Ontological Perspectives on Faith and Reason by Don S. Browning
Chapter 9: The Metaphysical Target and the Theological Victim by Malcolm
III. The Abandonment of Positivistic Dogma and the Analytic Turn to Metaphysics
out a traditional metaphysical position, such as the "substance view" of the self, analysts of this kind do not dismiss it out of hand as a species of metaphysical nonsense. Instead, they examine the arguments one by one and challenge the metaphysical to make his claim good. The nature of this challenge has been succinctly stated by Elmer Sprague,
"philosophical debates are hottest between those philosophers who want to make certain entries in the list of what there is in the world and other philosophers who do not want to let them get away with it."20
One important feature of this story is the negative one. Positivists and their successors have not produced an adequate version of the
verifiability principle. However, their ability to nail down the inadequacy of the various formulations of it provides impressive evidence of their rigor. This contrasts sharply with what goes on in theological circles where theologians cannot seem to agree as to what does not "go." Nevertheless, there is some good news for theologians in this story of the quest for the verifiability principle, because the failure to make any particular version of it stick does mean that theology cannot be ruled out of court without examination. However, a word of caution is in order: To stand for an examination is no guaranty of passing it.21
III. The Abandonment of Positivistic Dogma and the Analytic Turn
hand, held their favorite metaphysical whipping boys — Platonic, Heideggenian, and theological statements — constant. These were branded as meaningless, come what may! They then tried desperately to find the broadsword that would eliminate them at one blow without injuring any innocent "scientific" or "common-sense" bystanders.
Now that we have examined the kinds of arguments that analysts have used in attacking the dogma of verifiability, it will be useful to quote an anti-positivistic polemic written by Morton White, a contemporary analyst. It strikes at a number of other dogmas as well. This will help us to appreciate the extent to which the positivistic consensus (if there ever was one outside the confines of the Vienna circle) has broken down among contemporary analysts.
The early Platonism of Moore and Russell, the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements, the attempt to formulate a criterion of cognitive meaning, the emotive theory of ethics, the pragmatic
philosophy of science all of them were at one time liberating forces in the philosophy of the twentieth century. They helped divert
philosophical attention from a number of pseudo-problems; they increased respect for logic and exactness in philosophy; they
encouraged a laudable degree of self-consciousness among philosophers which led to a healthy reexamination of philosophical methods and philosophical aims.
But . . . ideas that were once liberating and which helped puncture the inflationary schemes of traditional philosophy were soon collected and composed into a tradition. . . . The terms "analytic," "meaningless,"
"emotive," and ‘naturalistic fallacy" — to mention only some — became empty slogans instead of revolutionary tools; the quest for meaning replaced the quest for certainty; orthodoxy followed revolt.
Logic, physics, and ethics were assigned special and unique methods of justification; ancient metaphysical generalizations about everything being fire or water were erased and replaced by equally indefensible universal theses, according to which all logical statements are like this, and all physical statements are like that, and all ethical statements very different from both. . . . Whereas their metaphysical predecessors, whom they regarded as benighted and befuddled, made startling
generalizations about all of existence, analytically minded philosophers (and those who were pragmatically minded too] defended apparently sober but equally dubious claims about linguistic expressions or their meanings.22
This statement reflects the anti-dogmatic spirit that has been manifest among contemporary analysts at least since Quine published his assault on "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" in 1951.23 It may also be taken as an earnest of the willingness of contemporary analysts to address
themselves to philosophical issues that the positivists thought they had buried; metaphysics is certainly one of these. One reason for this concern with traditional issues is that once the "litmus paper" view of the verifiability principle has been abandoned there is no simple way of distinguishing what analysts of today do from that which was done by metaphysicians of the past. Traditional problems of philosophy are then found lurking in the sophisticated formulations of the present. An
instructive example of this is the question of "essences." Philosophers had traditionally operated with the assumption that the use of common nouns was regulated by the essential characteristics that underlay the maze of accidental features that a given phenomenon displayed. In the effort to rid philosophers of this obsession, Wittgenstein introduced the notion of "family resemblances." He urged philosophers to abandon their "essentialistic" preconceptions and to use this notion as an aid in paying the most careful attention to the nuances of words in their
manifold relations to the phenomena they stand for.24 In his well-known illustration of "games," he noted that games (board games, card games, sports, and romping children) display a complex network of
crisscrossing characteristics that resemble the way characteristics of parents get scrambled among their children. There is no one "essential"
characteristic which is common to all. If one applied this approach to a complex phenomenon such as religion, one would resist the temptation to search for an "essence" of it; instead, one would study as many
instances as possible and map out the resemblances. This is the point of Wittgenstein’s admonition: "Don’t think, but look!"
