1 What is naturalism?

TIMOTHY WILLIAMSON

In The Philosophy of Philosophy,1 I defended a view of philosophy as much

less different in aims and methods from other forms of intellectual inquiry
than its self-images usually suggest. Some commentators treated this anti-
exceptionalism about philosophy as a form of naturalism, and wondered
why I did not characterize it explicitly as such. I will explain why not.
Many contemporary philosophers describe themselves as naturalists. They
mean that they believe something like this: there is only the natural
world, and the best way to find out about it is by the scientific method.
So why do I resist being described as a naturalist? Not for any religious
scruple: I am an atheist of the most straightforward kind. But to accept
the naturalist slogan without looking beneath the slick packaging is an
unscientific way to form one’s beliefs about the world, so not something
that even naturalists should recommend.
What, for a start, is the natural world? If we define it as the world of
matter, or the world of atoms, we are left behind by modern physics,
which characterizes the world in far more abstract terms. Anyway, the
best current scientific theories will probably be superseded by future
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scientific developments in various respects. Naturalism is not intended to

be hostage to the details of scientific progress. We might therefore define
the natural world as whatever the scientific method eventually discovers.
Thus naturalism becomes the belief that there is only whatever the
scientific method eventually discovers, and (not surprisingly) the best
way to find out about it is by the scientific method. That is no tautology.
It is not self-evident that there cannot be things only discoverable by
nonscientific means, or not discoverable at all.
Still, naturalism is less restrictive than one might think. For example,
some of its hard-nosed advocates undertake to postulate a soul or a god, if
doing so turns out to be part of the best explanation of our experience, for
that would be an application of scientific method. Naturalism is not
incompatible in principle with all forms of religion. In practice, however,
most naturalists doubt that belief in souls or gods withstands scientific
scrutiny.

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30 Timothy Williamson

What is meant by ‘the scientific method’? Why assume that science

only has one method? For naturalists, although natural sciences like
physics and biology differ from each other in specific ways, at a
sufficiently abstract level they all count as using a single general method.
It involves formulating theoretical hypotheses and testing their predic-
tions against systematic observation and controlled experiment. This is
the hypothetico-deductive method.
One challenge to naturalism is to find a place for mathematics. Natural
sciences rely on it, but should we count it a science in its own right? If
we do, then the description of scientific method just given is wrong, for it
does not fit the science of mathematics, which proves its results by pure
reasoning, rather than the hypothetico-deductive method. Although a few
naturalists, such as Quine, argue that the real evidence in favour of
mathematics comes from its applications in the natural sciences, so
indirectly from observation and experiment, that view does not fit the
way the subject actually develops. When mathematicians assess a
proposed new axiom, they look at its consequences within mathematics,
not outside. On the other hand, if we do not count pure mathematics as
science, we thereby exclude mathematical proof by itself from the
scientific method, and so discredit naturalism. For naturalism privileges
the scientific method over all others, and mathematics is one of the most
spectacular success stories in the history of human knowledge.
Which other disciplines count as science? Logic? Linguistics? History?
Literary theory? How should we decide? The dilemma for naturalists is
this. If they are too inclusive in what they count as science, naturalism
loses its bite. Naturalists typically criticize some traditional forms of
philosophy as insufficiently scientific, because they ignore experimental
tests. How can they maintain such objections unless they restrict scientific
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method to hypothetico-deductivism? But if they are too exclusive in what

they count as science, naturalism loses its credibility, by imposing a
method appropriate to natural science on areas where it is inappropriate.
Unfortunately, rather than clarify the issue, many naturalists oscillate.
When on the attack, they assume an exclusive understanding of science as
hypothetico-deductive. When under attack themselves, they fall back on
a more inclusive understanding of science that drastically waters down
naturalism. Such manoeuvring makes naturalism an obscure article of
faith. I don’t call myself a naturalist because I don’t want to be
implicated in equivocal dogma. Dismissing an idea as ‘inconsistent with
naturalism’ is little better than dismissing it as ‘inconsistent with
Christianity’.
Still, I sympathize with one motive behind naturalism, the aspiration
to think in a scientific spirit. It’s a vague phrase, but one might start to
explain it by emphasizing values like curiosity, honesty, accuracy,

