Idealism and Realism – Page 3 – Maverick Philosopher

Butchvarov: Objects, Entities, and Transcendental Idealism

This entry extends and clarifies my post, Blackman Versus Butchvarov: Objects, Entities, and Modes of Existence.

Preliminaries

For Butchvarov, all consciousness is intentional. (There are no non-intentional consciousnesses.) And all intentionality is conscious intentionality. (There is no "physical intentionality" to use George Molnar's term.) So, for Butchvarov, 'consciousness' and 'intentionality' are equivalent terms. Consciousness, by its very nature, is consciousness of something, where the 'of' is an objective genitive.

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Realism and Idealism

An excerpt from an e-mail by Chris C., with responses in blue.

. . . I read your post on Butchvarov's latest paper, and you made clear your argument about the problem with the crucial step in the "idealist" position; then you closed with the assertion that realism has its own set of problems. Granted that that's obviously true, I was wondering if you had a piece, whether a paper or a blog post, that elucidated your positions on 1) Why, although you think ultimately he is wrong, you also think Butch's position is a serious alternative to realism; and 2) Why, despite its problems, you believe realism addresses those problems adequately.

That post ended rather abruptly with the claim, "Metaphysical realism, of course, has its own set of difficulties." I was planning to say a bit more, but decided to quit since the post was already quite long by 'blog' standards. Brevity, after all, is the soul, not only of wit, but of blog. I was going to add something like this:

My aim in criticizing Butchvarov and other broadly Kantian idealists/nonrealists is not to resurrect an Aristotelian or Aristotelian-Thomistic theory of knowledge, as if those gentlemen clearly had the truth, a truth we have somehow, post Descartes, forgotten. My aim is to throw the problems themselves into the starkest relief possible. This is in line with my conception of philosophy as fundamentally aporetic: the problems come first, solutions second, if ever. A philosopher cannot be true to his vocation if he is incapable of inhibiting the very strong natural tendency to want answers, solutions, definite conclusions which he can live by and which will provide 'doxastic security' and legitimation of his way of life. You are not a philosopher if you are out for solutions at all costs. As Leo Strauss points out near the beginning of his essay on Thucydides, and elsewhere, the unum necessarium for the philosopher, the one thing needful, is free inquiry. Inquiry, however, uncovers problems, difficulties, questions, and some of these are reasonably viewed as insolubilia.

The philosopher, therefore, is necessarily in tension with ideologues and dogmatists who claim to be in possession of the truth. What did Socrates claim to know? That he didn't know. Of course, to be in secure possession of the truth (which implies knowing that one is in secure possession of it) is a superior state to be in than in the state of forever seeking it. Obviously, knowing is better than believing, and seeing face-to-face is better than "seeing through a glass darkly." On the other hand, to think one has the truth when one doesn't is to be in a worse state than the state of seeking it. For example, Muhammad Atta and the boys, thinking they knew the truth, saw their way clear to murdering 3000 people.

Your first question: How can I believe that Butch's position is untenable while also considering it a serious alternative to realism? Because I hold open the possibility that all extant (and future) positions are untenable. In other words, I take seriously the possibility that the central problems of philosophy are genuine (contra the logical positivists, the later Wittgenstein, and such Freudian-Wittgensteinian epigoni as Morris Lazerowitz), important — what could count as important if problems relating to God and the soul are not important? — but absolutely insoluble by us.

Your second question: How can I believe that metaphysical realism, despite its problems, addresses those problems adequately? Well, I don't believe it addresses them adequately.

I would say your book is pretty much a response to those questions, but what I'm looking for is your understanding of what makes Butch's position so powerful. What I have in mind is something like what [Stanley] Rosen does in The Elusiveness of the Ordinary, where in a couple of essays he makes clear that there is not going to be a way based on analysis or deduction to adjudicate between the Platonic and the Kantian claims – that is, the claims, respectively, that the "Forms" are external and mind-independent and that they are internal and mind-dependent. The final two essays in the aforementioned book are Rosen's attempt to provide a way to tip the scales in favor of Plato, and I have to say I haven't really seen a better way to do it.

