My
dissertation sought to rework Immanuel Kant’s once venerable distinction
between analytic and synthetic judgments for the purpose of leveraging this
distinction, in future work, to better understand what it is to “do metaphysics.” Going forward, beyond publishing articles
advocating for my account of the analytic/synthetic distinction and my extended
incompatibility semantics for modal logic which it drew upon, I would like to
focus on employing this account for such broader metametaphysical ambitions. Specifically, I would like to employ my
dissertation’s account of the analytic/synthetic distinction for the dual projects
of pragmatically delimiting the bounds of metaphysics (in metaphysically
neutral terms) and developing an account of how philosophy can successfully avoid metaphysics (and what it would it
look like for it to do so). In so doing,
I take my research to fit into two ongoing, philosophical projects: Immanuel
Kant’s critique of metaphysics and Jürgen Habermas’s paradigm of “postmetaphysical thinking.”[1]
The
first part of this project would seek to answer the metametaphysical question
of what makes a claim or inquiry metaphysical.[2] In my view, picking out what is distinctive
about metaphysical claims requires more than isolating some common content or
subject matter (the semantics): we must also look to what is being done when metaphysical claims are made
(the pragmatics). Drawing heavily on my
account of the distinction between the analytic and synthetic, I hope to show
that, semantically, metaphysics involves what I term, onto-logical claims, which are claims containing onto-logical operators such as “exists,”
“is real,” “is essential to,” “grounds,” “explains,” “is fundamental,” “is
necessary,” etc.[3] The semantic contribution of
onto-logical operators to these claims have these two key features: first, they
inferentially commit us to there being (or, negatively, not being) further, synthetic truths of a specific, schematic
sort—that is they engender synoptic, synthetic inferential commitments
involving their objects; and second, their use in such claims need not be taken to further
inferentially commit us to (by entailing or precluding them) which particular, substantive claims of
the requisite schematic form these are—that is, they can, consistent with
everyday usage at least, be understood to remain analytically, inferentially
inert in extra-onto-logical matters.
Onto-logical operators and claims thus allow us to undertake commitments
to there being some further synthetic claims to make and endorse, but they do
not themselves commit us fully as to which
– the commitment is rather schematic,
synoptic, or only present in outline rather than in detail.
Onto-logical
claims, in my view, are as much at home in everyday life as they are in the
metaphysician’s armchair. To get at
distinctively metaphysical uses of such onto-logical claims, we must also
identify a telltale pragmatics for
such usages. I take it that onto-logical
claims are used metaphysically when
they are made with a distinctive interpersonal, expressive inflexibility that
is absent in everyday usage. In my
research, I hope to elucidate this pragmatic inflexibility and the semantics of
onto-logical claims in greater detail.
By
illuminating metaphysics’ bounds, I hope to assemble the resources to
articulate how philosophy can do without it, and perhaps thereby trade
metaphysics’ extramundane trappings for greater everyday relevance. The kind of postmetaphysical proposal I will advocate is not an anti-metaphysical proposal per se, for I take it that
anti-metaphysical proposals fall into the trap of becoming metaphysical arguments in their attempts to defeat or
deflate metaphysics.[4] Rather, I support a kind of metaphysical agnosticism—a conscientious decision to
forget metaphysics and leave metaphysical claims and questions by the wayside.
This
kind of methodological counsel is not unprecedented. Some kinds of arguments and appeals have been
seemingly outgrown by the philosophical profession as a whole: for instance,
appeals to religious convictions. This is not to say that religious faith,
beliefs, and practice do not have their place in life and the academy more
generally. And, importantly, it does not
mean that such religious beliefs are incorrect. Philosophy is not anti-religious. Rather,
philosophy avoids making appeals to or taking a stance on the truth or falsity
of such religious matters. Philosophy
has become, by and large (albeit imperfectly), methodologically agnostic about matters religious.[5] I think we philosophers can learn to become
methodologically agnostic about matters metaphysical too. When we adopt a meta-philosophical outlook
that shows us how our explanatory needs are better served by theories and
accounts that avoid metaphysical claims and arguments, we can learn to outgrow metaphysics and lose our grip on
why we thought of it as a necessary or important component of philosophical
analysis to begin with. By shedding
metaphysical “training wheels” and highlighting alternative accounts that
explain the phenomena at least as well or better than metaphysically-loaded
accounts, we can gain confidence to do philosophy without metaphysics. We may eventually forget why we took ourselves to need metaphysical supports in
philosophy at all, in much the same way why modern philosophers are often
puzzled or unmoved by their predecessors’ invocation of the divine. Still, such a methodological shift does not
show or even seek to demonstrate that there is something substantively mistaken
about metaphysics, any more than philosophy’s parallel methodological shift
about matter religious should be taken as damning of religion. Rather, the counsel I hope to espouse is that
metaphysics is no longer something that we need concern ourselves with in order
to do philosophy well or, indeed, better
than before.
[1] Jürgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical
Thinking: Philosophical Essays, trans. William Mark Hohengarten (Cambridge,
MA: The MIT Press, 1992).
[2] When I speak of delimiting
metaphysics, importantly, I do not mean only contemporary metaphysics as
studied in analytic philosophy departments: I mean the full gamut of
metaphysical views across history and continents. My inquiry will not shy away from discussions
of metaphysics by Heidegger and Adorno, and I look forward to interdisciplinary
discussions of critical theory and “continental” thinkers with my colleagues in
the humanities.
[3] Why “onto-logical” and not “ontological”? I use “onto-logical” rather than
“ontological” to emphasize that what I mean by this term is actually closer to
the explicit conjunction of the predicate, “onto-,” and the notion, “logical,”
than standard usage of the term “ontological.” I thus take onto-logical
operators to be broadly logical operators that take objects, referred to
linguistically by nouns or nominalizations, as their arguments where standard,
truth-functional logical operators take sentences as their arguments—hence onto-logical. I take these
operators as broadly logical operators
in that they allow us to render in explicit terms inferential operations we
have implicitly mastered anyway simply by being competent participants in an
autonomous discursive practice: they allow us to say what we previously could
only inferentially do, where these things that we could previously only do are universal in the sense of being things
that any sapient, concept-using creatures could do simply in virtue of belonging
to a linguistic practice. In this view
of the “broadly logical,” I follow along the lines of the view Robert Brandom
outlines in his Between Saying and Doing:
Towards an Analytic Pragmatism, (2008,
47-54).
[4] As Habermas writes, “antimetaphysical
countermovements … remain within the horizon of possible thought set by
metaphysics itself” (1992, 29).
[5] Of course some philosophers still
do engage in philosophy of religion with particular theological content, and in
this way do not maintain a methodological agnosticism about religious
matters. But some philosophers of
religion still do seek a kind of methodological agnosticism and instead seek to
describe religion or matters of faith from an external, analytic perspective. And even for those philosophers of religion
who do argue for some vindicatory account of religious practice, still,
oftentimes, the details or particulars of religious dogmas or faith
are purposefully left open by a particular philosophy of religion, within a
given scope. In this way, the
methodological agnosticism of contemporary philosophy still may have a grip
even within the philosophy of religion.