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What is naturalism? 31

precision, and rigour. What matters isn’t paying lip-service to those

qualities – that’s easy – but actually exemplifying them in practice – the
hard part. To speak of the scientific spirit is not to make the naive (and
unscientific) claim that scientists’ motives are always pure. They are human.
Science doesn’t depend on indifference to fame, professional advancement,
money, or comparisons with rivals. Rather, truth is best pursued in social
environments, intellectual communities, that minimize conflict between
such baser motives and the scientific spirit, by rewarding work that
embodies the scientific virtues. Such traditions exist, and not just in
natural science.
The scientific spirit is as relevant in mathematics, history, philosophy,
and elsewhere as in natural science. Where experimentation is the like-
liest way to answer a question correctly, the scientific spirit calls for the
experiments to be done; where other methods – mathematical proof,
archival research, philosophical reasoning – are more relevant it calls for
them instead. Although the methods of natural science could beneficially
be applied more widely than they have been so far, the default assump-
tion must be that the practitioners of a well-established discipline know
what they are doing, and use the available methods most appropriate for
answering its questions. Exceptions may result from a conservative tradi-
tion, or one that does not value the scientific spirit. Still, impatience with
all methods except those of natural science is a poor basis on which to
identify those exceptions.
Naturalism tries to condense the scientific spirit into a philosophical
theory. But no theory can replace that spirit, for any theory can be applied
in an unscientific spirit, as a polemical device to reinforce prejudice.
Naturalism as dogma is one more enemy of the scientific spirit.
Philosophy should be done in a scientific spirit. Therefore we should
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not do it by invoking slogans about naturalism, or dismissing philoso-

phical theories or methods on the basis of results in natural science whose
relevance to them is unclear, or engaging in any of the other forms of
lazy-mindedness that the word ‘naturalism’ has so striking a capacity to
encourage.

Note
1 Timothy Williamson, The Philosophy of Philosophy, Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.

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2 Why I am a naturalist
ALEX ROSENBERG

Naturalism is the philosophical theory that treats science as our

most reliable source of knowledge and scientific method as the most
effective route to knowledge. In his introductory essay, Timothy Williamson
correctly reports that naturalism is popular in philosophy. In fact it is now
a dominant approach in several areas of philosophy: ethics, epistemology,
the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and, most of all, in
metaphysics, the study of the basic constituents of reality. Metaphysics is
important: if it turns out that reality contains only the kinds of things
that hard science recognizes, the implications will be grave for what we
value in human experience.
Naturalism is itself a theory with a research agenda of unsolved
problems. But naturalists’ confidence that it can solve them shouldn’t be
mistaken for “dogmatism,” nor can its successes be written off as “slick
packaging,” two terms Williamson used in his essay to describe why he
rejects naturalism.
Before taking up Williamson’s challenges to naturalism, it’s worth
identifying some of this success in applying science to the solution of
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philosophical problems, some of which even have pay-offs for science.

Perhaps the most notable thing about naturalism is the way its philosophers
have employed Darwin’s theory of natural selection to tame purpose. In
1784 Kant wrote, “There will never be a Newton for the blade of grass.”
What he meant was that physical science could never explain anything
with a purpose, whether it be human thought or a flower’s bending
toward the sun. That would have made everything special about
living things – and especially us – safe from a purely scientific under-
standing. It would have kept questions about humanity the preserve of
religion, mythmaking and the humanities.
Only twenty years or so later the Newton of the blade of grass was
born to the Darwin family in Shropshire, England. On the Origin of
Species revealed how physical processes alone produce the illusion of
design. Random variation and natural selection are the purely physical
source of the beautiful means/ends economy of nature that fools us into

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Why I am a naturalist 33

seeking its designer. Naturalists have applied this insight to reveal the
biological nature of human emotion, perception and cognition, language,
moral value, social bonds and political institutions. Naturalistic philoso-
phy has returned the favor, helping psychology, evolutionary anthro-
pology and biology solve their problems by greater conceptual clarity
about function, adaptation, Darwinian fitness and individual versus group
selection.
While dealing with puzzles that vexed philosophy as far back as Plato,
naturalism has also come to grips with the very challenges Williamson
lays out: physics may be our best take on the nature of reality, but
important parts of physics are not just “abstract,” as he says. Quantum
mechanics is more than abstract. It’s weird. Since naturalistic philosophers
take science seriously as the best description of reality, they accept the
responsibility of making sense of quantum physics. Until we succeed,
naturalists won’t be any more satisfied than Williamson that we know
what the natural world is. But 400 years of scientific success in prediction,
control and technology shows that physics has made a good start. We
should be confident that it will do better than any other approach at
getting things right.
Naturalists recognize that science is fallible. Its self-correction, its
continual increase in breadth and accuracy, give naturalists confidence in
the resources they borrow from physics, chemistry and biology. The
second law of thermodynamics, the periodic table and the principles of
natural selection are unlikely to be threatened by future science. Philosophy
can therefore rely on them to answer many of its questions without fear of
being overtaken by events.
Williamson writes, “It is not self-evident that there cannot be things
only discoverable by non-scientific means, or not discoverable at all” (this
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volume, p. 29). Naturalism doesn’t claim self-evidence for much of any-