I haven't read Rosen's book, but I will soon get hold of it. It will be interesting to see whether he has a compelling rational way of tipping the scales.

The point is that I was wondering if you thought, along those lines, that roughly speaking your form of realism and Butch's form of idealism form a similar sort of "fundamental alternative" in the way Rosen believes Platonism and Kantianism do. And if so, I would be interested to see your take on what makes Butch's idealism (again roughly speaking) as something that cannot be truly defeated, but rather must be established as something of a less plausible vision of how things really stand.

Can any philosophical position be "truly defeated"? I assume that we cherish the very highest standards of intellectual honesty and rigor and we are able to inhibit the extremely strong life-enhacing need for firm beliefs and tenets (etymologically from L. tenere, to hold, so that a tenet is literally something one holds onto for doxastic security and legitimation of one's modus vivendi.) Now there are some sophomoric positions that can be definitively defeated, e.g., the relativist who maintains both that every truth is relative and that his thesis is nonrelatively true. But in the history of philosophy has even one substantive position ever been "truly defeated," i.e., defeated to the satisfaction of all competent practioners? (A competent practioner is one who possesses all the relevant moral and intellectual virtues, is apprised of all relevant empirical facts, understands logic, etc.) I would say No. But perhaps you have an example for me.

Now why don't I think that I have defeated Butchvarov on any of the points we dispute? Part of the reason is that he does not admit defeat. If I cannot bring him to see that he is wrong about, say, nonexistent objects, then this gives me a very good reason to doubt that I am right and have truly refuted his position. It seems to me that, unless one is an ideologue or a dogmatist, one must be impressed by the pervasive and long-standing fact of dissensus among the best and brightest. Of course, I could be right and Butch wrong. If he maintains that p and I maintain that not-p, then one of us is right and the other wrong. But which one? If I do not know that I am right, or know that he is wrong, then I haven't solved the problem that divides us. It is not enough to be right, one must know that one is right and be able to diagnose convincingly how they other guy went wrong.

As for Platonism versus Kantianism, see my post on another latter-day Kantian, Milton Munitz, espceically the section on Platonic and Kantian intelligibility. My Existence book avoids both Kantianism and Platonism by adopting an onto-theological idealism. If the reality of the real traces back to divine mind, that is reality and realism enough, but it is also a form of idealism in that the real is not independent of mind as such.

As I've indicated in previous emails, I have always taken realism as a presumptive truth (in a general way) and I thus place the burden of truth [proof] on idealism. Kant impressed me, but he didn't convince me, and consequently I've never understood what it was exactly in realism that made people jump into the idealist camp. That is, I've never understood that basic shift where someone takes idealism as presumptively true and thus places the burden of proof on realism. What was so bad about realist arguments that made idealism so attractive as an alternative for these thinkers?

Well, this is a very large topic, but you can glean some idea of what motivated Kant to make his transcendental turn from his famous 1772 letter to Marcus Herz, part of which is here. And then there is the metaphilosophical topic of burden of proof. How does one justify a claim to the effect that the burden of proof lies on one or the other side of a dispute? For you there is a (defeasible?) presumption in favor of realism, and that therefore the onus probandi lies on the nonrealist. But what criteria do you employ in arriving at this judgment?

Butchvarov on Metaphysical Realism and Logical Nonrealism

This post is a stab at a summary and evaluation of Panayot Butchvarov's "Metaphysical Realism and Logical Nonrealism" which is available both online and in R. M. Gale, ed., The Blackwell Guide to Metaphysics (Oxford: Blackwell 2002), pp. 282-302. Page references are to the Blackwell source. The ComBox stands open if readers have some informed commentary to offer. ('Informed' means that you have read Butchvarov's paper, and my response, and you have something pertinent to contribute either in objection to or agreement with either Butchvarov or me.)

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More on Modes of Being with Two Applications

Clarity will be served if we distinguish the following four questions:

Q1. What is meant by 'mode of being'?
Q2. Is the corresponding idea intelligible?
Q3. Are there (two or more) modes of being?
Q4. What are the modes of being?

