Naturalism
Naturalism
NATURALISM IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
Naturalism is a term that stands for a family of positions that endorse the general idea of being true to, or guided by, “nature,” an idea as old as philosophy itself (e.g., Aristotle is often called a “naturalist”) and as various and open-ended as interpretations of “nature.” Since the rise of the modern scientific revolution in the seventeenth century, nature has come to be identified increasingly with the-world-as-studied-by-the-sciences. Consequently, naturalism has come to refer to a set of positions defined in terms of the scientific image of nature or the methods of scientific inquiry. This brief article focuses upon explicating three versions of this modern scientific naturalism: (1) naturalism in the arts, especially literature; (2) philosophical naturalism; and (3) naturalism in the social sciences. These different naturalisms involve different ways of appealing to science, whether it be adopting a scientific stance toward human and social life, or a broadly empirical approach to inquiry in some area, or a scientific world-view, or some combination of these.
NATURALISM IN THE ARTS
Naturalism in the field of the arts refers to art that depicts everyday subjects in a “realistic” manner, free from stylization, idealization, and academic convention. Although naturalism has been used to describe a style of painting since the late seventeenth century (e.g., Caravaggio’s), it only became an important term of art criticism in the nineteenth century when it was applied to painters such as Gustave Courbet (1819–1877). Naturalism as a literary category was first applied to a genre of French fiction exemplified by the writings of Émile Zola (1840–1902), which built on the antiromantic “realist” fiction of Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) and Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), writers who deliberately adopted a scientific—that is, detached and objective—approach to human life. The vision of the human depicted in naturalist literature owed much to a picture of the world suggested by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution: a purposeless, Godless world of competitive striving where free will is an illusion. Under these historical and ideological influences, American literary naturalism arose in the 1890s as a reaction to the “realist” fiction of middle- and upper-class life of the 1870s and 1880s—for example, the novels of Henry James (1811–1882). Its chief exemplars include Stephen Crane (1871–1900), Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945), Jack London (1876–1916), and Frank Norris (1870–1902). The American school is typified by an anti-individualist view of humans as largely determined by environmental forces, frank and animalistic depictions of sex and violence, and an unflinching treatment of the harsh realities faced by immigrants and the working-class in modern industrialized U.S. cities.
It is important to note, however, that not all appeals to nature are to be understood in terms of an allegiance to naturalism. For example, the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) and Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)—memorably, Thoreau’s Walden (1854)— reveal a vision of nature that challenges the assumptions of naturalism, particularly the idea that the objective is a matter of excluding the subjective. Although Emerson and Thoreau accepted that nature is everything that is distinct from one’s own consciousness, they were interested in a larger reciprocity and interdependence of mind and nature that bears the influence of German philosophers such as Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and F. W. von Schelling (1775–1854). Another example of an antinaturalist appeal to nature is the tradition of thinking about human conduct and law in terms of natural rights, or the related, but older, idea of natural law. Here the appeal to nature refers to principles or rules of conduct that are given as opposed to humanly constructed. In this tradition what is naturally given is typically understood as a matter of God’s law. Naturalism, of course, is strongly opposed to theism.
PHILOSOPHICAL NATURALISM
Modern philosophy recognizes two basic strains of naturalism: ontological naturalism and methodological naturalism. Ontological naturalism takes the subject matter of the natural sciences as its model of the genuinely real. A leading advocate, David Armstrong, holds “that reality consists of nothing but a single all-embracing spatiotemporal system” (1980, p. 149). He is representative in thinking that this implies a conception of nature as a single unified causal order. This ontological outlook is primarily meant to exclude supernatural entities such as the Christian God, demons, spirits, and souls—none of which are the subject matter of a natural science. Naturalism can accommodate religion, however, but only to the extent that it is interpreted as a certain kind of experience which can be understood without any commitment to the existence of supernatural entities or events (e.g., angels, miracles).
It is important to note that ontological naturalism comes in more or less reductive forms depending upon one’s attitude to the social (or human) sciences. Typically, naturalists favor a reductive form—because they tend to share a skeptical attitude to the social (or human) sciences—claiming that the natural world is nothing but the world posited by the explanations of the natural sciences exclusively (e.g., physics, chemistry, and biology). This, in turn, leads to a sharp contrast between the scientific image of the world and the manifest image of everyday human experience. Consequently, contemporary metaphysicians ask how we can “place” items in the manifest image (e.g., reasons, meanings, moral goodness, and aesthetic values) within the scientific image. Such debates within naturalism are often conducted in a semantic key. That is, the question is one about how we are to interpret the core concepts of a target nonscientific discourse given a scientific view of nature. For instance, how are we to account for or refer to anything in nature? If not, are the sentences in which it occurs true or false, for our thought and talk about moral goodness? Does the term good refer to anything in nature? If not, are the sentences in which it occurs true or false, or do they play a nonfactual role? The semantic project of accounting for the function of nonscientific concepts in this way is called naturalization. Just how revisionary of ordinary ways of thinking this project is depends upon two important questions: whether there are irreducible and indispensable nonscientific forms of understanding, and whether one accepts the legitimacy and distinctiveness of the social sciences.
The second strain of philosophical naturalism is methodological naturalism, which takes scientific methods of inquiry as its model. It holds that nature as a whole is properly studied by the same empirical methods as those employed by the natural sciences. Because human beings are a part of nature, this implies that the study of human nature is continuous with the study of nonhuman nature. It also implies that knowledge is, properly speaking, scientific knowledge. W. V. Quine draws the radical conclusion that there is no a priori knowledge, thereby undermining traditional philosophy (see especially Quine 1964 and 1969). The question whether philosophy has any autonomy in relation to science has subsequently become an important topic of dispute.
NATURALISM IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
Naturalism in the social sciences is usually understood as a form of skepticism about the legitimacy of the social sciences or, less drastically, the doctrine that the posits of these sciences are reducible in principle to the posits of paradigmatic natural sciences such as physics. However, there is nothing in naturalism itself that requires this dismissive or reductive approach to the ontology of the social sciences, and not all naturalists share it (e.g., pragmatists such as John Dewey). Notwithstanding, most writers in the social sciences understand naturalism primarily as a methodological doctrine: the view that the methods of inquiry of the natural sciences (e.g., the attempt to discover laws or law-like regularities, empirical testing and corroboration, a clear distinction between facts and values) are no less applicable to man than to nature—that is, to the study of people, society, morality, politics, and culture. Such methodological naturalism is often coupled with a rejection of the influential idea defended by Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), Max Weber (1864–1920), and others that there is a fundamental difference between the scientific understanding of nature (Erklären ) and the sort of empathetic understanding of human beings that involves seeing things from the subject’s point of view (Verstehen ).
An important debate in philosophy and the social sciences is whether we should follow the naturalistic identification of nature with the scientific image of the world. John McDowell, for example, has argued that it is a metaphysical prejudice to treat the “disenchanted” world of the natural and social sciences as exhausting our conception of nature. What it arguably leaves out of account is a richer conception of the world revealed to critical human thought and experience, one that includes sui generis normative phenomena such as reasons, meanings, and values.
SEE ALSO Atheism; Industrialization; Kant, Immanuel; Modernization; Natural Rights; Philosophy; Realism; Science; Scientific Method; Secular, Secularism, Secularization; Theism; Thoreau, Henry David
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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David Macarthur