As I am still at the outset of my philosophical journey, it is not surprising that I have changed my mind on many substantial issues on more than a few occasions. So why post about it then? For one, because it’s the early hours of the morning and I’m bored. But more importantly, I think it’s important to remind whatever everyday people might read this that one really can change important beliefs in response to evidence and argument. So what are some areas where I have changed my mind, or my positions are evolving?
-I have switched to anti-foundationalism in epistemology (making the blog title somewhat ironic)
-To use one of Brian Leiter’s useful distinctions, I have stepped back from “substantive naturalism” to a more inclusive, pluralistic methodological naturalism. I now regard as “naturalistic” any project of inquiry which 1. takes methodological inspiration and form from the sciences and 2. takes serious the results of the science. E.g. in my understanding of naturalism, even much of the philosophy of later Wittgenstein could be considered naturalistic insofar as it is anti-metaphysical, anti-foundationalist, and recognition of both the social and fallible nature of human inquiry and our nature as real, living creatures embedded in a social context.
-I have switched from reductive (physicalist, specifically) to non-reductive naturalism. I was inspired both by Quine and Nietzsche on this point. First, I came to see the choice of “the smallest entities quantified over in our physical theories” as what is “really real” to be arbitrary. If, say, we were beings living at the sub-atomic level, we might say that our world of probabilities and field behavior and virtual particles was “merely apparent” and the real world “out there” operated on these alien, classical principles. Second, I don’t see reductive physicalism as actually a necessary or even particularly obvious implication of our best scientific theories. Now, this is not to posit any kind of dualism; I accept supervenience in nature as fairly obvious. However, I now say that “what there is” is simply what our best natural theories (philosophical and scientific) say there is (I may eventually accept something like Quine’s ontological commitment, though for now Nietzsche has made me cautious of ontology and I will proceed with great caution in this area). There is no reason to regard composite entities as “less real,” for as Nietzsche points out in Beyond Good and Evil, it only makes sense to speak of mere appearance as merely illusory if there is some “really real” thing-in-itself (a la Kant or Plato) lurking out there/back there somewhere. If there is no ultimate thing-in-itself, however, as I understand from non-reductive naturalism, then the “mereness” of composite entities goes away.
-In metaethics I am becoming skeptical of moral realism, a position I previously embraced. I’ve been on an increasingly rapid slide towards anti-realism. Originally I defended reductive naturalist moral realism, what I suppose one might call a sort of “welfarism,” but was never very confident about it. I desperately wanted to be a moral realist, and I felt like I could almost grasp a working theory if I just reached a little farther. As my own reductive naturalism/physicalism crumbled before me, I initially grew optimistic about the prospects for moral realism, because now I didn’t have to provide a reductionist account of the good, leading me to read up on and briefly entertain the Cornell realism of David Brink et al. But now I am finding even this unpersuasive after having read Nietzsche – again, more seriously, at an older age (though still young – I’m just out of high school as opposed to in high school!) – and Bernard Williams. This is not to say there isn’t an ethical dimension to life in that we still have to navigate the difficulties of figuring out how to live together and how to live good lives. But the key is that this “good” means “good” like “good sex,” not morally good. There is no further fact of moral rightness or wrongness once we’ve dealt with all the particulars of the issue at hand.
-In political philosophy, I have become less of an “idealist” and more of a realist. This is related to my developing moral skepticism. If morality really is, as Bernard Williams calls it, a “peculiar institution,” then there are no problems pertaining to the relationship between law, politics, and morality. Positivism, interpretavism, and natural law all become extraneous. Politics are just one more thing humans do, and it is a nuanced, fallible enterprise that we use in the course of existing as beings which live in a society. This is not to say we can’t do it better, or that there is no political normativity, merely that we should not start with some vision, defined in terms of (even if disconnected from in the case of positivism) morality, of how things ought to be, but rather that we should just look at how things actually are and then try and work from there. Like in morality, this is a broadly “ethical” enterprise in nature, but it is not “moral” in the sense that there is some further rightness or wrongness beyond all the particulars.
Rational A Priori 