Epistemology Culturalized

EPISTEMOLOGY CULTURALIZED

DIRK HARTMANN and RAINER LANGE

SUMMARY. The anti-metaphysical intentions of naturalism can be respected withoutabandoning the project of a normative epistemology. The central assumptions of naturalismimply that (1.) the distinction between action and behaviour is spurious, and (2.) epistemol-ogy cannot continue to be a normative project. Difficulties with the second implication havebeen adressed by Normative Naturalism, but without violating the naturalistic consensus,it can only appreciate means-end-rationality. However, this does not suffice to justify itsown implicit normative pretensions. According to our diagnosis, naturalism succumbs tothe lure of an absolute observer’s stance and thereby neglects the need for participation incommunal practice. By contrast, methodical culturalism ties down the concepts of episte-mology to the success of such practice. Only from this perspective, the normative force ofepistemology can be appreciated. Also, the mind-body problem loosens its hold and thedistinction between action and behaviour is reestablished. In the last section, the mutualrelation between philosophy and science is reconsidered.

Key words:agency, culturalism, epistemology, mind-body problem, naturalism, normativ-ity

In some quarters of contemporary philosophy, it seems to go without say-ing that for any subject x, a satisfactory philosophical account of x will be“naturalistic”, maybe even “thoroughly naturalistic”. Of course, it is up toanyone to tailor verbs suitable for acclamatory purposes to his own taste.Unfortunately, the recent history of self-styled naturalistic approaches intheoretical philosophy has shown that these are either deeply problematicfor reasons both internal and external or pivot on a reading of “naturalistic”so insubstantial as to render the label gratuitous. This is the dual thesiswe wish to detail and defend in the first two parts of our paper. Someof the arguments have been produced before, by philosophers who feltuneasy with the complacency which some naturalists display. However,we believe that our analysis of the situation sheds additional lights on itsdialectics and, in virtue of this, calls for the development and defence ofan alternative position, which we will call “methodical culturalism”1. Tothis we will turn in the third part of this paper.

Journal for General Philosophy of Science31: 75–107, 2000.© 2000Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

76 DIRK HARTMANN AND RAINER LANGE

1. ELEMENTS OF NATURALISM

1.1. Origins and history

Early in the 20th century, many philosophers who are rightly regarded asprecursors of what was to become analytical philosophy – most promi-nently members of the Vienna Circle – shared a commitment to the so-called scientific worldview. As one aspect of this commitment, they ac-cepted science as a model of knowledge and of rationality and, conse-quently, substituted philosophy of science for epistemology. A related as-pect was the fundamental role attributed to truth and the assertoric modeof speech within philosophy of language, which was central to the projectof philosophical analysis. As Wittgenstein noticed in theTractatus, con-ceiving of meaning in terms of truth conditions would not only have thedesirable consequence of curbing aspirations to metaphysical knowledge,but also the more ambivalent one of rendering philosophy as a wholemeaningless2. Wittgenstein bit the bullet and, in his later writings, devel-oped a radically new conception of philosophy according to which thereare no philosophical propositions but only therapies which are meant tohelp us refrain from making any supposedly “philosophical” claims. Car-nap and the philosophers of logical empiricism tried to distinguish differ-ent levels of speech and reserved the formal mode – in which the results oflinguistic analysis are stated – for the philosophers. Thereby, they wantedto retain the possibility of taking a critical stand on knowledge claims,scientific or other, and to conserve remnants at least of the old notion ofphilosophy as an independentarbiter scientorum.

That kind of motivation and the correspondent conception of philoso-phy was shared far beyond the inner circle of logical empiricism at the timewhen Quine exposed the famous “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, and it wasfelt to be under attack as well. If there is no distinction between analyticand synthetic truths but only grades of centrality within our knowledgesystem as a whole, and if there is no reductive analysis of scientific con-cepts or claims in terms of observation terms or sentences, respectively,then what is left for the philosophers to do? Nothing, or so it seemed.Therefore, Quine celebrated the end ofprima philosophiaand argued thatif the traditional questions of philosophy are meaningful at all, they have tobe recast in terms of the empirical sciences. With respect to epistemologythis reads as follows:

Epistemology, or something like it, simply falls into place as a chapter of psychology andhence of natural science. It studies a natural phenomenon, viz., a physical human subject.This human subject is accorded a certain experimentally controlled input – certain patterns

EPISTEMOLOGY CULTURALIZED 77

of irradiation in assorted frequencies, for instance – and in the fullness of time the subjectdelivers as output a description of the three-dimensional external world and its history.3

With hindsight, it is easy to spot analogies between Quine’s behaviourismand empiricist versions of foundationalism: for both, the acquisition ofknowledge by human subjects has to begin with some experiential inputand then work its way up to the more remote topics as are investigated bytheoretical science. They differ however on how this general picture is to besituated within the scientific worldview at large. For the logical empiricists,the project of reconstructing knowledge claims on the basis of sentenceswhich are somehow close to sense experience has to be justified prior toany empirical investigation. Otherwise, they believed, it would not fulfilits epistemological role. As we just have seen, Quine held epistemologyto fall into place within natural science as one of many subjects dealt withwithin an overall “naturalistic” worldview. Consequently, the central claimthat human subjects gather knowledge from the irritations of their surfacesis itself an integral part of an empirical theory, namely a psychological one.What kind of experience could speak for or against this theory within ourpresent scientific framework is another matter, but the essential differenceis clear enough.

Many philosophers accepted Quine’s criticism of logical empiricismbut parted company with him when they had to decide on a successorproject. Instead of joining the behaviorist camp, they turned to cognitivepsychology, neurophysiology, evolutionary biology, or social science. Irre-spective of this, they designated whatever they did as “naturalistic”, evenif only to indicate abstention from standard empiricist foundationalism.It is of some interest to note that at this point naturalism converged withsome descendants of the new historicism inspired by Thomas S. Kuhn andothers. It was taken to be a result of their historical studies that no universalscientific method had been followed by paradigmatic scientists of all agesand disciplines, especially not during its important, revolutionary periods.Any attempt to identify a set of formulaic, procedural rules which wouldsomehow embody the essence of science and its rationality would foreverbe in vain. The resultant anti-essentialistic mood spurned whatever aprior-ism had been left within the philosophy of science and opened the way forempirical study of the actual procedures followed by different scientists,using historical and sociological means.

Both movements combined to form what is now known as “post-positi-vistic” philosophy of science. More recent developments led to the emer-gence of the field of so-called science studies whose representatives (e.g.,Bruno Latour) proclaim the demise of whatever distinction there has for-merly been perceived to exist between philosophical, sociological and his-


torical studies of science, its practice and history. It seems almost as ifphilosophy has finally been put to rest by being reunited with the empiricaldisciplines.

1.2. Basic tenets of naturalized epistemology

In this paper, we will try to confront naturalism with an alternative thatmight appropriately be labelled “methodical culturalism”. For this purposewe need at least a broad definition of naturalism. Of course, the multiplic-ity and heterogeneity of self-styled naturalistic positions makes it almostimpossible to address all of them at once without charging each of themwith some claims its proponents would rather disavow. But it seems to usthat the following theses can justly be taken to be at the core of the matterand that, therefore, a philosopher who is not committed to any of them willat least have to give good reasons for his claim to the label “naturalist”.

One strand of contemporary naturalism reaches back into previous cen-turies and well beyond the analytic tradition4. Its ultimate goal is the uni-fication of ontology. Therefore, it attempts to cut down the apparent on-tological diversity of different modes of discourse by designating one ofthem as basic and either reducing or eliminating others. Most philosophersprobably would agree that someprima facienon-naturalistic domains canbe naturalized and that it is desirable to do so, but here we are concernedonly with generalized approaches which advocate a single ontology for allpurposes. Since this ontology is chosen for its “naturalness”, the motiva-tion for this could justly be stated, in ordinary language, as “everythingis natural”; it is often taken to be equivalent to “there is nothing super-natural”. This strand of the debate we will callontological naturalism. Itsstrength and scope depends, first, on its choice of a model ontology againstwhich others have to defend their respectability. Most contemporary vari-ants of this position leave it to physics to decide on this question and aretherefore also labelled “ontological physicalism”. It remains to be seenwhether this choice can be justified solely by reference to the main aimof ontological naturalism, which is to get rid of superabundant elementsin our ontology including, e.g., angels, ghosts, or theélan vital. We willreturn to this question below. For the moment, it has to be noted that onto-logical naturalism has a number of difficulties beyond the one concerningthe justification of its positive choice of ontology. First of all, ontologicalclaims have themselves been criticised as being “metaphysical”. Here theCarnapian move to reinterpret questions of ontology as questions of lan-guage can help. Now if we judge ontological naturalism in its semanticalreformulations, what precisely it amounts to depends on whether we aretalking about an eliminative, reductive, or non-reductive project.


If we respect the pragmatist anti-metaphysical adage that there is nodifference which does not make a difference, it seems that ontologicalnaturalism is significant inasmuch as it legislates against some specific“non-naturalistic” modes of speech or of inquiry. By this criterion, it iseasy to establish the significance of eliminative projects and, in a sense,also of reductive ones which manage to render some non-naturalistic do-mains redundant even if they do not find fault with the correspondingvocabularyper se. Things are a bit more complicated in fact for we haveto distinguish between ontological and pragmatic redundancy which willusually not coincide. Where some reduced vocabulary is held to be indis-pensable for scientific-pragmatic reasons, the ontological claim that thereferents of its terms are redundant will probably fail by the pragmatistcriterion. The same is true of non-reductive ontological naturalism whichexplicitly denies any consequences on the object level of speech.

