From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_(philosophy)In philosophy, naturalism is the idea or belief that only natural laws and forces (as opposed to supernatural or spiritual ones) operate in the universe.
Adherents of naturalism assert that natural laws are the only rules
that govern the structure and behavior of the natural world, and that
the changing universe is at every stage a product of these laws.
Naturalism is not so much a special system as a point of view or
tendency common to a number of philosophical and religious systems; not
so much a well-defined set of positive and negative doctrines as an
attitude or spirit pervading and influencing many doctrines. As the name
implies, this tendency consists essentially in looking upon nature as
the one original and fundamental source of all that exists, and in
attempting to explain everything in terms of nature. Either the limits
of nature are also the limits of existing reality, or at least the first
cause, if its existence is found necessary,
has nothing to do with the working of natural agencies. All events,
therefore, find their adequate explanation within nature itself. But, as
the terms nature and natural are themselves used in more than one
sense, the term naturalism is also far from having one fixed meaning.
According to philosopher David Papineau, naturalism can be separated into an ontological component and a methodological component.
"Ontological" refers to ontology, the philosophical study of what
exists. On an ontological level, philosophers often treat naturalism as
equivalent to materialism. For example, philosopher Paul Kurtz argues that nature is best accounted for by reference to material principles. These principles include mass, energy, and other physical and chemical properties accepted by the scientific community. Further, this sense of naturalism holds that spirits, deities, and ghosts are not real and that there is no "purpose" in nature. This stronger formulation of naturalism is commonly referred to as metaphysical naturalism.
On the other hand, the more moderate view that naturalism should be
assumed in one's working methods as the current paradigm, without any
further consideration of whether naturalism is true in the robust
metaphysical sense, is called methodological naturalism.
With the exception of pantheists—who believe that Nature is identical with divinity while not recognizing a distinct personal anthropomorphic god—theists challenge the idea that nature contains all of reality. According to some theists, natural laws may be viewed as secondary causes of God(s).
In the 20th century, Willard Van Orman Quine, George Santayana,
and other philosophers argued that the success of naturalism in science
meant that scientific methods should also be used in philosophy.
According to this view, science and philosophy are not always distinct
from one another, but instead form a continuum.
History of Naturalism
Ancient and medieval philosophy
Naturalism
is most notably a Western phenomenon, but an equivalent idea has long
existed in the East. Naturalism was the foundation of two out of six
orthodox schools and one heterodox school of Hinduism. Samkhya, one of the oldest schools of Indian philosophy puts nature (Prakriti) as the primary cause of the universe, without assuming the existence of a personal God or Ishwara. The Carvaka, Nyaya, Vaisheshika schools originated in the 7th, 6th, and 2nd century BCE, respectively. Similarly, though unnamed and never articulated into a coherent system, one tradition within Confucian philosophy embraced a form of Naturalism dating to the Wang Chong
in the 1st century, if not earlier, but it arose independently and had
little influence on the development of modern naturalist philosophy or
on Eastern or Western culture.
Western metaphysical naturalism originated in ancient Greek philosophy. The earliest pre-Socratic philosophers, especially the Milesians (Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes) and the atomists (Leucippus and Democritus), were labeled by their peers and successors "the physikoi" (from the Greek φυσικός or physikos, meaning "natural philosopher" borrowing on the word φύσις or physis,
meaning "nature") because they investigated natural causes, often
excluding any role for gods in the creation or operation of the world.
This eventually led to fully developed systems such as Epicureanism, which sought to explain everything that exists as the product of atoms falling and swerving in a void.
The current usage of the term naturalism "derives from debates in
America in the first half of the 20th century. The self-proclaimed
'naturalists' from that period included John Dewey, Ernest Nagel, Sidney Hook and Roy Wood Sellars."
Aristotle surveyed the thought of his predecessors and conceived of nature in a way that charted a middle course between their excesses.