thing, and certainly not for its denial that there are non-scientific routes
to knowledge. This denial is inductive: nothing that revelation, inspira-
tion or other non-scientific means ever claimed to discover has yet to
withstand the test of knowledge that scientific findings attain. What are
those tests of knowledge? They are the experimental/observational meth-
ods all the natural sciences share, the social sciences increasingly adopt,
and that naturalists devote themselves to making explicit. Are there facts
about reality “not discoverable” by scientific means “at all”? About the
only way to go about answering this question is to use the methods of
science.
As Williamson notes, naturalism’s greatest challenge “is to find a place
for mathematics” (p. 30). The way it faces the challenge reveals just how
undogmatic naturalism really is. It would be easy to turn one’s back on
the problems mathematics presents. There is the metaphysical problem of

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34 Alex Rosenberg

whether there are numbers in addition to our mental concepts of num-

bers, which like the numerals, “2,” “II” or “ニ” (the Chinese for the
number two), should not be mistaken for the number two that they seem
to refer to. There are the epistemic problems of how if they are abstract
objects, we can have any knowledge about numbers, let alone the
certainty about them that math reveals. One excuse naturalists might
give to turn our backs on these problems is that mathematicians and
scientists don’t care much about them. Another is that no one has ever
provided a satisfactory answer to these questions since they were raised by
Plato. So, no other philosophy can be preferred to naturalism on this
basis. In fact, as all philosophers recognize, naturalism has invested a
huge amount of ingenuity, even genius, seeking scientifically responsible
answers to these hardest of questions. Not with much success as yet by
our own standards, one must admit. But that is the nature of science.
Naturalists acknowledge that mathematics presents them (and all philo-
sophers) with serious unfinished business. That is why Williamson is
wrong to accuse them of “manoeuvring” or treating their theory
as “an obscure article of faith.” Not yet having the solution to all its
problems doesn’t make naturalism into an “equivocal dogma” (p. 30).
Naturalism takes the problem of mathematics seriously, since science
cannot do without it. So naturalism can’t either. But what about other
items on Williamson’s list of disciplines he thinks it would be hard to
count as science: logic, linguistics, history, literary theory? Naturalists
won’t have any trouble counting logic and linguistics as knowledge,
though logic raises all the same problems for epistemology and metaphysics
that mathematics does. History is a harder problem. As a chronicle of the
human past, history is no more problematical for naturalism than natural
history. But the explanations it provides can’t satisfy the tests the
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natural sciences impose on their own explanations. This raises another

problem on naturalism’s research agenda: in some ways it’s a problem like
the one mathematics raises for naturalism, how to certify historical
explanations as real knowledge without adopting a double standard for
what counts as knowledge. That would “water down” naturalism into the
equivocal dogma Williamson charges it with being. When it comes to
history, naturalists have an option we won’t help ourselves to in trying to
figure out mathematical knowledge. We might well come to see that
historical explanations are not contributions to knowledge at all. Instead
they should be treated as works of literature. Historical narratives have
never gained the predictive power of scientific explanations, but the best
of them have stirred our emotions, shaped our values, and affected human
affairs decisively. (Think of The Gulag Archipelago.) They could do all of
these things, and be prized for them, without however ever providing
predictively useful knowledge. The question of whether history should

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Why I am a naturalist 35

count as science remains an open one for naturalism. (More on this in my

rejoinder to Williamson’s reply to this essay; Chapter 4, this volume.)
What about literary theory? Can science, and naturalistic philosophy,
do without it? This is a different question from whether people, as
consumers of literature, can do without it. The question naturalism faces
is whether a discipline like literary theory provides real knowledge.
(Naturalism can’t dodge these questions because it won’t uncritically buy
into Williamson’s “default assumption … that the practitioners of a
well-established discipline know what they are doing, and use the
available methods most appropriate for answering its questions”; p. 31.) If
semiotics, existentialism, hermeneutics, formalism, structuralism, post-
structuralism, deconstruction and postmodernism transparently flout
science’s standards of objectivity, or if they seek arbitrarily to limit the
reach of scientific methods, then naturalism can’t take them seriously as
knowledge. That doesn’t mean anyone should stop doing literary
criticism, any more than they should be foregoing fiction. Naturalism
treats both as fun, but neither as knowledge.
What naturalists really fear is not becoming dogmatic or giving up the
scientific spirit. It’s the threat that the science will end up showing that
much of what we cherish as meaningful in human life is illusory.
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