It would take more space to disentangle these matters than we can sparehere. Suffice it to say that with the help of the pragmatist criterion whichwe take many naturalists, especially those of Deweyan faith, to share, wewill concentrate our discussion on naturalistic positions which do have atleast semantic consequences. These we believe to merit discussion regard-less of their ontological background. In fact, we will use this same criterionto push our definition of naturalism one step further. It is generally agreedthat scientific knowledge is linguistic, i.e. capable at least in principle ofexplicit expression. Therefore a naturalistic reduction of terminology willalso change our appreciation of certain forms of knowledge, or what isusually taken to be knowledge. This leads us to consideration of a posi-tion which has both epistemic and methodological components and can beformulated as follows:

Everything can be subjected to description and explanation within a unified methodologicalframework broadly conceived as scientific, including humans, their manifest behaviour andtheir capacities.

For the sake of brevity we will call this positionmethodological natu-ralism. Its impact depends on what precisely “scientific” is meant to ex-clude. Quine’s behaviorism represents the most restrictive version whichin virtue of its commitment to a concept of observation sentences seemsto be, broadly speaking, empiricist. More liberal alternatives would goall the way “up” to include the social sciences, even if no reduction oftheir entities succeeds. The question remains: Which social sciences arenaturalistically unobjectionable? The strictly scientistic answer would be,only those modelled after the natural sciences with respect to their method,be it hypothetico-deductive or whatever. Of this position, the “strong pro-gramme” of Edinburgh sociology of scientific knowledge is a well-known


instance. Other interpretations integrate ethnomethodology and its proce-dure of participant observation into a sociology of scientific knowledgesupposed to be a realisation of naturalistic epistemology.

However, whether it is correct to call ethnomethodological investiga-tions “naturalistic” can be doubted. Of course this discipline is an attemptto acquire knowledge of humans, their manifest behaviour and their ca-pacities through following a special epistemic method. But does this jus-tify, from a naturalist’s point of view, the inclusion of ethnomethodologyamong the scientific subjects which define its scope? Obviously, natural-ism is vacuous if it embraces just about any discipline which is beingtaught at university faculties or claims the laudatory label “scientific” foritself – surely, a naturalist would not want to promote traditional philos-ophy with its peculiar knowledge claims? If it does not want to fail thepragmatist criterion on methodological ground, naturalism has to take astand on this question. Its answer will most likely be something in thisvein:

Nothing can be known about a human being if it cannot be known by a scientist whoadheres to the observational and experimental methods typical of the natural sciences andthereby manages to establish natural laws under which the respective phenomena can besubsumed.

Now this is a strong and provocative thesis to discuss – so strong in-deed that some self-styled naturalists will probably not subscribe to it.But this shall not deter us from taking a closer look at the consequencesof such a“scientistically purified” version of methodological naturalism.Most prominent among these seems to be that since everything that canbe known, whether about human beings or other subjects, is scientificknowledge, answers to normative questions – questions concerning thejustification of values, norms, or goals – are not in any sense of the wordpart of what we might “know” about ourselves. This seems trivial becauseof the Humean rule that no “ought” can ever be derived from an “is”,which is to say that the justification of goals, norms, or rules cannot getoff the ground solely by means of factual inquiry but always has to takeother goals, norms, or rules for granted. More exactly, normative contentis neither derivable from factual content nor, on the other hand, completelyindependent from it. The expulsion of normative questions from naturalismtakes one further premise, namely, that answers to them do neverthelessaspire to the same kind of validity as does empirical knowledge proper.Most naturalists do seem to believe that if the answer to a specific questionis “objective”, it constitutes knowledge and in virtue of this competes withempirical knowledge, of which science is the prime source; and if it is notobjective, it is “merely subjective”, in other words, it is idle talk. In short,


because normative claims do not constitute knowledge, they do not admitof rational solution.

One consequence of this is that epistemology, which is one focus ofthe naturalization debate, cannot be a normative project anymore. Indeed,sometimes naturalism has been defined by its opposition to normative epis-temology or philosophy of science, especially if the latter is taken to pro-pound, as the logical empiricists or the critical rationalists did, norms whichanyone aspiring to be a “scientist” allegedly has to respect. However, morerecently many philosophers of naturalist inclinations have denied that thereis such a fundamental opposition. They argue that even after its natural-ization, epistemology still is a normative discipline – some even agreewith their critics5 that otherwise it would not be epistemology anymore– and that, therefore, these worries lack substance. For instance, while inA.I. Goldman’s original paper on a causal theory of knowing6 normativeconcepts are only reluctantly made use of, later he sketches a project whichis explicitly meant to be normative (or, synonymously, regulative)7. Nev-ertheless he takes himself to be a naturalist, though not a Quinian one.It is instructive to see how normativity is believed to fit into a frame-work of naturalized epistemology. A prominent advocate of a positioncalled “normative naturalism” is Larry Laudan8. For him, the object ofphilosophy of science is to establish a set of methodological rules whichare recommendable for the scientists’ use. What can a philosopher do torecommend such a set of rules? According to Laudan, he subjects anyproposed “axiology” to two constraints: consistency and realizability bygiven means. The former constraint requires conceptual clarification, thelatter empirical investigation which follows scientific methods proper. Ofcourse, conceptual clarification is emphatically not something Quine orany of his more literalistic followers would see as a naturalist’s business,concepts being intensional objects and therefore rather un-natural. Of morerelevance to our present subject, however, is the second topic. In essence,it means that normative naturalism deals with normative questions onlyinasmuch as they ask for the evaluation of rules relative to given aims. Ofcourse, it is an important empirical question whether someone’s aims arerealisable at all, and surely a negative answer with respect to one of themwould make it very hard indeed to justify pursuing such an aim any fur-ther. Likewise, we would of course not recommend to let one’s actions beguided by rules which we know do not help to further realisation of theseaims, given these are deemed worth pursuing. But there’s the rub:giventhese are deemed worth pursuing. Do we really want to accept certain aimsas given to us, subject to criticism only with respect to their realizability? Itseems that normative naturalism, by restricting the evaluative use of reason


to means-end-rationality, will force this “scientistic” consequence on us, aconsequence for which Habermas once coined the phrase “positivisticallytruncated reason”9. Lest anyone supposes that this fails to engage withnormative naturalism as it is practised, it has to be noted that similar con-clusions have been drawn not only by Laudan, but also by H. I. Brown10

and R. N. Giere11, both of which sympathise with normative naturalism.The latter even defines as naturalistic any philosophy which renounces thetraditional quest for what he calls a categorical conception of rationality.

In fact it is only by restricting normative discourse to the conditionalevaluation of aims and rules that normative naturalism manages not tooffend against the naturalist mainstream consensus. Remember that nat-uralists and historicists jointly opposed traditional philosophy because itallegedly claimed primacy over the empirical sciences in virtue of its ac-cess toa priori truths, a primacy which would give it licence to interferewith science “from outside” and be an independent judge of its achieve-ments. Since no alternative procedure for evaluating proposed goals oraims seems to be known to naturalists, any attempt to justify them withoutempirical investigation will always be perceived as a relapse into the olddays when philosophers groped for thea priori. Normative naturalism triesto correct scientific procedure from within and thereby to abstain from thatkind of hubris.

Enough has been said about methodological naturalism’s opposition tonormative discourse for the time being. A different though related topicis its stand on the concept of action. Non-naturalistic philosophers sharewith most people’s pre-philosophical intuition the belief that there is afundamental distinction between those episodes in our life which we callactions and, on the other hand, those events which are behaviour of akind with that of brutes or merely accidental movements of our limbs,bodily processes etc. By way of explication the hallmark of this distinctionis that actions are supposed to have a special relation to the individualperforming them: an action is something he does, his behaviour happensto him. With respect to actions, it makes sense to ask for reasons; withrespect to behaviour, not. In fact, the whole mentalistic idiom which isso deeply mistrusted by naturalists in the philosophy of mind pivots onthat concept, and indeed the distinctions between agency and behaviour,between reasons and causes must collapse on a methodologically naturalistaccount. This is so because, if an event in the life of a human being can besubsumed under natural laws and thereby fully explained, non-naturaliststake this to exclude ascription of this event to a person as his action, witnessthe use of psychological evidence in court. So the thesis that everythingcan be described and explained by the sciences, which implies that it can


be subsumed under natural laws, seems to say that ascriptions of actionsare spurious12. Conversely, agency ascriptions seem to presuppose thatthe respective events which, as probably nobody denies, cannot take placewith no concomitant physical changes13 at all, are not fully explicable inscientific terms. We will return to this question below.

