John Shook’s analysis of Naturalism

John Shook is one of the leading philosophers of naturalism. My understanding is that he advocates for pragmatic naturalism (evidence: he edited a book with that title, and has published books about the pragmatists William James and John Dewey). My version of skeptical naturalism also leverages pragmatism (pragmatic empiricism, specifically).

But Shook will tell you that I am wrong, that naturalism simply can’t be combined with skepticism.

Let’s try to understand his point of view, which can be found here: http://www.naturalisms.org/science.htm

Shook explains that “There are six primary options when considering whether science yields knowledge about reality” and he goes through them one by one to evaluate whether or not they can be compatible with naturalism.

First on his list is skepticism (which, remember, I think biology forces on us, since there is no plausible biological method for organisms on earth to perceive the world as it is, and that what we mistake for perception is actually a construction by the brain treated as if it is the world—a stand-in).

Describing skepticism as a worldview, Shook writes

“Reality cannot be known at all. All knowledge is impossible because of fatal flaws within any ways of attempted knowing. This option is usually called “Radical” or “Philosophical” Skepticism. This option is NOT the same as the ordinary skepticism of common sense, or the scientific skepticism that demands experimental evidence to have knowledge.”1

This is the essence of skepticism, although I do have a quibble with it. The claim is not that “all knowledge is impossible”—of course knowledge is possible! Organisms like us do tons of knowing! Rather the claim of philosophical (and academic) skepticism is that all knowledge of reality is impossible, where “reality” refers to the “mind-independent, observer-independent” physical world (where, of course, organisms like us who are observers, organisms with consciousness, exist).

By the word “reality”, we thus mean exclusive of the “observer” or “mind” aspect of organisms like us. Because after all consciousness is all about knowing. The point of radical or philosophical skepticism is that all this knowing is not knowing of the mind-independent, observer-independent aspect of reality: it’s knowing of a biologically created (brain-created) stand-in which organisms employ pragmatically to navigate reality.

We will see that the reason Shook rejects skepticism as a basis for naturalism is because skepticism is incompatible with scientific realism, and Shook believes naturalism requires scientific realism to stand on. (This is the obvious point of disagreement—and later on when we talk about how to define naturalism, we’ll see that the disagreement carries on into that discussion, as one would expect.)

Let’s continue with Shooks six primary options.

The second one is

“Reality only consists of what science cannot know about. There is another non-scientific way of understanding reality that should be trusted instead of science. Since science’s conclusions do not agree with this non-scientific way of understanding reality, science is completely untrustworthy.”

Not surprisingly, this is where mysticism, spiritualism, idealism, rationalism reside. In fact, here you will find the residences of a great many people today. It is not an option for naturalism.

Third, Shook gives us

“Science is rarely able to give reliable knowledge about reality. Science can occasionally provide reliable knowledge, but only about a limited portion or aspect of reality.”

Here he breaks out two varieties. The first (3A) stresses pure reason (or religious intuition?) as a more reliable alternative to science. Here Shook includes “[m]ost types of Platonism, Idealism, Phenomenalism, and Phenomenology “

Anti-Realism

More interesting is 3B. This is where Shook places anti-realism (the rejection of scientific realism).

“The scientific anti-realist has decided that none of arguments for Scientific Realism (the view that science does provide some genuine knowledge of reality) are convincing. In the 20th century, scientific anti-realists have preferred types of Empiricism (like Positivism‘s view that science can only describe patterns of phenomena), or Social Constructivism (the view that science’s claims are largely caused by cultural/political forces). Another type of empiricism is Instrumentalism, which holds that science can only give knowledge about directly or instrumentally observable entities.”

What Shook doesn’t list here is my preferred version of anti-realism: biological constructivism. There are other names for it: neurological constructivism, scientific constructivism, model-dependent realism come to mind.

That last (model-dependent realism) is from The Grand Design, a 2010 book by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow.

According to the idea of model-dependent realism …, our brains interpret the input from our sensory organs by making a model of the outside world. We form mental concepts of our home, trees, other people, the electricity that flows from wall sockets, atoms, molecules, and other universes. These mental concepts are the only reality we can know. There is no model-independent test of reality.2

The neuroscientist György Buzsáki makes a related point in the June 2022 issue of Scientific American. Buzsáki rejects what he calls the traditional “outside-in framework” because it relies on an outside observer (the objective scientist). He provides an example of someone “seeing” a flower; from the outside-in framework

A stimulus—the image of a flower—reaches the eyes, and the brain responds by causing neurons to fire. This theory is plausible only with the involvement of an “experimenter” to observe and establish a relation between the flower and the neuronal responses it induces. Absent the experimenter, neurons in the sensory cortex do not “see” the flower.3

Instead, Buzsáki proposes an “inside-out framework.”