The effort to eliminate fatuous quests for non-existent essences is liberating in some contexts, but the problems that exercised the
philosophers of the past cannot be lightly dismissed. For one thing, to apply the technique of family resemblances to all common nouns would run counter to the resistance to dogmatic generalizations exemplified by contemporary analysts and certainly by Wittgenstein himself. Some words are inextricably tied to certain fundamental characteristics, for example, as "brother" is to "male." In addition, the conceptual
considerations that agitated the "essentialists" of the past re-emerge in the context of family resemblances when one has to cope — at the fringes — with the problems of determining the limits of consanguinity.
It would, however, be a mistake to suggest that the concern with metaphysics manifest among contemporary analysts is inadvertent or that it is evoked under duress. P. F. Strawson, Wilfrid Sellars, W. van O.
Quine, Gustav Bergmann, and other contemporary analysts
unblushingly engage in metaphysical discourse as they tackle such
traditional problems of philosophy as the metaphysics of experience (the conceptual preconditions of significant experience), the philosophy of mind, and the basic ontological questions (what there is), as well as questions of ethics. To them they bring the resources of the recent developments in formal logic, the linguistic self-consciousness induced by recent work in semantics, and an impressive mastery of the
achievements and problems of the sciences.25 Yet a qualification may be called for; in an important essay on the "Metaphilosophical
Difficulties of Linguistic Philosophy," R. M. Rorty claims that these resources are employed in a way that makes it misleading to say that these analysts are doing metaphysics, if the term "metaphysics" retains its traditional associations.26 The issues they deal with may be
traditional, but they construe their task in a radically different way. They follow the positivists in rejecting the claim — characteristic of
traditional metaphysicians that philosophy can add to our knowledge of the world. In this domain they do not believe that philosophical
conceptualization can supplement scientific inquiry. They regard their job as that of providing a "clean" conceptual framework for the
knowledge we actually acquire through science and common sense, that is, a framework that will be expressed in precise and controllable forms and one that will be free of the confusions of purpose and the turgid jargons that scarred the metaphysical systems of the past. If Rorty is right, then from the standpoint of philosophers who are still oriented toward the traditional approaches to metaphysics, the post-positivistic era in analysis is not all that different from its predecessor, and the analysts’ turn to metaphysics is deceptive. The main difference would seem to be that contemporary analysts have been chastened by the abandonment of the dogmas that inaugurated the "revolution in philosophy," so that they ought to be less disposed to summary
dismissals of metaphysical theses — regardless of the orientation of the thinkers who propose them.
In any event, whatever may be the case regarding their approach to such inescapable issues as the philosophy of mind or ontology, it is clear that contemporary analysts remain most inhospitable to transcendental metaphysics and theology. These analysts (metaphysical or not) are responsive to a point made many times over by C. F. Moore: There are
all sorts of things which can be known to be obviously true but which are very difficult to analyze ("analysis" in this context means to offer a satisfactory theoretical account of how these obvious truths are known to be true). Included in the list of truisms which he regarded as certainly knowable, were such matters as the existence of his body and the contact it has with other bodies.27 When assertions of this kind prove hard to analyze, and when scientific assertions whose truth is relatively obvious also prove hard to analyze, the analysts of today are not
disposed to excursions into transcendental realms in order to analyze statements about "the Absolute," "Being-Itself," or God." In these cases, it is hard to determine just what it is that one is supposed to be
analyzing, much less how one would ever agree on procedures for resolving conflicts about these transcendental matters.
Again and again, religious thinkers invoke the Tu Quoque in dealing with analytic philosophers. Religious thinkers point to the difficulties involved in the efforts to formulate the empiricist criterion of meaning by means of the verifiability principle, or they point to the difficulties of determining the precise character of the analytic-synthetic distinction.
They then say something like, ‘We philosophical theologians may have our difficulties, but you analysts have yours too, so that there’s little to choose between us on that score. Therefore, considering the ultimate importance of the issues we deal with, you ought to abandon your trivial epistemological pursuits and get to work on our field."
Analysts who are confronted with this sort of appeal might well respond with the argument that Reinhold Niebuhr directed against Lewis
Mumford. In one of his books, Mumford was sharply critical of the United Nations and, because of the obvious limitations of this organization, he urged that it be abandoned and that the World
Federalist Program be adopted in its place. In answer, Niebuhr said that this was like a man who was crawling along the narrow ridge high up on a cliff, holding to the rocky side for dear life, being told that since the progress he was making was so tortuous and since the danger of his making a false step and plunging into the abyss was so great, the only thing for him to do was to let go and fly.