The connection between the issues of normativity and of agency is easyto see. Actions are those events in the life of a human being which therecan be reasons for; they are what makes man a rational animal. But to saythat some x constitutes a reason for doing y is to evaluate y’s relation tox in the light of a concept of rationality, and this evaluation is normativeeven if it refers only to means-end-rationality without making provisionfor the justification of ends. Empirical investigation, on the other hand,can at best disclose causal relations between events. Causal relations arenot normative even if causal knowledge can be required for evaluating aparticular event relative to certain goals, norms, or rules. To adduce thecauses of an event can never justify it but, at best, exculpate the individualsinvolved. If a fully causal explanation of an event is available, reasons forthe same event cannot be given nor criticised; it is exempt from normativeevaluation.

1.3. Anti-metaphysical intentions

One central motivation which naturalistic philosophers share with theirlogical empiricist precursors is the criticism of and opposition to “meta-physics”. The symptoms of this antipathy are as varied as are the projectswhich could be called, more or less adequately, metaphysical. As has al-ready been mentioned, the original motivation for ontological naturalismwas to get rid of supernatural entities, and in this respect contemporarynaturalism is indeed continuous with views of prominent 19th centuryscientists. On the other hand, to object against the invocation of angels,ghosts and immaterial properties for explanatory purposes nowadays isnot the exclusive prerogative of naturalism, unless one is content with avery weak, almost all-embracing conception of that position. As we havealready noted, an interestingly strong version of naturalism requires thatwe abandon mentalistic talk and the embedded normative concepts. Canwe understand this as realising anti-metaphysical intentions as well?

Once again, it is much easier to grasp what is at issue if one focuses onmethodological naturalism. What is unsettling about metaphysical entitiesis that they are supposed to interfere with “ordinary” objects in a waywhich by definition cannot be accounted for within our scientific world-view. Methodologically speaking, this means that there are knowledgeclaims which purport to be exempt from control and criticism by the usual


methods of the empirical sciences but which nevertheless conflict withtheir results. This conflict results from the universality of the laws whichthe sciences establish; events which involve objects within their domainbut cannot be explained are taken to be potential falsifying instances. Ac-cording to naturalism, the same worry extends to claims involving agencyand the related concepts. In the next section, we will try to show that thisrests on a mistaken conception of science, more specifically, of scientificlaws.

A similar connection can also be shown to hold between anti-metaphy-sical intentions and naturalistic doubts about the validity of normativearguments in philosophy or elsewhere. For, as has already been noted,naturalists generally do seem to believe that any attempt to justify a cat-egorical norm without recourse to empirical methods is predicated on theassumption that we have access toa priori knowledge. Quine is famous forhaving argued that even the analytic, which as the last respectable domainof a priori knowledge had withstood the empiricists’ attacks, cannot in anon-arbitrary manner be separated from synthetic (i.e., on an empiricistaccount, empirical) truths. It only compounds the crime against natural-istic consensus that norms must have some non-tautologous propositionalcontent, i.e. they must be synthetic. However, we will argue below thatthere is a way to argue for or against norms which is unobjectionable byanti-metaphysical standards. It just is not true that “a priori” argumentsare arguments which invoke supernatural human capacities in order to “getsomething from nothing”.

2. WHY NOT TO BE A NATURALIST

2.1. The concepts of agency and normativity are indispensable

Against naturalism, many philosophers have raised the objection that em-pirical disciplines like, e.g., cognitive psychology simply cannot be heir toepistemology because they do not deal with the same kind of questions,namely, questions to do with the justification of knowledge; epistemology,they say, is essentiallyde jure14. And indeed there is something deeplyunsatisfactory about Quine’s rhetorical question: Why not settle for psy-chology? Yes, why not do something else instead? It seems that, once sucha kind of move is permitted, we might as well call stamp collecting orparagliding “epistemology”. And yet those debates concerning who hasa right to which label have not proved very productive. The naturalists’anti-essentialism has allowed them to turn a deaf ear on complaints in this


regard; and normative naturalists have apparently managed to avert thesequestions altogether.

But can naturalism really afford to ignore criticisms which point outan unsatisfied need for normative argumentation? Norms, rules, and pre-scriptions lurk everywhere in scientific practice. For example, scientistsgenerally agree that an experiment which consistently fails to be repro-duced (whatever that means exactly) counts as a failure. Its results areinvalid. So scientists in the laboratory implicitly acknowledge the normthat experimental results ought to be reproducible. Moreover, they do notseem to believe that this is only a conditional norm which could be sus-pended in the light of further evidence. On the contrary, the results of asingle experiment which nobody has been able to reproduce so far will onlybe accepted if it can be explained why we have actually failed to reproduceit although itis reproducible in principle. Now if a naturalist wants to keephis position in harmony with actual scientific practice, he has to somehowmake sense of these normative aspects. But he cannot simply endorse thembecause this would be inconsistent with the above definition of naturalismas an essentially non-normative or at best conditionally normative project.Alternatively, he has to argue that those regulations have to be banishedfrom science proper. This would itself amount to a strong prescriptiveinterference with science and, therefore, clash with the naturalistic ethos,too.

Moreover, naturalistic philosophers do themselves presuppose certainulterior ends with respect to which scientific method and, therefore, theirown procedure only is justifiable. Thus Goldman’s epistemology takes itfor granted that scientists seek the truth. Worse even, his concept of truthseems to be metaphysical and, consequently, naturalistically disrespecta-ble15. Giere says that it is an empirical problem to find out which aimsscientists generally do pursue. Of course it is; but what he means to implyis that we ought to take our findings from these studies and accept themas the aims of science. Note the ought: you can commit the traditionalnaturalistic fallacy as cheerfully as you like – as Laudan says16, “[W]here’sthe fun in being a naturalist, if one is not thereby licensed to commit thenaturalistic fallacy?” –, there is no hiding the fact that both the advice tocommit it and the conclusion which it is supposed to support still amount to(intended) prescriptions on your part. Equally strong and unacknowledgednormative presuppositions can be revealed by an analysis of the differentapproaches in the sociology of scientific knowledge17 which some say isthe most promising attempt to naturalize epistemology. What are we tomake of this?


The naturalist’ scepticism toward claims to absolute justification ofgoals and norms rests on a general conception of what it means to justifysome proposal, according to which the very idea of an absolute justi-fication is difficult to make sense of. More specifically, it seems to bea consequence of the Humean rule, already referred to above, that onecannot justify any prescriptions without having some normative basis tostart from. So far, naturalists are right: it is only relations between aims,conflicting or not, and potential courses of action that we can reasonablydiscourse about. But then the naturalistic proscription against “categoricalrationality” seems to backfire because it helps to exempt some aims orcategorical norms from criticism. In the end, it amounts to the injunctionthat justification of scientific aims is to be sought for only within science.But why should this be? Granted that questions of realizability are im-portant in choosing our aims, and granted that science has proved to bethe best way to answer questions of realizability, there is still more tosay about aims which, while not being scientific, nevertheless does notaspire to “absolute” validity. First of all, it is not at all clear why ourextra-scientific preferences and values should not play part in justifyingaims of science. On the contrary, the fact that all of us participate in aneveryday life which, while impregnated everywhere with the products oftechno-scientific success, admits of description and regulation in fully non-scientific terms18, suggests that the contributions of science to this life playan important role in our choice of subjects and methods. Therefore, thevery least that has to be demanded of the naturalistic answers to normativequestions is that their scope is broadened to include not only normative in-junctions by scientists but to put them in context with society at large. Eventhen, empirical investigation of means-ends-relations will not suffice. Theimportance of conceptual clarification has already been mentioned. Butequally important are pragmatic aspects of actions. Of special importanceis the constant threat of what has been called a performative inconsis-tency between avowed aims and actual conduct which does not amountto explicit verbal self-contradiction. An example will help to clarify thisconcept. Let us suppose someone who professes allegiance to egalitariandemocracy but, on the occasion of elections, actively supports measures toprevent socialists and the unemployed from voting. We would not normallyreinterpret his utterances in a way suitable to alleviate the tension if thiswould mean to ascribe very idiosyncratic meanings to his words. Rather, hewould be accused of a performative inconsistency which, unless reconciledby some additional explanations of his, would make us doubt his sincerity.Pragmatic considerations of this kind do also play a role in the discussion


of scientific norms and rules and their consistency with our extrascientificconduct.

The concept of performative inconsistency is central to an even strongeranti-naturalistic position according to which normativity is constitutiveof agency. Roughly, the argument goes like this. To assert a propositionsincerely means to endorse its content as true. This in turn can only beunderstood in terms of justifiability in principle within some ideal com-munity of discourse. But both the ideal community and justifiability inprinciple are essentially normative concepts. So, in virtue of its embed-ding in discourse, every assertion, even if it does not explicitly deal withnormative matters, presupposes a consensus on certain aims and norms.The asserted claim can be justifiable only if these hidden presumptions arejustifiable, rather than arbitrary themselves. Therefore, to assert that hereis no (rational) solution to normative questions engenders performativeinconsistency. And since this inconsistency spreads to all reasons given bythe prospective naturalist for his actions, it deprives him of the possibilityto conceive himself as a rational agent – i.e., an agent whose conduct isresponsive to reason. According to this kind of position, exemplified indifferent forms by (certain time-slices of) Apel, Habermas, and Putnam,agency and normativity are inseparable. It will therefore only work as anargument against naturalism if we manage to prove the concept of agencyindispensable. To this problem we will now turn our attention.