The alternative, inside-out theory does away with the experimenter. It presumes instead that we come to understand the external world by taking actions—moving a flower, for instance—to learn about an object. To accomplish this task, inputs from action-initiating neurons combine with sensory inputs to provide an understanding of the object’s size shape and other attributes. A meaningful picture arises, allowing the neurons to “see” the flower.4

The outside-in framework relies on the assumption of scientific realism, whereas the inside-out framework does not. In similar fashion, Hawking’s model-dependent realism bypasses the need to assume scientific realism.

Donald Hoffman, who I mentioned in a previous post, is an earlier (and more forceful) proponent of the idea that our brains construct what we see.5 (Seems to me, Hawking and Mlodinow were knowledgable of modern currents in neuroscience and developed their model-dependent realism accordingly.)

Realism vs Realism

The reader might wonder why I include model-dependent realism as an example of anti-realism? How can a type of realism be a type of anti-realism?

Blame philosophers.

In philosophy there are two quite different “primary” meanings of the term realism. The first is the assertion that the physical world exists independent of mind (often referred to as belief in a mind-independent or observer-independent reality). This meaning of realism stands opposed to idealism. Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow mean this sort of realism when describing model-dependent realism. They assert that there is indeed a physical reality—it’s just that we can’t actually know it as it is, so we construct models which stand in for it.

The other (and more common) meaning of realism in philosophy is the specific assertion of scientific realism—but beware because there is a grand philosophical tradition of confounding these two realism. Scientific realism necessarily embraces the first sort of (mind-independent) realism. But so do most anti-realists (those who reject scientific realism—I’ve argued, for example, that scientific realism fails to take mind-independent realism seriously enough.)

Scientific realism tacks on two additional claims.

Semantically, [scientific] realism is committed to a literal interpretation of scientific claims about the world. In common parlance, realists take theoretical statements at “face value”. According to realism, claims about scientific objects, events, processes, properties, and relations (I will use the term “scientific entity” as a generic term for these sorts of things henceforth), whether they be observable or unobservable, should be construed literally as having truth values, whether true or false.6

And the second is this:

Epistemologically, [scientific] realism is committed to the idea that theoretical claims (interpreted literally as describing a mind-independent reality) constitute knowledge of the world. This contrasts with skeptical positions which, even if they grant the metaphysical and semantic dimensions of realism, doubt that scientific investigation is epistemologically powerful enough to yield such knowledge, or, as in the case of some antirealist positions, insist that it is only powerful enough to yield knowledge regarding observables. The epistemological dimension of realism, though shared by realists generally, is sometimes described more specifically in contrary ways…. Amidst these differences, however, a general recipe for realism is widely shared: our best scientific theories give true or approximately true descriptions of observable and unobservable aspects of a mind-independent world.7

Model-dependent realism rejects this for a far more pragmatic view of scientific theories, one

which accepts that reality can always be interpreted in a number of different ways, and focuses on how well our models of the world do at describing the observed phenomena. It claims that it is meaningless to talk about the “true reality” of the model. The only meaningful thing is the usefulness of the model.8

Like biological constructivism, model-dependent realism asserts the existence of a mind/observer-independent reality, but denies that we can know it as it is. (In short, this is naturalism based on skepticism.) Hawking and Mlodinow arrived at this conclusion based on their understanding of modern neuroscience, where it is clear that organisms have no way to perceive the world and so must construct a model of it.

And science is a conceptual continuation of that construction.

Back to John Shook

We left off with John Shook placing anti-realism under category 3B, a variant of

“Science is rarely able to give reliable knowledge about reality. Science can occasionally provide reliable knowledge, but only about a limited portion or aspect of reality.”

According to Shook, “These empiricisms [the variations of anti-realism] can’t develop into viable naturalisms, and instead collapse into 3A options such as idealism or phenomenalism.”

But I think we can see clearly now that 3B is the wrong place for most versions of anti-realism—certainly this is the case for model-dependent realism and biological constructivism. Both properly fall under Shook’s category of skepticism. This is because, for reasons of neurobiology, both embrace skepticism about our ability to know reality as it actually is.

Both assert that this is not a problem for science.

Both insist on a mind-independent world which is primary and existed before organisms like us evolved into being.

Both therefore embrace the meta-philosophy of naturalism, and do so via skepticism.

Conclusion: John Shooks says naturalism can’t be based on skepticism9, but I think we’ve shown that he is mistaken.

Footnotes