that there are non-causal explanations. But this does not undermine the main purpose of counterfactual analyses, which is to distinguish between explanatory and non-explanatory relations in cases where causation is the only realistic candidate.
20 Although this conception of the fundamental task for human beings (or any cognitive creature) is widespread, we should note how contentious it is: it seems already to presuppose naturalism.
21 For a classic statement of a view which distinguishes between ‘broad’ and ‘narrow’ content, see McGinn, C., The Structure of Content, in Thought and Object, ed. Woodfield, A. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982)Google Scholar. For the view that thoughts are essentially individuated by universal features, see Blackburn, S., Spreading the Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), chapter 9.Google Scholar
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23 This is Strawson's view: see Mental Reality, p. 315 (but passim too).
24 Strawson seems to be tempted by this: see ibid., p. 303.
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