As we have noted above, according to methodological naturalism every-thing a human being is, does, or is capable of, can be described and ex-plained by subsumtion under natural laws. These laws are established bythe behavioural sciences. Now what does it mean to establish natural lawsand use them in explanations? Philosophers in the analytical tradition havetried in vain to answer this question solely with reference to the logi-cal form of the propositions which state prospective laws. Some of theirresults have become widely accepted as necessary conditions for lawlike-ness. However, for a proposition of appropriate logical form to be a candi-date law, something more is needed. The inductive practices of scientistsrequire that laws are supported by their instances and, in turn, supporthypothetical conditionals themselves. Numerous counterexamples of sub-junctive statements which despite their universal validity fail these criteriaand are therefore called “accidental” truths have been discussed in theliterature. The general conclusion to be drawn from this is that lawlike-ness cannot be guaranteed by logical form alone. For most sciences, thesuccessful realisation of reproducible experiments counts as the best sup-port a law can receive. Now to perform an experiment consists in, roughlyspeaking, the preparation of a particular kind of situation, often including


the assembly of some apparatus, the start of the experiment, waiting forsome process to take its course, and, finally, reading off the result, usuallyby means of measuring instruments. In this scheme the lawlikeness of uni-versal conditionals translates into the reproducibility of results by meansof repeated realisation of experimental situations and start conditions.

Very roughly speaking, therefore, an event can be explained scientifical-ly19 if it is of a kind with the result of a reproducible experiment20; theexplanation then adduces established laws and antecedent conditions of akind with the starting conditions of the experiment. Now the start of anexperiment is an event which cannot itself be technically reproduced in thesame sense as its result can be because for the result to be reproducible,it is required that we can produce it by means of starting a similar ex-periment again. The reproduction of the start would make it the result ofanother experiment which in turn has to be started somehow. So, apartfrom the preparation of the requisite apparatus, the start of an experimentis an element which essentially involves agency. This argument amountsto a reductio of the conception of a behavioural science which explains“everything” by subsumtion under natural laws.

As we have seen, the typical worry of naturalists with respect to the con-cept of agency is that it purportedly implies that “actions are not caused”and, therefore, have to be viewed as “miracles” from a naturalist point ofview. The reason for this is that events which cannot be fully explainedby subsumtion under laws of succession are assumed to violate the princi-ple of causality. This principle states that for every event there is a causewhich “necessitates” its occurrence. But how can we make sense of thisrelation of “necessitation”? Only by the assumption that the cause is astate of affairs from which the event in question follows according to somenatural law. Now whether we know this law or not, it would certainly inprinciple be possible to explain the event by adducing this law plus thepostulated cause. So the principle of causality implies that every event canbe explained by subsumtion under natural laws.

Still we have to ask, what is so bad about events which are not caused,why are they regarded as “miracles” on a naturalist account? Apparently,all hinges on the acceptance of the principle of causality and a concomi-tant ban on any discourse not capable of rendering in the cause-effect-terminology. Relative to this restriction, an event which does not admit ofcausal explanation can indeed only be viewed as a freak of nature, and ifthere is supposed to be a whole class of such events, it will be a class ofmiracles. By contrast, in ordinary talk actions are not micaculous preciselybecause we can give reasons for them. The naturalist’s worries result fromthe unrestricted scope which he imputes on the principle of causality.


So the next question to ask is, what is the status of the principle? Is it auniversally valid proposition, that is to say, is it just a natural law of highgenerality? A little reflection proves that this cannot be so. On any extantphilosophical account, a natural law must admit of empirical test. But whatcould an empirical test of the principle of causality be? To answer thisquestion, we must ask, what role does causality play in the experimentaltest of natural laws? A typical answer would be that an experiment isreproducible if all causally relevant factors are controlled. Methodically,however, things are the other way around: an event is a causally relevantfactor if it disturbs the reproduction of experimental results. The exper-imenters’ work largely consists in establishing reproducible experimentsby identifying and controlling all these factors. But why is it that therealways is some factor to blame the difference between successful attemptsat reproduction and failed ones on? This is where the principle of causalitycomes in. In experimental terms, it says that a difference in outcomeisalwaysdue to some causal interference with the experiment, which is thencalled a disturbance. So, whether they explicitly acknowledge it or not,in striving for reproducible experiments scientists act on the principle ofcausality. If the results of an experiment’s reproductions were to vary onsuccessive days, experimenters would always say that this proves the ex-perimental conditions to vary in an unsystematic manner, calling for bettertechnical control, simply because it is a necessary condition of successfulexperimentation that no such variation occur. So, no amount of variationcould count as empirical disproof of the principle of causality.

At this point one might be tempted to say that while the principle ofcausality cannot be empirically proven to be universally valid, its truth isat least rendered highly probable by the success of science. But as longas no concept of inductive probability suitable for the valuation of generalstatements like the principle of causality is on offer, this statement canserve appellative functions at best. Reformulating the “high probability”-claim in terms of the results of conventional statistical testing does notmake things any better. “Given the null hypothesis, that the principle isfalse, the probability of achieving the scientific success we enjoy so farwould have been so low, that the null hypothesis has to be rejected in favourof the principle of causality.” We do not expect that anyone would seriouslymaintain that he can make sense of that.

Now if the principle of causality does not admit of empirical test, toclaim that it is a law of nature amounts to nothing less then metaphysicspure and simple. One could try to save the principle by taking refugeto a well-known transcendental argument stating that the validity of theprinciple is a condition of the possibility of experimental science. But


this thesis is false, again. For experimental science to be possible, nothingmore is needed than that there are some domains where causal connectionsbetween types of events can be established experimentally.

Alternatively, one could regard the principle as a methodological normwhich guides the establishing of laws by the experimental sciences. Thisdoes not imply that there can be no events which violate against it. Rather,the norm delimits the domain of the experimental sciences, and while thisdomain is constantly and monotonously growing, there is no reason tosuppose that one day “everything” will have been subjected to it. Afterall, the world does not seem to be finite in any humanly comprehensiblesense. So to object against the distinction between agency and behaviouron ground of causal completeness claims is to hypostatize ana priori norm– surely something a naturalist should normally shy away from.

As a concluding remark to this section let us add that in the behaviouralsciences, the preparation of an experiment usually includes the instructionof test persons; only with their co-operation does an experiment get offthe ground. This co-operation cannot be enforced technically (althoughof course power in the sense of institutional pressure, authority or moneycan be conducive to achieving it). Of course, laws concerning the course ofactions can be established, only the execution of actions is itself always oneof the antecedent conditions in an explanation, not part of the explanan-dum. So, what is physically the same course of events can be analysedinto a component of agency which is necessary for its getting started atall, and a behavioural component which can be subjected to control by theexperimenter and, therefore, potentially subsumed under natural laws.

2.2. What went wrong with naturalism

Contrary to avowed intentions, naturalists have left the boundary betweenphilosophy and the empirical sciences intact. For instance, it is still quiteeasy to spot the difference between a philosophical journal and, say, apsychological one even without reading titles. This situation calls for di-agnosis.

A common objection against the verifiability theory of meaning, whichwas central to the realisation of the logical empiricists’ anti-metaphysicalintentions, was to point out that the verifiability theory was not meaningfulby its own standards and, therefore, inconsistent. Similar problems arisefrom self-application of methodological naturalism. For, if the principleof purified methodological naturalism formulated in section 1.2 were anempirical generalisation established by some natural science, what are weto make of potential falsifiers, of instances like someone’s claim that heknowsthat he has done x for such-and-such reason? Of course, on a re-


ductive account naturalists do not have to say that this is false; rather, theywould reinterpret his claim as being about some neurophysiological occur-rences in his brain. But then his self-conception, his own interpretation ofwhat he has been doing, will most likely turn out to be in conflict with whatthe naturalist says. So, at one point or another, methodological naturalismwill clash with some very common conceptions of knowledge. Now whydo naturalists not count these as potentially falsifying instances for theirown position? Because methodological naturalism is not an empiricallytestable position at all but rather an attempt to regulate our discourse aboutknowledge and, therefore, is an excellent example of a claim which doesnot admit of solution by the methods of the sciences, natural or morebroadly conceived.

Instead of resting content with exhibiting such inconsistency in method-ological naturalism, we would like to push our analysis one step further.The scientist’s approach to the subject of interest is external; he observesand manipulates and, thereby, literally “objectifies” it. By contrast, in every-day contexts we are immersed in a community of persons with whom wecommunicate and co-operate. For this it is required that we do not objec-tify them but rather approach them as our equals. Terminologically, wewould like to contrast these two points of view as the observer’s stanceversusthe participant’s stance. Since rationality seems to be on the sideof “objective” knowledge, some people believe that a generalisation of theobserver’s point of view would be most reasonable. Is it not this what iscalled for when we ask of people to “transcend their subjectivity”? But thisis not so; in morality, we call such generalisation of an observer’s positioncynicism; far from being particularly rational, a person who is unable toengage with others as her equals but consistently treats them as objectsmight even be judged to be a sociopath. And in epistemology, it seems thatmethodological naturalism surrenders to an analogous kind of fallaciousreduction. By restricting the scope of knowledge claims to what can beempirically tested, it elevates the observer’s stance to the detriment of theparticipant’s. In doing so it ignores the fact that, to be a scientist, one hasto participate in the practice of the scientific community, and in this onecan only succeed if one sincerely engages with the normative regulationswhich are constitutive of this practice. Since the observer’s stance and theparticipant’s stance are in this way mutually dependent, any attempt to takean absolute observer’s point of view spells performative inconsistency. Ofcourse, for rational justification it is required that we suspend judgementand distance ourselves from the immediacy of present action. While thiscan sometimes be achieved by means of a scientific redescription of ourpractices, it only supplements the reflexive criticism of one’s practice from


a participant’s point of view. To explicate these remarks, we now have toturn to a brief exposition of our own conception of theoretical philosophy.