Plato's world of eternal and unchanging Forms, imperfectly represented in matter by a divine Artisan, contrasts sharply with the various mechanistic Weltanschauungen, of which atomism
was, by the fourth century at least, the most prominent… This debate
was to persist throughout the ancient world. Atomistic mechanism got a
shot in the arm from Epicurus… while the Stoics adopted a divine teleology…
The choice seems simple: either show how a structured, regular world
could arise out of undirected processes, or inject intelligence into the
system. This was how Aristotle… when still a young acolyte of Plato,
saw matters. Cicero… preserves Aristotle's own cave-image: if troglodytes
were brought on a sudden into the upper world, they would immediately
suppose it to have been intelligently arranged. But Aristotle grew to
abandon this view; although he believes in a divine being, the Prime Mover is not the efficient cause
of action in the Universe, and plays no part in constructing or
arranging it... But, although he rejects the divine Artificer, Aristotle
does not resort to a pure mechanism of random forces. Instead he seeks
to find a middle way between the two positions, one which relies heavily
on the notion of Nature, or phusis.
With the rise and dominance of Christianity in the West and the later spread of Islam, metaphysical naturalism was generally abandoned by intellectuals. Thus, there is little evidence for it in medieval philosophy.
The reintroduction of Aristotle's empirical epistemology as well as
previously lost treatises by Greco-Roman natural philosophers which was
begun by the medieval Scholastics without resulting in any noticeable increase in commitment to naturalism.
Modern philosophy
It was not until the early modern era of philosophy and the Age of Enlightenment that naturalists like Benedict Spinoza (who put forward a theory of psychophysical parallelism), David Hume, and the proponents of French materialism (notably Denis Diderot, Julien La Mettrie, and Baron d'Holbach)
started to emerge again in the 17th and 18th centuries. In this period,
some metaphysical naturalists adhered to a distinct doctrine, materialism, which became the dominant category of metaphysical naturalism widely defended until the end of the 19th century.
Immanuel Kant rejected (reductionist) materialist positions in metaphysics, but he was not hostile to naturalism. His transcendental philosophy is considered to be a form of liberal naturalism.
In late modern philosophy, Naturphilosophie, a form of natural philosophy, was developed by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel as an attempt to comprehend nature in its totality and to outline its general theoretical structure.
A version of naturalism that arose after Hegel was Ludwig Feuerbach's anthropological materialism, which influenced Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's historical materialism, Engels's "materialist dialectic" philosophy of nature (Dialectics of Nature), and their follower Georgi Plekhanov's dialectical materialism.
Another notable school of late modern philosophy advocating naturalism was German materialism: members included Ludwig Büchner, Jacob Moleschott, and Carl Vogt.
Contemporary philosophy
A politicized version of naturalism that has arisen in contemporary philosophy is Ayn Rand's Objectivism. Objectivism is an expression of capitalist ethical idealism within a naturalistic framework. An example of a more progressive naturalistic philosophy is secular humanism.
The current usage of the term naturalism "derives from debates in America in the first half of the last century.
Currently, metaphysical naturalism is more widely embraced than in previous centuries, especially but not exclusively in the natural sciences and the Anglo-American, analytic philosophical
communities. While the vast majority of the population of the world
remains firmly committed to non-naturalistic worldviews, prominent
contemporary defenders of naturalism and/or naturalistic theses and
doctrines today include Kai Nielsen, J. J. C. Smart, David Malet Armstrong, David Papineau, Paul Kurtz, Brian Leiter, Daniel Dennett, Michael Devitt, Fred Dretske, Paul and Patricia Churchland, Mario Bunge, Jonathan Schaffer, Hilary Kornblith, Quentin Smith, Paul Draper and Michael Martin, among many other academic philosophers.
According to David Papineau, contemporary naturalism is a consequence of the build-up of scientific evidence during the twentieth century for the "causal closure of the physical", the doctrine that all physical effects can be accounted for by physical causes.
