David Hume is the St. Francis of modern metaphysics, the patron saint of ontological ascetics: the only facts are the mundane first-order physical facts about how things actually are (..) undercut the distinction between various non-Humean forms of metaphysical realism and something akin to a Wittgensteinian linguistic pluralism (..) One familiar kind of philosophical pluralism is exemplified by W. V. Quine's brand of ontological relativity, and perhaps in a different way by other forms of scientific relativism. Here the plurality consists in the possible existence of a range of alternative scientific worldviews, each empirically adequate to more or less the same degree, and none, even in principle, hent coherent moral viewpoints. (..) what would be a vertical pluralism? It would be the view that philosophy should recognize an irreducible plurality of kinds of discourse - the moral as well as the scientific, for example. I shall mainly use the term discourse pluralism (cf W's language games) (..) IV. TRUTH AND FACTUALITY Are the notions of truth, fact, assertion, belief, and so on foundational categories, inevitably central to any theoretical account of our use of language? Or are they mere products of language, categories thrown up by language itself, and not therefore presupposed by a proper explanatory theory of language? (..) So discourse pluralism is ultimately an empirical doctrine, albeit a highly theoretical one, and one that concerns the linguistic part of the natural world. (..) The discourse pluralist is not denying that scientific utterances and moral utterances are alike in being meaningful speech acts, but simply that there is any more substantial sense in which they are both "statements of fact," or "descriptions of how things are." (..) Quine's irrealism about meaning seems very much at home with the view that there is no substantial unity to the factual, descriptive, or truth-bearing part of language as a whole; no single such semantic category, in any substantial sense. (..) important question as to how we set the limits to pluralistic tolerance. (..) The pluralist can allow, on the one hand, that there is no uniform way in which each of the many language games affects our well-being; and yet, on the other, that in all or most such games there is some benefit in argument, and hence in the availability of a notion of truth. (..) our use of the notion of truth is not strictly uniform across the range of different domains of discourse. There are significant differences, underlying the predominant pattern. (..) account in being explanatory rather than analytic: its focus will be not on the question "What is truth?" but on the question "Why do ordinary speakers have such a notion as truth?" (..) The pluralist accepts with all sincerity that there are moral states of affairs, possible worlds, numbers, or whatever. (..) pluralism sits quite happily with a nonmetaphysical or "minimal" realism. (..) On one reading, the Quinean doctrine is effectively a principle of ontological quietism - the principle that there is no separate second-order science of ontology, but simply the mundane business of existential quantification carried out by first-order specialists in the course of their working lives. (..) Instrumentalism is a form of nonfactualism. Like additive monism, though for a different reason, it thus depends on a substantial distinction between factual and nonfactual uses of language. (..) vs the theoretical error about language, namely, the view that there is a single substantial category of descriptive or fact-stating discourse. It follows that the Humean conception of metaphysical virtue was always misguided. In granting the lapsed Humeans their metaphysical comforts, we thus deny them their Humean metaphysical virtue; for we say that there has never been any such thing. (..) a well-motivated pluralism might allow one to endorse something like Daniel Dennett's account of the role and origins of intentional psychology, without having to concern oneself as to whether the view amounts to instrumentalism about the mental. |