3. METHODICAL CULTURALISM : AN ALTERNATIVE PROJECT AND

SOME OF ITS PHILOSOPHICAL CONSEQUENCES

3.1. A brief sketch of culturalized epistemology

In the last major part of our article we will present an alternative projectwhich we will call “culturalism”. The word “culturalism” is obviously in-tended to contrast the position sharply with naturalism. On the other handthe term also suggests that the two positions are in some sense analogous.

And there is indeed an analogy: the project of culturalism just likethat of naturalism strives for a non-metaphysical epistemology. Taking thisanti-metaphysical motivation for serious, the position should of course turnout to be not an “ontological” but a “methodical” culturalism. Methodicalculturalism21 tries to achieve this aim by “culturalizing” epistemology.Our major task in this section will be to give an explication of what thatenterprise amounts to.

The starting point for the culturalist’s argumentation is the fact that allpractices which seek to produce knowledge – even the naturalist’s cher-ished natural sciences – are part of human culture and therefore, withrespect to their claim to knowledge, bound to culture-immanent norms ofrationality. This being bound to culture-immanent norms even holds forthe meanings of all terms used to formulate knowledge-claims. So, obvi-ously, the first-person-view cannot be accorded epistemological primacybecause this would immediately engender total relativism. But neither canthe observer’s stance, because every knowledge-claim raised from the ob-server’s stance can only be justified by taking recourse to the norms ofthe language-community the observer is a member of. Alas, the view ofan “absolute” observer (i.e. absolute from all culture-immanent norms andall language-communities) cannot be taken without ceasing to speak (orbecoming performatively inconsistent).

Instead, our approach to epistemology starts from the usually neglected“we-perspective” of joint action which becomes practice by institutional-ization and culture by tradition. As we already mentioned above, we callthis perspective the “participant’s view”.

At this point the inevitable question arises whether culturalism willend up in cultural relativism. After all, don’t different societies establishdifferent practices and therefore different cultures with different norms ofrationality? Fortunately, the mud-puddle of utter relativism can be avoided


here: for in the success and failure of actions we can find a semanticallyconstitutive criterion for distinguishing truth and error which is not whollydiscourse-dependent. To admit that there is indeed such an extra-discursiveelement of truth is the only concession one has to make to realism – butit already suffices for the refutation of epistemological relativism. In factrealism always gains intuitive plausibility when rival positions seem tosuggest that one can tell truth from error just by talking, comparing sen-tences and obeying some so-called principles of discourse. By the way:herein lies one of the main differences between methodical culturalismand the otherwise related culturalism of the (second, or late) Frankfurtschool. The latter has indisputably earned considerable merits throughits theory of discourse, but in the end its consensus-theory of truth over-stated the aspect of ideal discourse and neglected the aspect of successfulnon-linguistic practice. In the view of methodical culturalism however, anadequate epistemology demands for a combination of principles of rationalachievement of consensus with the fundamental insights of pragmatism(and of phenomenology – we will explain that in the next section).

With reference to the discourse-independent criterion of the success ofaction, claims regarding means-ends relations can be maintained intercultu-rally22 – there is no more quibbling when our bronze-made swords breakto pieces on the impact of the iron swords our foes brought with them. Sowithout recourse to a ready-made reality, methodical culturalism avoidsrelativistic arbitrariness by borrowing from pragmatism: “Objective real-ity” is constituted by successful practice.

At this point of argumentation, realism usually has its one last shot:success and failure of human agency, the realist claims, is to be explainedby the assumption that the world is just the way it is described by truescientific theories. Here on the one hand the culturalist agrees; one canindeed give an account of success and failure which often can be sys-tematised within scientific theories. But on the other hand he will replythat to “meta-explain” the successful theoretical explanation and guidanceof action by positing a reality which “really is” just as described by thetheories is nothing but a pseudo-account. To explain the success of actionby referring to “reality”, one would need an action-independent accessto it which is not available. So, on the contrary, the validity of theoriesdepends on the degree of support they can give to the success of (domain-specific) actions. An optical theory for instance, on the basis of which wecan produce better telescopes, is always to be preferred to a rival theoryacting on which produces poor results, no matter what internal virtues therival theory may have. Success of action establishes theoretical reality, andnot the other way around.


Now, at the end of this paragraph, we can tell what is meant by “cultur-alization of epistemology”: Whereas, according to the program of natural-ization, normative epistemology had to be replaced by a causal explanationof knowledge-formation, culturalization requires the concepts of norma-tive epistemology to be systematically tied down to the success of jointpractice which can be appreciated only from the participant’s stance.

3.2. Practice, science, and the constitution of reality

As we said above, our epistemological starting point is that humans co-operate with other humans. More important than singular events involvingjoint action (the wrapping of the “Reichstag”, the French revolution) arejoint activities which are executed regularly, governed by rules and notdependent on the participation of particular individuals – activities whichwe will call “practices”. As examples consider the practice of playingchess, the practice of lens-polishing, the practice of treating phobias bybehaviour therapy and the practice of legislation. In the following, we firstwant to analyse the notion of “practice” somewhat more in detail.

First of all, it is easy to see that although some practices – like thepractice of chess-playing – are usually executed for the sake of nothingbut the fun of it, more commonly the execution of practices serves tofurther certain goals. We call these goals the “practice-guiding interests”:lens-polishing helps us, among other things, to produce glasses for therestoration of impaired eyesight, behaviour therapy helps to heal phobias,legislation is for securing a harmonious social life and so on.

Among the practices with practice-guiding interests are many which,like behaviour therapy or lens-polishing, are executed only in order torealise certain given goals. These practices can be called “technical” ina broad sense. Looking at the example of the practice of lens-polishing wecan see that the guiding interests of some practices involve the productionof things. We call these practices “poietic” and the things made “artifacts”.Artifacts become “tools” if they are used as means to realise the interestsof other practices. We propose to call the tool-using technical practices“technical in the narrow sense”.

Different goals can be in conflict with each other in the sense that pur-suing one goal can hamper or thwart reaching another goal. So apart fromtechnical practices, there is always a need for practices whose practice-guiding interest consists in deciding which goals to pursue and especiallyhow to cope with conflicts (of course there is always the option of unre-strained barbarism).

In some societies – appropriately called “traditional” – those practicesoften rely on the interpretation of certain holy books or on the word of sec-


ular or clerical authorities. In modern democracies, it is usually seen as anideal to cope with conflicts in a non-violent way by taking into account theneeds of all persons concerned (of course this does imply absolutely noth-ing about how well this ideal is realised in individual cases). The ideal canbe referred to as the “social ideal”. It is anticipated in contexts ranging fromfamily affairs (like debating where to spend the summer-vacation) to col-lective bargaining and the negotiation of international treaties. Among themany practices which are in some way concerned with the avoidance andresolution of conflicts, the practice of giving society a normative frame-work by enacting laws (i.e. norms, which include regulations concerningthe sanctions to be applied in case of their violation) is especially worthmentioning. The practice of debating about and enacting laws and thepractices concerned with the constitution and organisation of authorisedcommittees for these purposes can be summed up as “political practice”.As a comprehensive word for all the practices whose interest is to preventor cope with conflict we suggest the term “socio-political practice”.

A community gets a “culture” by tradition, i.e. by passing on fromgeneration to generation its practices (including morals, customs and in-stitutions) and artifacts. The main concept “culture” contrasts with is ofcourse “nature”. In line with Aristotle we propose to use the term “nature”when talk is about objects or aspects of objects which are not the result ofhuman actions. So, whereas a wooden chair is itself a “cultural object”, theveining of its wood can be referred to as “natural”.

We now want to show how practices contribute to the constitution of“reality”. In doing so, we shall first concentrate on the reality constitutedby pre- and extra-scientific practices, for which Husserl had coined theterm “lifeworld” (“Lebenswelt”)23. The lifeworld encompasses all the thingswe distinguish in pre-scientific talk – well-suited examples are humans,cats, sunflowers, stones, weapons, cathedrals, but also noises, afterimages,thoughts, memories, hunger, joy and fright. As practices, which can bedescribed in prescientific talk, even the sciences themselves are part ofour lifeworld. But because the lifeworld is – by definition – the “theoreti-cally untouched”, neither molecules nor activation-potentials belong to itsconstituents, nor does mass nor energy, and even not the id or super-ego.