By the middle of the twentieth
century, the acceptance of the causal closure of the physical realm led
to even stronger naturalist views. The causal closure
thesis implies that any mental and biological causes must themselves be
physically constituted, if they are to produce physical effects. It
thus gives rise to a particularly strong form of ontological naturalism,
namely the physicalist doctrine that any state that has physical
effects must itself be physical.
From the 1950s onwards,
philosophers began to formulate arguments for ontological physicalism.
Some of these arguments appealed explicitly to the causal closure of the
physical realm (Feigl 1958, Oppenheim and Putnam 1958). In other cases,
the reliance on causal closure lay below the surface. However, it is
not hard to see that even in these latter cases the causal closure
thesis played a crucial role.
— David Papineau, "Naturalism" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
In contemporary continental philosophy, Quentin Meillassoux proposed speculative materialism, a post-Kantian return to David Hume which can strengthen classical materialist ideas.
Etymology
The term "methodological naturalism" is much more recent, though. According to Ronald Numbers, it was coined in 1983 by Paul de Vries, a Wheaton College
philosopher. De Vries distinguished between what he called
"methodological naturalism", a disciplinary method that says nothing
about God's existence, and "metaphysical naturalism", which "denies the
existence of a transcendent God". The term "methodological naturalism" had been used in 1937 by Edgar S. Brightman in an article in The Philosophical Review as a contrast to "naturalism" in general, but there the idea was not really developed to its more recent distinctions.
Description
According to Steven Schafersman, naturalism is a philosophy that maintains that;
- "Nature encompasses all that exists throughout space and time;
- Nature (the universe or cosmos) consists only of natural elements, that is, of spatio-temporal physical substance—mass–energy. Non-physical or quasi-physical substance, such as information, ideas, values, logic, mathematics, intellect, and other emergent phenomena, either supervene upon the physical or can be reduced to a physical account;
- Nature operates by the laws of physics and in principle, can be explained and understood by science and philosophy;
- The supernatural does not exist, i.e., only nature is real. Naturalism is therefore a metaphysical philosophy opposed primarily by supernaturalism".
Or, as Carl Sagan succinctly put it: "The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be."
In addition Arthur C. Danto states that Naturalism, in recent usage, is a species of philosophical monism according to which whatever exists or happens is natural
in the sense of being susceptible to explanation through methods which,
although paradigmatically exemplified in the natural sciences, are
continuous from domain to domain of objects and events. Hence,
naturalism is polemically defined as repudiating the view that there
exists or could exist any entities which lie, in principle, beyond the
scope of scientific explanation.
Arthur Newell Strahler
states: "The naturalistic view is that the particular universe we
observe came into existence and has operated through all time and in all
its parts without the impetus or guidance of any supernatural agency."
"The great majority of contemporary philosophers urge that that reality
is exhausted by nature, containing nothing ‘supernatural’, and that the
scientific method should be used to investigate all areas of reality,
including the ‘human spirit’.” Philosophers widely regard naturalism as a
"positive" term, and "few active philosophers nowadays are happy to
announce themselves as 'non-naturalists'". "Philosophers concerned with
religion tend to be less enthusiastic about 'naturalism'" and that
despite an "inevitable" divergence due to its popularity, if more
narrowly construed, (to the chagrin of John McDowell, David Chalmers and Jennifer Hornsby, for example), those not so disqualified remain nonetheless content "to set the bar for 'naturalism' higher."
Alvin Plantinga
stated that Naturalism is presumed to not be a religion. However, in
one very important respect it resembles religion by performing the
cognitive function of a religion. There is a set of deep human questions
to which a religion typically provides an answer. In like manner
naturalism gives a set of answers to these questions".