So far in this series of posts I have been concerned only with the first two questions. Clearly, the first two questions are logically prior to the second two. It is possible to understand what is meant by 'mode of being' and grant that the notion is intelligible while denying that there are (two or more) modes of being. And if two philosophers agree that there are (two or more) modes of being they might yet disagree about what these modes are.

I assume that if talk of modes of being is intelligible, then there is no mistake such as Peter van Inwagen alleges, or fallacy such as Reinhardt Grossmann alleges, that is committed by partisans of any modes-of-being doctrine. Van Inwagen's claim, you will recall, is that such partisans illictly transfer what properly belongs to the nature of an F to the existence of the F. And Grossmann's claim, you will also recall, is that one cannot validly infer from a dramatic difference in properties as between two kinds of thing (concreta and abstracta, for exsample) that the two kinds of thing differ in their mode of being.

An Application to Philosophical Theology

Suppose you have two philosophers. They agree that God exists and they agree as to the nature of God. But one claims that God exists necessarily while the other claims that he exists contingently. What are they disagreeing about? That there is a being having such-and-such divine properties is not in dispute. Nor is the nature of God in dispute. It is at least arguable that the disagreement centers on God's Seinsweise, or modus essendi, or way of being, or mode of being or however you care to phrase it. The one philosopher says that God exists-necessarily while the other says that God exists-contingently. This is not a difference in nature or in properties but in mode of being.

This suggests that with respect to anything, we can ask: (i) What is it? (ii) Does it exist? (iii) How (in what way or mode) does it exist? This yields a tripartite distinction among quiddity (in a broad sense to include essential and accidental, relational and nonrelational properties), existence, and mode of existence (mode of being).

My claim, at a bare minimum, is that, contra van Inwagen, Grossmann, Dallas Willard, and a host of others, the notion that there are modes of being is intelligible and defensible, and needn't involve the making of a mistake or the commission of a fallacy. Of course I want to go beyond that and claim that a sound metaphysics cannot get by without a modes-of-being doctrine. But for now I am concerned merely to defend the minimal claim. Minimal though it is, it puts me at loggerheads with the analytic establishment. (But what did you expect for a maverick?)

A contemporary analytic philosopher who adheres to the thin conception of being according to which there are no modes of being will accommodate the difference between necessary and contingent beings by saying that a necessary being like God exists in all possible worlds whereas a contingent being like Socrates exists in some but not all possible worlds. So instead of saying that God exists in a different way than Socrates, he will say that God and Socrates exist in the same way, which is the way that everything exists, but that God exists in all worlds whereas Socrates exists only in some. But this involves quantification over possible worlds and raises difficult questions as to what possible worlds are.

(It is worth noting that a modes-of-being theorist can reap the benefits of possible worlds talk as a useful and graphic façon de parler without incurring the ontological costs. You can talk the talk without walking the walk.)

Presumably no one here will embrace the mad-dog modal realism of David Lewis, according to which all worlds are on an ontological par. So one has to take some sort of abstractist line and construe worlds as maximal abstracta of one sort or another, say, as maximal (Fregean not Russellian) propositions. But then difficult questions arise about what it is for an individual to exist in a world. What is it for Socrates to exist in a possible world if worlds are maximal (Fregean) propositions? It is to be represented as existing by that world. So Socrates exists in the actual world in that Socrates is represented as existing by the actual world which, on the abstractist aspproach, is the one true maximal proposition. (A proposition is maximal iff it entails every proposition with which it is consistent.) And God exists in all possible worlds in that all maximal propositions represent him as exsiting: no matter which one of the maximal propositions is true, that proposition represents him as existing.

But veritas sequitur esse, truth follows being, so I am inclined to say that the abstractist approach has it precisely backwards: the necessity of God's existence is the ground of each maximal proposition's representing him as existing; the necessity of God's existence cannot be grounded in the logically posterior fact that every maximal proposition represents him as existing.

The ground of the divine necessity, I say, is God's unique mode of being which is not garden-variety metaphysical necessity but aseity. God alone exists from himself and has his necessity from himself
unlike lesser necessary beings (numbers, etc) which have their necessity from God. The divine aseity is in turn grounded in the divine simplicity which latter I try to explain in my SEP article.