From the lifeworld-stance the things of our lifeworld are simply “there”.On the other hand not only scientific reality but already lifeworld-reality isthe result of co-operation in pre- and extra-scientific practices. When wetalk about the “constitution of reality” through successful practice, thenthis is of course an elliptical way of saying that truth-claims of statementsare to be judged by the success of practice. Speaking – and with this as-serting – itself is a practice, and the connection between speech acts and


non-linguistic actions can be roughly sketched as follows: humans formlanguage-communities (not only but in the first place) for the purposeof co-ordinating their joint actions. In pursuing this goal, they linguisti-cally fix discriminations which they have already made through acting andbehaving, by means of words and syntactic structure. Relative to the pri-mary purpose of co-ordinating joint actions intersubjective controllabilityof discriminations is indispensable. Guided by the goal of intersubjec-tive controllability, the language-community transcends the “subjective”discriminations made by single persons and thereby constitutes an inter-subjective or “objective” reality.

To establish a common lifeworld in the way described already encom-passes the constitution of the “physical” and the “mental”. On the one side,the co-ordination of joint actions requires us to talk and reach consensusabout publicly accessible things and events. But as a consequence, thesame purpose calls for the establishment of some modes of speech aboutthe “perception” of things and events a particular person in contrast toanother one has or (even more important) has not. In confronting subjec-tive discriminations with an already constituted intersubjective reality, thepossibility of perceptive illusions arises and this leads to the establishmentof talk about the “sensations” which illusions and perceptions have in com-mon. Last not least, even the distinction between “mere belief” and “trueknowledge” (the cognitive ability to justify a true belief) is determined withrespect to the rules of language and discourse of a language-communityand its intersubjectively constituted reality. (By the way: it is this referenceto a community, constitutive of all so-called “wide” mental states, whichis responsible for the failing of brain-based theories of supervenience.)

From the extra-scientific lifeworld we now want to turn to sciences andscientifically constituted reality. According to the programme of natural-ism, the sciences, regarded as the “centre of culture”24, decree what is realor not. This view is rejected by culturalism because the practice-guidinginterests of sciences and therefore their ultimate criteria of truth depend onextra-scientific practice (we will treat of this in more detail soon).

From the culturalist’s point of view, sciences do not have the task ofmaking “true pictures” of the world. Nor do they reduce to their theories.They are neither systems of statements nor predicates or “n-tuples”. Theyare practices. To be a science, a practice has to have the characteristic fea-ture that its practice-guiding interests consist in giving other practices the-oretical support (with Habermas we also call the practice-guiding interestsof sciences their “knowledge-guiding interests”25). “Theoretical support”means that the rules of action obeyed within a practice in order to further its


practice-guiding interests can be warranted but also criticised and modifiedby aid of theory.

To prevent misunderstandings about this point it should be stated thattheoretical support is not a one-one relation: a certain science can the-oretically support various practices, and a practice can be theoreticallysupported by various sciences. Chemistry for example supports many prac-tices among which one can find the fabrication of pharmaceutical productsas well as the practice of food analysis. On the other hand, a practice likepsychiatry is supported by various sciences, psychology as well as neu-rophysiology being among them. Moreover, sciences can give theoreticalsupport to other sciences – as logic does to mathematics or chemistry toneurophysiology. Especially noteworthy is the fact that some sciences givetheoretical support to extrascientific practices only indirectly by support-ing other sciences which then give direct support. For example, physicsactually supports technics mostly indirectly by giving direct support to thescience of engineering26, and general psychology gives indirect supportto many extrascientific practices by directly supporting various applieddisciplines like pedagogical psychology and abnormal psychology.

Depending on purpose, many classifications of sciences can be set up.One of them is the well-know distinction between “formal sciences” (e.g.logic, mathematics, geometry) and “material sciences” (e.g. physics, bi-ology, sociology). This distinction is drawn with respect to the way thetheoretical statements of a science are tested: In testing statements of aformal science, no experiments are conducted and even no observations ofa lesser rigidity are made – except looking up facts concerning the symbolsand their symbolic interconnections themselves. The statements of formalsciences are judged by referring to the rules of their symbol-constitutivecalculi alone. Being rules not statements, those in turn are neither true norfalse, but can of course be the subject of deliberations concerning theirpragmatical adequacy27. In testing the statements of material sciences,however, referring to the rules of symbol-manipulation is not enough. Inaddition, consensus has to be achieved about at least one not wholly rule-dependent fact, e.g. by measurement or by establishing an experimentallyreproducible process.

Already the formal sciences alone can support a wide variety of prac-tices theoretically. Logic supports any discourse, mathematics supports anypractice which includes calculation – e.g. commercial business. Geom-etry supports architecture, painting and design, and is generally neededin connection with the fabrication of many artifacts, especially of someused for scientific experiments. Because material sciences cannot do with-out logico-mathematical knowledge either, formal sciences also give the-


oretical support to material sciences and, indirectly, to the extrascientificpractices supported by them.

With respect to material sciences, a distinction can be made between“sciences of nature” (e.g. physics, chemistry and biology) and “sciences ofculture” (these are the traditional “Geisteswissenschaften”, i.e. the socialsciences and humanities, but excluding philosophy). At this point, it isof great importance to note that this distinction can not be justified justby regarding the objects these sciences are concerned with. Since Galilei,the methods of natural sciences changed dramatically from contempla-tive observation (or just looking everthing up in the books of Aristotle)to the elaborate art of device-intensive experimenting. This leads to theconclusion that natural sciences do not simply explore “nature” (in theAristotelian sense of unmanipulated things or events), but quite on thecontrary their domain of phenomena proves to be constituted culturallyto a high degree (if in doubt, go and see for youself by having a look intoa physicist’s or chemist’s lab).

If, however, we first draw a distinction between “technical” and “socio-political” sciences in the way that the former give theoretical support totechnical practices (in the wide sense) whereas the latter support socio-political practices, then the sciences of nature roughly turn out to be thetechnical, the sciences of culture to be the socio-political sciences. Thedistinction between technical and socio-political sciences also allows for ajustification of Dilthey’s idea that there must be a systematic difference inmethod between natural and cultural sciences (which was long and contro-versially disputed under the labels “explaining” versus “understanding”):The enterprise of theoretically backing the rules of technical practice –where given goals are to be achieved by appropriate actions – demands forexplaining the empirical consequences of actions by using general laws ofsuccession within a Hempel-Oppenheim frame. For the interests of socio-political practice however, where the goals themselves are on the agenda,hermeneutic methods of interpretation are needed to gain synchronic anddiachronic knowledge about systems of beliefs, interests and morals, ofhabits, of secular and religious customs and so on. Such knowledge is, forexample, an indispensable decision-guiding background for the practice oflegislation, no matter whether the lawmakers try to take into account theneeds of all persons concerned or just want to estimate the social impactof legislative measures in consideration beforehand.

Different goals demand for different methods. This simple truth en-forces the conclusion that scientism, i.e. the programme of streamliningthe methods of all sciences according to the paradigm of natural sciences,should be buried once and for all (r.i.p.).


With a short sketch of the emergence of physics we now want to makeclear how theoretical support of lifeworld-practices leads to a scientificallyconstituted reality “beyond” lifeworld-reality. Already in ancient times,in the context of staking out and administrating real estate as well as inthe context of planning and building bridges, houses, palaces, temples andfortifications, people began to talk about the “spatial” properties of thingsin a special “geometric” terminology. Described within this terminology,things are seen as “bodies”. Already within the practice of the constructionof buildings, but especially within the context of bartering, the need aroseto compare the “amount” of bodies by means other than mere counting.The invention of beam scales then allowed for a discrimination of bodiesaccording to an operationally defined notion of “mass”. Further on, thepractice of describing the course of the planets – which originally wasestablished for the purpose of foretelling the future – demanded for meansto describe the spatial movement of bodies with more precision. More-over, there was also much interest in the technical control of unguidedbody-movements (in the first place, the trajectory of projectiles), and soconcepts had to be developed which allowed to explain or respectivelyforecast the course of unconstrained movement. From these practical needseventually classical mechanics emerged as an integrative theory of ce-lestial and earthly body-movements. With the intention of extending thetheory’s range of application, the research program of classical mechanicsincluded a methodological norm which demanded the reformulation ofevery event in terms of bodily movements. By the ingenious move of pos-tulating micro-bodies (including some statistical assumptions about theirmechanical properties), e.g., the “reduction” of the formerly independenttheory of thermodynamics to classical mechanics could be achieved.

We can now do without further delineation of the history of physicsbecause what we have said up to this point already suffices to make thefollowing diagnosis: within natural science aspects of the lifeworld, whichare relevant to practice, are “cut out” terminologically. In order to explain(and hence technically control) those aspects systematically, theoreticalentities – e.g., microbodies and microevents - are postulated which cannotbe found or produced in lifeworld independent of theory. Ontologicallyspeaking, lifeworld-reality becomes “underlayed” with a “scientific real-ity” which itself is constituted by those theories successful in supportinglifeworld-practices.

At this point, a possible misunderstanding has to be cleared out in ad-vance: culturalism does not claim that theoretically postulated entities donot “really” exist. But in the interest of an anti-metaphysical epistemology,a substitutional understanding of the existential quantifier is strongly rec-


ommendable here. Hence, questions about a difference in the ontologicalstatus of objects – for example, objects of lifeworld and objects postu-lated by scientific theory – are in fact question about a difference in theirepistemological status.