Providing assumptions required for science
According
to Robert Priddy, all scientific study inescapably builds on at least
some essential assumptions that are untested by scientific processes;
that is, that scientists must start with some assumptions as to the
ultimate analysis of the facts with which it deals. These assumptions
would then be justified partly by their adherence to the types of
occurrence of which we are directly conscious, and partly by their
success in representing the observed facts with a certain generality,
devoid of ad hoc suppositions." Kuhn
also claims that all science is based on an approved agenda of
unprovable assumptions about the character of the universe, rather than
merely on empirical facts. These assumptions—a paradigm—comprise a
collection of beliefs, values and techniques that are held by a given
scientific community, which legitimize their systems and set the
limitations to their investigation.
For naturalists, nature is the only reality, the "correct" paradigm,
and there is no such thing as 'supernatural'. The scientific method is
to be used to investigate all reality, including the human spirit.
Some claim that naturalism is the implicit philosophy of working
scientists, and that the following basic assumptions are needed to
justify the scientific method:
- that there is an objective reality shared by all rational observers.
"The basis for rationality is acceptance of an external objective reality."
"Objective reality is clearly an essential thing if we are to develop a
meaningful perspective of the world. Nevertheless its very existence is
assumed."
"Our belief that objective reality exist is an assumption that it
arises from a real world outside of ourselves. As infants we made this
assumption unconsciously. People are happy to make this assumption that
adds meaning to our sensations and feelings, than live with solipsism."
"Without this assumption, there would be only the thoughts and images
in our own mind (which would be the only existing mind) and there would
be no need of science, or anything else." - that this objective reality is governed by natural laws;
"Science,
at least today, assumes that the universe obeys to knoweable principles
that don't depend on time or place, nor on subjective parameters such
as what we think, know or how we behave." Hugh Gauch argues that science presupposes that "the physical world is orderly and comprehensible." - that reality can be discovered by means of systematic observation and experimentation.
Stanley
Sobottka said: "The assumption of external reality is necessary for
science to function and to flourish. For the most part, science is the
discovering and explaining of the external world." "Science attempts to produce knowledge that is as universal and objective as possible within the realm of human understanding." - that Nature has uniformity of laws and most if not all things in nature must have at least a natural cause.
Biologist Stephen Jay Gould referred to these two closely related propositions as the constancy of nature's laws and the operation of known processes.
Simpson agrees that the axiom of uniformity of law, an unprovable
postulate, is necessary in order for scientists to extrapolate inductive
inference into the unobservable past in order to meaningfully study it.
"The assumption of spatial and temporal invariance of natural laws is
by no means unique to geology since it amounts to a warrant for
inductive inference which, as Bacon showed nearly four hundred years
ago, is the basic mode of reasoning in empirical science. Without
assuming this spatial and temporal invariance, we have no basis for
extrapolating from the known to the unknown and, therefore, no way of
reaching general conclusions from a finite number of observations.
(Since the assumption is itself vindicated by induction, it can in no
way "prove" the validity of induction — an endeavor virtually abandoned
after Hume demonstrated its futility two centuries ago)." Gould also notes that natural processes such as Lyell's "uniformity of process" are an assumption: "As such, it is another a priori assumption shared by all scientists and not a statement about the empirical world."
According to R. Hooykaas: "The principle of uniformity is not a law,
not a rule established after comparison of facts, but a principle,
preceding the observation of facts ... It is the logical principle of
parsimony of causes and of economy of scientific notions. By explaining
past changes by analogy with present phenomena, a limit is set to
conjecture, for there is only one way in which two things are equal, but
there are an infinity of ways in which they could be supposed
different."
- that experimental procedures will be done satisfactorily
without any deliberate or unintentional mistakes that will influence the
results.
- that experimenters won't be significantly biased by their presumptions.
- that random sampling is representative of the entire population.
A
simple random sample (SRS) is the most basic probabilistic option used
for creating a sample from a population. The benefit of SRS is that the
investigator is guaranteed to choose a sample that represents the
population that ensures statistically valid conclusions.