Summing up this difficult line of thought that I have just barely sketched: if we dig deep into the 'possible worlds' treatment of metaphysical necessity and contingency, we will be led back to an ontology that invokes modes of being.

Application to the Idealism/Realism Controversy

Consider this thing on the desk in front of me. What is it? A coffee cup with such-and-such properties both essential and accidental. For example, it is warm and full of coffee. These are accidental properties, properties the thing has now but might not have had now, properties the possession of which is not necessary for its existence. No doubt the coffee cup exists. But it is not so clear in what mode it exists. One philosopher, an idealist, says that its mode of being is purely intentional: it exists only as an intentional object, which means: it exists only relative to (transcendental) consciousness. The other philosopher, a realist, does not deny that the cup is (sometimes) an intentional object, but denies that its being is exhausted by its being an intentional object. He maintains that it exists mind-independently.

What I have just done in effect is introduce two further modes of being. We can call them esse intentionale and esse reale, purely intentional being and real being. It seems that without this distinction between modes of being we will not be able to formulate the issue that divides the idealist and the realist. No one in his right mind denies the existence of coffee cups, rocks, trees, and 'external' items generally. Thus Berkeley and Husserl and other idealists do not deny that there exist trees and such; they are making a claim about their mode of existence.

Suppose you hold to a thin conception of being, one that rules out modes of existence. On the thin conception, an item either exists or it does not and one cannot distinguish among different ways, modes, kinds, or degrees of existence. How would an adherent of the thin conception formulate the idealism/realism controversy? The idealist, again, does not deny the existence of rocks and trees. And he doesn't differe with the realist as totheir nature. Without talk of modes of being, then, no sense can be made of the idealism/realism controversy.

When Is an Identification an Elimination, and When Not? Idealism and Eliminativism not in the Same Logical Boat

A reader, recently deployed to Afghanistan, finds time to raise an objection that I will put in my own words to make it as forceful as possible:

You endorsed William Lycan's Moorean refutation of eliminative materialism, but then you criticized him for thinking that Moorean appeals to common sense are also effective against standard idealist claims such as Berkeley's thesis that the objects of ordinary outer perception are clusters of ideas. You maintained that there is a crucial difference between the characteristic claims of eliminativists (e.g., that there are no beliefs, desires, intentions, pleasures, pains, etc.) and the characteristic claims of idealists (e.g., Berkeley's thesis just mentioned, McTaggart's thesis of the unreality of time, Bradley's of the unreality of relations.) The difference is that between denying the existence of some plain datum, and giving an account of a plain datum, an account which presupposes, and so does not deny, the datum in question. In effect, you insisted on a distinction between identifying Xs as Ys, and denying the existence of Xs. Thus, you think that there is an important difference between identifying pains with brain states, and denying that there are pains; and identifying stones and physical objects generally with collections of ideas in the mind of God and denying that there are physical objects. But in other posts you have claimed that there are identifications which collapse into eliminations. I seem to recall your saying that to identify God with an unconscious anthropomorphic projection, in the manner of Ludwig Feuerbach, amounts to a denial of the existence of God, as opposed to a specification of what God is. Similarly, 'Santa Claus is a fictional character' does not tell us what Santa Claus is; it denies his very existence.

Now why couldn't Lycan argue that this is exactly what is going on in the idealist case? Why couldn't he say that to identify stones and such with clusters of ideas in the mind of God is to deny the existence of stones? Just as God by his very nature (whether or not this nature is exemplifed) could not be an anthropomorphic projection, so too, stones by their very nature as physical objects could not be clusters of ideas, not even clusters of divine ideas.

It seems you owe us an account of why the reduction of physical objects to clusters of ideas is not an identification that collapses into an elimination. If you cannot explain why it does not so collapse, then Lycan and Co. will be justifed in deploying their Moorean strategy against both EM-ists and idealists. They could argue, first, that idealism is eliminationism about common sense data, and then appeal to common sense to reject the elimination.

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