3.3. A provocative implication of culturalism: the mind-body problem asa result of some “naturalistic fallacies”

In the course of time, the interplay between theoretical differentiation (for-mulating theories for new applications) and theoretical integration (con-necting these theories by reduction and systematisation) led to a persistentdetachment of the sciences of nature from all the singular and specifictechnical practices which provided the knowledge-guiding interests in thehistorical beginnings. This process was accompanied by the emergence ofspecial “laboratory” practices which – because they were designed withrespect to just that goal – could take over the role of an instance for theory-testing in a more direct and subtle way than any genuine technical practicecould.

This overall development (which in itself is of course not deplorable atall) early on concealed the fact that it is still the knowledge-guiding interestof giving theoretical support to practice which (as indirectly as it may be)provides the ultimate criteria of validity. So, the realistic conception ofvalidity as a kind of correspondence of theory and reality could prevail fora very long time.

Realism almost inevitably carries the ontological hypostasis of the enti-ties postulated by scientific theories in its train. Although fully aware of thefact that naturalism and realism are semantically independent positions, wewill refer to this hypostasis as “the second naturalistic fallacy”28, becausethis kind of mistake is usually encountered within materialist naturalisation-projects, which make the bulk of naturalisation-enterprises (of course welike the polemic aspect also).

In succumbing to the second fallacy, entities postulated in theory (likeneutrons and quarks) and life-world objects (like chairs and flowers) be-come ontologically levelled as “physical objects”: A knife consists of ablade and a handle, the material of the blade is an alloy consisting of mole-cules, which themselves are a compound of atoms consisting of even tinierparts – just a matter of “looking closer”. The fact that in contrast to life-world-objects theoretically postulated entities are not accessible withouttaking recourse to the theories dealing with them is deliberately ignoredwithin this conception.

At this point, of course, we have to take up the challenge presented bythe common “theory ladeness”-reply, at least insofar as it is meant to imply


that understanding and verifying even the most trivial talk about objectsof our lifeworld can not be accomplished semantically independent fromtheory. As Popper has put it in theLogic of Scientific Discovery29:

Every representation uses general symbols, universals, every sentence bears the characterof a theory, of a hypothesis. The sentence: ‘Here stands a glass of water’ can not be verifiedby any experiences, because the universals appearing in it can not be related to dinstinctexperiences [...]. By the word ‘glass’ for example we denote physical bodies with a certainlawful behaviour, and the same holds for the word ‘water’.

This conception is untenable, because – if it were true – we could neverlearn any term nor test any statement: Be Pa a singular statement about anobject a. To be able to test Pa one obviously has to have learned whatP means. Now, according to the thesis of theory-ladeness of “observa-tional” terms, P is a disposition-term: Px≡ Ax → Bx. Hence, to learnP – besides already having grasped some sort of (relevantist) materialimplication –, one has to have learned the terms A and B, which in turnwill be disposition-terms themselves and so on.

The thesis of semantical theory-ladeness arises from a confusion of thepre-scientific meaning of a word with a theoretical redefinition which canalways be given “ex post” only. At first, one needs to grasp the meaningof a word like “water” with respect to its use in pre-scientific contexts andthereby learn to distinguish it from words like “oil”, “juice” or “milk”.Otherwise, one would never know which objects one should scientificallyexamine in order to learn about the “lawful” properties of water. Much later– on a high theoretical niveau – experimentally established phenomenaconcerning water are theoretically integrated with the help of a theoreticalconstruction named “H2O”.

Characteristically, the terminology for the description of the phenom-ena to be explained is related to the theoretical terminology in such away thatbisubjunctivestatements can be established between “atomic”phenomenal terms and complex theoretical terms, but not between atomictheoretical terms and complex phenomenal ones. This is hardly surprisingsince the theoretical terminology is set up for the very purpose of integrat-ing the phenomena. So there usually is the formal possibility to redefinephenomenal terminology within theoretical terminology (“water is H2O”).In general, little attention is paid to the fact that laws originally classi-fied as empirical are thereby reclassified as semantical rules: a substancewhich does not behave according to the “H2O-laws” is not water thenby definition. Because it is generally agreed that the theories of naturalscience should remain empirical and not be immunised by analytical ap-pointments, the significance of the possibility of theoretical redefinitionsshould not be overestimated. In any case the existence of theoretically


redefined terms can not count as evidence for the thesis of the theory-ladeness of lifeworld-talk, because the theoretical terminology can notbecome established without recourse to a lifeworld-terminology alreadyat hand.

Returning from our excursion into “theory-ladeness’ we now want todirect our attention to the “second naturalistic fallacy” again. Let us assumefor the moment that the theoretical terminology of physics is complete rel-ative to its original goals: body movements, thermic, magnetic, electric andoptical phenomena could (in all relevant respects) be completely describedby means of physical terminology. When someone succumbs to the secondnaturalistic fallacy (symptomatically, this shows in statements like “in theend, everything is just bunches of particles”), the claim of terminologi-cal completeness has to be further expanded to universal completeness –completeness relative to all conceivable aspects.

Immediately, puzzling questions arise: “How can humans, who are noth-ing but biochemical automatons, have feelings, intentions and thoughts?”or “How can words like ‘notion’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘memory’ be definedneurophysiologically?” In ontologizing the terms of scientific theory evenresearch-guiding methodological norms like the “principle of causality”(an even stronger version for physics is the “principle of causal unifor-mity”) are metaphysically reinterpreted as general statements about howthe world is like. Therefore, further mysterious riddles show up: “If everyevent is caused by another event according to some general laws of nature,how can there be rationality and freedom of will?” or “If every physicalevent is caused by a physical event, how can the mental act upon thephysical?”

Everyone knows the strong temptation, exercised by questions restingon the second naturalistic fallacy, to take refuge with materialist and reduc-tionist “solutions”. At first, identity theories almost always seem to be bestchoice. Then, when confidence in reductionism vanishes with time, emer-gentist and eliminativist “solutions” become attractive. The ermergentistasks: “What are the natural levels of reality, how did they emerge and howare they related to one another in an non-reductive way?”

The eliminativist even succumbs to a “third naturalistic fallacy” bystating an ontological primacy of theoretical constructions: According tothe second fallacy, the life-world ultimately consists of the objects pos-tulated by scientific theory. Now, if a reduction of life-worldly objectsis nevertheless not achievable, then this has to count as evidence againstlife-world itself – after all, scientific theories are superior in precision tolifeworld-talk. Hence, according to the eliminativist, life-world becomes amere illusion: What people call “Barlach’s sculpture ‘the hovering one”’


is in fact just a bunch of molecules, and what is commonly called a “per-formance of Beethoven’s 9th symphony with final chorus” is nothing but atemporary occurrence of local deviations in air pressure.

Even the very question “Which events are the mental ones?” alreadypresupposes the fallacies described above, if one expects as an answerthe designation of certain events by means of physiological, biochemicalor physical terminology. Else the answer had to be (according to BishopButler): “Every thing is what it is and not another thing”. This luckily holdseven in the case of us humans.

3.4. Philosophy as the culturalist views it

Within philosophy, naturalism is disputed more fiercely than any otherthesis, and this is certainly due to the fact that consistent naturalism hasfar-reaching implications about what philosophy stands for. Consistent nat-uralism means nothing less than the self-dispensation of philosophy infavour of scientific research alone. But just from the writings of its mostradical advocates the performative inconsistency of this thesis becomesmost obvious. The philosophical work of Quine, for example, is not it-self a result of research done within natural sciences and even could nothave been, because from empirical theories no philosophical programmesfollow.

Nevertheless, even after the repudiation of naturalism the question re-mains, whether and how philosophy can be characterised as a disciplinewith its unique methods without reverting to some sort of metaphysicalobscurantism. Actually these are two questions: What is the task of philos-ophy and which are the methods philosophy is to make use of?

The first question is best tackled historically. From an historic point ofview, philosophy is in fact the “mother of all sciences”. In the historicalbeginnings as documented, i.e. in the pre-socratic period, deliberationsabout logico-mathematical, physical, biological and psychological issues,as well as considerations concerning ethics and political theory were in-discriminately referred to the sphere called “love of wisdom”. Euclid’sElements(ca. 300 BC) mark the emancipation of geometry from philos-ophy as the first scientific discipline in history. In the ninth century it isfollowed by mathematics in the arab countries (Al Khwarizmi); in Europewe have to wait until the thirteenth century (Fibonacci) for an equivalentprocess to take place. Not until the seventeenth century physics is estab-lished (Galilei, Newton), and at last biology (Cuvier, Darwin), sociology(Comte) and psychology (Wundt, Freud) follow in the nineteenth century.Meanwhile, philosophy always consisted of those enterprises which wherenot yet established as autonomous disciplines.


This gives us the decisive clue for an adequate understanding of philos-ophy as a reflection upon what is not yet defined and institutionalised asan autonomous scientific enterprise with standardised methods. It can beassumed that even in the future new theories or disciplines will emergewhen reflection falls in secure step by defining its scope and formingstandardised methods – the integration of the theory of speech-acts intolinguistics may count as a more recent example for this. Disciplines likethe philosophy of science, which for a long time were regarded as “typi-cally philosophical”, just find themselves in a stage of transition and canyet be studied independently from philosophy at some universities. In thefuture, systematical deliberations within the philosophy of art, like those ofNelson Goodman and Arthur C. Danto, may be counted as belonging to themain body of art-theory. This all suggests that philosophy cannot be welldefined by an enumeration of subdisciplines like philosophy of language,philosophy of mind, ethics, and so on, because these subdisciplines couldemancipate themselves from the body of philosophy one day.