Metaphysical naturalism
Naturalism
is also known as "metaphysical naturalism", "ontological naturalism",
“pure naturalism" and "philosophical naturalism".
Metaphysical naturalism holds that all properties related to consciousness and the mind are reducible to, or supervene upon, nature. Broadly, the corresponding theological perspective is religious naturalism or spiritual naturalism. More specifically, metaphysical naturalism rejects the supernatural concepts and explanations that are part of many religions.
Methodological naturalism
Methodological naturalism
requires scientists to seek explanations in the world around us based
on what we can observe, test, replicate and verify. It is a self-imposed
convention of science.
Methodological naturalism concerns itself with methods of
learning what nature is. These methods are useful in the evaluation of
claims about existence and knowledge and in identifying causal
mechanisms responsible for the emergence of physical phenomena. It
attempts to explain and test scientific endeavors, hypotheses, and
events with reference to natural causes and events. This second sense of
the term "naturalism" seeks to provide a framework within which to
conduct the scientific study of the laws of nature. Methodological
naturalism is a way of acquiring knowledge. It is a distinct system of
thought concerned with a cognitive approach to reality, and is thus a philosophy of knowledge. Studies by sociologist Elaine Ecklund
suggest that religious scientists in practice apply methodological
naturalism. They report that their religious beliefs affect the way they
think about the implications – often moral – of their work, but not the
way they practice science.
Steven Schafersman states that methodological naturalism is "the adoption or assumption of philosophical naturalism within the scientific method
with or without fully accepting or believing it ... science is not
metaphysical and does not depend on the ultimate truth of any
metaphysics for its success, but methodological naturalism must be
adopted as a strategy or working hypothesis for science to succeed. We
may therefore be agnostic about the ultimate truth of naturalism, but
must nevertheless adopt it and investigate nature as if nature is all
that there is."
In a series of articles and books from 1996 onward, Robert T. Pennock wrote using the term "methodological naturalism" to clarify that the scientific method
confines itself to natural explanations without assuming the existence
or non-existence of the supernatural, and is not based on dogmatic metaphysical naturalism. Pennock's testimony as an expert witness at the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial was cited by the Judge in his Memorandum Opinion concluding that "Methodological naturalism is a 'ground rule' of science today":
Expert testimony reveals that since the scientific revolution of the
16th and 17th centuries, science has been limited to the search for
natural causes to explain natural phenomena.... While supernatural
explanations may be important and have merit, they are not part of
science." " It is a "ground rule" that "requires scientists to seek
explanations in the world around us based upon what we can observe,
test, replicate, and verify.
Schafersman writes that "while science as a process only requires
methodological naturalism, I think that the assumption of methodological
naturalism by scientists and others logically and morally entails
ontological naturalism",
and "I maintain that the practice or adoption of methodological
naturalism entails a logical and moral belief in ontological naturalism,
so they are not logically decoupled."
Views on Methodological Naturalism
W. V. O. Quine
W. V. O. Quine
describes naturalism as the position that there is no higher tribunal
for truth than natural science itself. In his view, there is no better
method than the scientific method for judging the claims of science, and
there is neither any need nor any place for a "first philosophy", such
as (abstract) metaphysics or epistemology, that could stand behind and justify science or the scientific method.
Therefore, philosophy should feel free to make use of the
findings of scientists in its own pursuit, while also feeling free to
offer criticism when those claims are ungrounded, confused, or
inconsistent. In Quine's view, philosophy is "continuous with" science
and both are empirical.
Naturalism is not a dogmatic belief that the modern view of science is
entirely correct. Instead, it simply holds that science is the best way
to explore the processes of the universe and that those processes are
what modern science is striving to understand. However, this Quinean
Replacement Naturalism finds relatively few supporters among
philosophers.
Karl Popper
Karl Popper equated naturalism with inductive theory of science. He rejected it based on his general critique of induction, yet acknowledged its utility as means for inventing conjectures.