At first glance, our diagnosis of the nature and development of philos-ophy seems to support the naturalist view: in fact, it is very tempting toconclude that philosophy, always in the business of self-dispensation, willone day achieve this final goal. But such a conception presupposes some-thing which is almost certainly false, namely, that the possible objects andmethods of reflection form a finite and determined whole. So, as long ashumans insist on the right to question every practice, every concept, everymethod and every claim reflectively, there will always be “philosophical”issues.

We now want to turn to the question about “the philosophical method”.Since the linguistic turn, dating back to the beginning of the twentiethcentury, there is a widely accepted answer to that question which goes likethis: being an enterprise of reflection, philosophy deals with the way welinguistically approach everyday-life and science. Reflecting on this, phi-losophy tries to contribute to a better understanding by clarifying logicaland semantical relations between important concepts and theses. In copingwith this task, it makes use of a wide range of logical and semanticaltools. This type of business is commonly called “logical analysis” or if it isaccompanied by proposals for terminological adjustment or rearrangement– “logical reconstruction”.

Although there is much to be said in favour of the linguistic turn-styleconception of philosophy, it nevertheless does not exhaustively determine“the” philosophical methods: First, the tools of logical analysis, i.e. logic,semantics etc., are not simply given, but may themselves be subjectedto further development and modification which could be influenced by


“philosophical” considerations. Secondly, methods always have to matchthe goals – whether a fly-flap or an elephant rifle is to be chosen depends onthe prey. So the methods adequate for political theory could differ consid-erably from those adequate for the philosophy of mathematics. Thirdly, aswe have seen above, philosophers are pioneers exploring widely unchartedterrain. Which methods are most apt in the context of philosophical prob-lems is rarely known before having tackled them, often for a long time. Inmany cases break-throughs are achieved just by inventing a new method ofanalysis, by establishing a new distinction, by adopting a new perspectiveon a problem, or by adjusting the goals. Therefore, heuristically, any tool iswelcome at first – “anything goes”. The only constraint is that everythingshould end up with the formulation of an approach which allows for inter-subjective controllability: within the vast terrain philosophers explore, thisdefines the line of demarcation to metaphysics which sometimes presentsitself as a widely visible mountain range, but more often seems to be a wellhidden area of malicious quicksands.

Because the philosopher’s field of work is located at the frontier dis-tricts of language, he is in permanent danger of going metaphysical. But ifthe goal is to measure the frontier, then one has to go to the borders. Hencethe belief that an anti-metaphysical intention has to come along with a dis-dain of philosophical positions or systems which, in the end, have turnedout to be metaphysical, is mistaken. After all, without theMeditations,theCritique of Pure Reason, and theTractatus Logico-Philosophicus, wewould not be in the position to broach this kind of criticism at all. Ofcourse, the same holds for all the great books which were written in thespirit of naturalism. Insofar as naturalism felt deeply bound to the idea ofenlightenment, culturalism not only aspires to be its successor, but in linewith the dialectical course of history also its legitimate heir.

NOTES

1 Methodical culturalism is a position which emerged from the discussions of a groupof philosophers around Peter Janich in the first half of the nineties (see Hartmann/Janich(1996)). In a second sense of “methodical”, the label “methodical culturalism” is meant toexpress the claim that argumentations ought to proceed stepwise, avoiding vicious cir-cles and gaps. Methodical culturalism itself has its historical roots in the “methodicalcontructivism” of the “Erlangen school” around the philosopher and mathematician PaulLorenzen.2 L. Wittgenstein,Tractatus6.53.3 W.V.O. Quine (1969), pp. 82–83.4 For instance, it seems to be at the core of Ernst Haeckels “monistic philosophy” whichPhilip Kitcher (1992) singles out as an exemplar of naturalism at the turn of the century.


5 Notably, Kim (1988).6 It almost seems that normative commitments go unnoticed: at first, he says that it requires“a” causal connection between a state of affairs and a subject’s belief about it for this beliefto constitute knowledge of it; only a few sentences later the requirement is one for “a certainkind of” and then for “a relevant” causal connection. See Goldman (1967).7 Goldman (1978).8 Laudan (1996).9 see Habermas (1978).10 Brown (1988).11 Giere (1988).12 Except, of course, on a compatibilist account which tries to reconcile both modes ofdiscourse by interpreting ascriptions of actions as talking about instances of very complexbehaviour. However, the reduction to which the compatibilist is committed does not seemto be feasible.13 We take it that what is at issue in contemporary philosophy of mind is only the pre-cise kind of relation that holds between “mental events” and those concomitant “brainprocesses”.14 e.g., Kim (1988).15 This charge has first been brought forth by Putnam (1982).16 Laudan (1996), p. 156.17 see H. Radder (1996), chap. 5.18 We will return to this point below, section 3.2.19 In line with our above explication of a purified naturalism, scientific explanation heremeans explanation by subsumtion under natural laws of succession.20 In practice, extrapolation to different orders of magnitude, use of principles of compo-sitionality etc. help us to work our way from this meagre basis to an explanation of naturalevents.21 see footnote 1.22 Of course, claims have to be formulated within a language. So our argument presupposesthat people from different cultures can communicate with one another by using some com-mon language. We do not think, that this really poses a problem. The problem of validatinga claim interculturally does simply not arise, when two cultures have no means for takingup communication with one another.23 See Husserl (1954). The concept of lifeworld always had the function of a starting pointfor programmes of (re-)building scientific terminology and theory in a methodical “step-by-step” way. For this purpose, lifeworld is indeed much better suited than prominent rivalslike “sense-data” or “particles”, because those – far from being epistemologically elemen-tary – are already highly theoretical constructions, whereas the life-world comprises onlythings we are acquainted with in everyday-life. The programme of a methodical build-up– or better “reconstruction” – of scientific theory is also a central features of methodicalculturalism as it is pursued in Marburg. Unfortunately, in this article we can not developthese topics in more detail.24 This terse phrase is taken from Rorty (1993), „Vorwort“.25 See Habermas (1978).26 See Schonefeld (1996), p. 199.27 So if we suggest to follow the philosophical tradition in calling the statements of theformal sciences “a priori”, this does not mean “everlasting” and even not “independentfrom everysort of experience”. Indeed there are domains, where some rules and analyticstatements based on them areconstitutivefor certain kinds of experiences. For example to


measure the weight of a body one has to take recourse to some norms which distinguishbetween intact and defective scales (see Janich (1992), p. 194). No results obtained bymeasuring the weight of bodies canby themselvesrefute those norms and the analyticstatements following from them. Nevertheless these norms can be undermined by otherexperiences, for example the “meta-experience”, that other norms are more apt for achiev-ing our purposes related with measurement.28 Of course the first one would be the classical deduction of “ought” from “is”. As wehave seen in section 2.1, naturalism even succumbs to that first fallacy.29 See Popper (1971, S.61). We have translated the quote from the original German text.

REFERENCES

Brown, H.I.: 1988, “Normative Epistemology and Naturalized Epistemology”,Inquiry 31,53–78.

Giere, R.N.: 1988,Explaining Science, Univ. Chicago Press, Chicago.Goldman, A.I.: 1967, “A Causal Theory of Knowing”,J, Phil.64, 355–72.Goldman, A.I.: 1978, “Epistemics: The Regulative Theory of Cognition”,J. Phil.75, 509–

23.Habermas, J.: 1978,Knowledge and Human Interests, Heinemann, London.Hartmann, D. and Janich, P.: 1996,Methodischer Kulturalismus, Suhrkamp Verlag,

Frankfurt/M.Husserl, E.: 1954,Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale

Phänomenologie, Husserliana VI, Den Haag.Janich, P.: 1992,Die Grenzen der Naturwissenschaft, Verlag C.H. Beck, München.Kim, J.: 1988, “What is ‘Naturalized Epistemology’?”Phil. Perspectives2, Epistemology,

381–405.Kitcher, P.: 1992, “The Naturalists Return”,Phil. Rev.101, 53–114.Laudan, L.: 1996,Beyond Positivism and Relativism, Westview Press, Boulder Co.Popper, K.R.: 1971,Logik der Forschung, 5th ed. J.C.B. Mohr, Tübingen.Putnam, H.: 1982, “Why Reason Can’t Be Naturalized”,Synthese52, 3–23.Quine, W.v.O.: 1969, “Epistemology Naturalized”,Ontological Relativity, Columbia UP,

N.Y.Radder, H.: 1996,In and About the World, SUNY Press, Albany/N.Y.Rorty, R.: 1993,Eine Kultur ohne Zentrum, Reclam Verlag, Stuttgart.Schonefeld, W.: 1996, “Relativistische Protophysik” in: Hartmann and Janich (1996), 197–

224.Wittgenstein, L.: 1960,Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in: Wittgenstein, L.Schriften Bd.

1, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt/M.

Institut für Philosophie derUniversität MarburgBlitzweg 16D-35032 Marburg, Germany.

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