A naturalistic methodology
(sometimes called an "inductive theory of science") has its value, no
doubt.... I reject the naturalistic view: It is uncritical. Its
upholders fail to notice that whenever they believe to have discovered a
fact, they have only proposed a convention. Hence the convention is
liable to turn into a dogma. This criticism of the naturalistic view
applies not only to its criterion of meaning, but also to its idea of
science, and consequently to its idea of empirical method.
Popper instead proposed that science should adopt a methodology based on falsifiability for demarcation,
because no number of experiments can ever prove a theory, but a single
experiment can contradict one. Popper holds that scientific theories are
characterized by falsifiability.
Alvin Plantinga
Alvin Plantinga, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Notre Dame, and a Christian, has become a well-known critic of naturalism. He suggests, in his evolutionary argument against naturalism, that the probability that evolution has produced humans with reliable true beliefs, is low or inscrutable, unless the evolution of humans was guided (for example, by God). According to David Kahan of the University of Glasgow, in order to understand how beliefs are warranted, a justification must be found in the context of supernatural theism, as in Plantinga's epistemology.
Plantinga argues that together, naturalism and evolution provide an insurmountable "defeater for the belief that our cognitive faculties are reliable", i.e., a skeptical argument along the lines of Descartes' evil demon or brain in a vat.
Take philosophical naturalism
to be the belief that there aren't any supernatural entities – no such
person as God, for example, but also no other supernatural entities, and
nothing at all like God. My claim was that naturalism and contemporary
evolutionary theory are at serious odds with one another – and this
despite the fact that the latter is ordinarily thought to be one of the
main pillars supporting the edifice of the former. (Of course I am not attacking the theory of evolution, or anything in that neighborhood; I am instead attacking the conjunction of naturalism with the view that human beings have evolved in that way. I see no similar problems with the conjunction of theism
and the idea that human beings have evolved in the way contemporary
evolutionary science suggests.) More particularly, I argued that the
conjunction of naturalism with the belief that we human beings have
evolved in conformity with current evolutionary doctrine... is in a
certain interesting way self-defeating or self-referentially incoherent.
— Alvin Plantinga, Naturalism Defeated?: Essays on Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism, "Introduction"
Robert T. Pennock
Robert T. Pennock contends
that as supernatural
agents and powers "are above and beyond the natural world and its
agents and powers" and "are not constrained by natural laws", only
logical impossibilities constrain what a supernatural agent cannot do.
He states: "If we could apply natural knowledge to understand
supernatural powers, then, by definition, they would not be
supernatural." As the supernatural is necessarily a mystery to us, it
can provide no grounds on which one can judge scientific models.
"Experimentation requires observation and control of the variables....
But by definition we have no control over supernatural entities or
forces." Science does not deal with meanings; the closed system of
scientific reasoning cannot be used to define itself. Allowing science
to appeal to untestable supernatural powers would make the scientist's
task meaningless, undermine the discipline that allows science to make
progress, and "would be as profoundly unsatisfying as the ancient Greek
playwright's reliance upon the deus ex machina to extract his hero from a difficult predicament."
Naturalism of this sort says nothing about the existence or
nonexistence of the supernatural, which by this definition is beyond
natural testing. As a practical consideration, the rejection of
supernatural explanations would merely be pragmatic, thus it would
nonetheless be possible for an ontological supernaturalist to espouse
and practice methodological naturalism. For example, scientists may
believe in God while practicing methodological naturalism in their
scientific work. This position does not preclude knowledge that is
somehow connected to the supernatural. Generally however, anything that
one can examine and explain scientifically would not be supernatural,
simply by definition.
Criticism
Applicability of Mathematics to the Material Universe
The late eminent Philosopher of mathematics Mark Steiner
has written extensively on this matter and acknowledges that the
applicability of mathematics constitutes “a challenge to naturalism.”