Going on with my project (6) - Goodman, Irrealism, Pragmaticism.

    Now I will shift and use Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, to show that the underlying conception of "neutral reason" such that evidence must be external (independent of quality of inner life) is connected with his irrealism or idea that there are many worlds. I think if you, under the rug, so to speak, smuggle in a concept of reason that axiomatically excludes lived experience and the possibility that a "subjective" response like remorse, grief, joy, etc. discloses aspects of reality rather than only our psychology or forms of social consciousness, then Goodman's irrealism is what you get. To use the examples above, both the reductionist versions and my account, from the point of view of neutral reason, can account for the "data." Goodman would not claim, I think, that the "subjective" aspect disqualifies "my world" as an intelligible world version, as would the logical positivist or more generally reductionist. But to justify a claim to truth (in the genuine sense of uncovering reality) we would have to be able to escape our frames-of-explanation, our world versions, and compare them with reality itself – rather like Einstein’s relativity hypothesis being tested by the solar eclipse of 1919 in science. And this, I agree, is absurd since metaphysical reality is not ‘in’ the universe but how the universe is as a whole, what we should see the universe as. To test Einstein’s relativity did not require we get out of our conscious experience itself to compare it to reality-in-itself – an absurd idea, as Goodman makes clear. But the metaphysical aspect of Goodman’s view – the plurality of worlds – only follows if you accept neutral reason at the metaphysical level. i.e. that we use the same form of reason to think about Being as such as we do in physics, or a courtroom case.

     Take an extreme examples, from a speech by Heinrich Himmler concerning the role of the SS in murder and cruelty on an industrial scale.

“I am now referring to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. It's one of those things that is easily said: 'The Jewish people are being exterminated', says every party member, 'this is very obvious, it's in our program, elimination of the Jews, extermination, we're doing it, hah, a small matter.' And then they turn up, the upstanding 80 million Germans and each one has his decent Jew. They say the others are all swine, but this particular one is a splendid Jew. But none has observed it, endured it. Most of you here know what it means when 100 corpses lie next to each other, when there are 500 or when there are 1,000. To have endured this and at the same time to have remained a decent person – with exceptions due to human weaknesses – has made us tough, and is a glorious chapter that has not and will not be spoken of.” (emphasis mine)

This is a chilling passage, the logic that informs it horrific. Himmler – unless he was a master of cynicism, which is possible – believed that engaging in systematic mass murder on a fantastic scale while remaining “a decent person” is a mark of moral superiority. Thus he in Nazi fashion redefines morality as obedience to an ideological imperative (the will of the Führer, in which reality is perfectly present) rather than as based on human dignity. “Decency” is linked to emotional detachment and the ability to carry out systematic killing without succumbing to what he dismisses as "human weaknesses" (meaning guilt or remorse). The inversion is complete when he calls this “a glorious chapter,” turning an abomination into something glorious. His language evokes compassion for the men who must do the unpleasant work of mass murder, whereas compassion for the victims would be a sign of “weakness.”

    The speech is built on a biological determinism that holds that races are fundamentally distinct moral categories. Jews are not just a different people, but a different kind of being, one whose extermination is a “programmatic” necessity. The phrase “the others are all swine, but this particular one is a splendid Jew” captures this: individual Jews may appear good, but their ontological status (their racial being) still marks them as outside the moral community. This reflects a racialized essentialism, akin to Aristotle’s concept of “natural slaves” but stripped of any paternalistic duty toward the lesser group. The extermination is not presented as an unfortunate necessity but as a historical mission, part of a “glorious chapter.” This implies a quasi-religious eschatology, in which purification through killing is necessary to create a better world (for the superior race).

     In a traditional moral ontology, goodness, truth, and justice exist independently of human will. Himmler denies this by making morality a function of ideological commitment: the good is whatever serves the racial state. There is no higher tribunal (God, natural law, conscience) against which the extermination can be judged.

     This is a world version in Goodman’s sense. Now imagine an android intelligence that wanted to evaluate it with respect to its truth against a competitor – say, the Christianity of Edith Stein, revealed as a saint according to the Catholic Church for the miraculous love she manifested in Auschwitz. Let me describe this intelligence and its theory of rationality before going on. (I think this fits 95% of analytic philosophy perfectly. Alternatively, it is how an anthropologist studying modern philosophical culture might analyze it.)

 

Android rationality: a model of neutral intelligence

   An android rationality would be:

1.    Formally Logical. It could perform logical deductions, identify contradictions, and evaluate syllogisms with precision.

2.    Empirically Rigorous. It could process vast amounts of data, identify correlations, and determine probabilities with high accuracy.

3.    Meta-Theoretically Neutral. It could recognize that different world-versions (e.g., Himmler’s vs. Edith Stein’s) exist and even describe them from the outside, but it would lack the ability to inhabit them from the inside.

4.    Lacking Lived Understanding. It would not be inside the beam (to use C.S. Lewis’s metaphor), meaning it could not experience meaning from within. Love, remorse, awe, and moral horror would be analyzed as data points, not as disclosures of truth.

5.    Unable to Resolve Ultimate Disputes. Faced with competing world-versions (Himmler vs. Stein), it could compare them in terms of coherence, historical influence, or predictive success, but it could not judge them from within a moral or existential framework. At best, it could analyze trends in human moral intuitions, but it could not grasp why one vision of reality is truer than another.

   In the jargon of analytic philosophy, android rationality features epistemic externalism without internal access. It can catalog all possible interpretations of a set of facts. But it cannot see from within a world version, meaning it cannot recognize that some interpretations might be truer than others because they disclose reality more fully or more justly. Evidence, moreover, is reduced to external verification rather than the internal understanding of meaning. It can assign probability values to different interpretations based on the available data. However, it cannot experience – or rather, a human being must discount any such experience – why something must be the case or ought to be believed in a way that involves existential-ontological participation (i.e. the kind of understanding that comes from being a part of reality or some reality). It can tell you the statistical likelihood that humans in a given culture will find moral horror in Auschwitz, but it cannot grasp why that horror is an authoritative disclosure of evil (i.e. cannot allow any such grasp to matter philosophically as it is “subjective”.)

      Because its rationality is based on a neutral, externalist framework, an android must treat all moral claims as human constructs rather than as truths embedded in reality. It can recognize that Edith Stein’s Catholicism and Himmler’s racial ontology are different but has no internal grounds for declaring one as truer than the other. If pressed, it might choose based on social consensus or predictive outcomes (e.g., which world leads to a more stable society?), but not based on a direct insight into moral reality.

    Furthermore, it can analyze aesthetic preferences and recognize patterns in what humans call "beauty," but it cannot experience beauty as a revelation. Similarly, it can identify religious beliefs and study their cultural effects, but it cannot recognize holiness, transcendence, or moral purity – discounted as “subjective”. An android could partly describe the rituals of a mass or a Buddhist meditation practice and explain their significance sociologically, but it could never see what those engaged in them see.

    The android can process and generate language at a syntactical and even probabilistic level (as AI does), but it cannot grasp what Wittgenstein would call the depth of meaning in lived expressions like:

§  "I am sorry."

§  "I love you."

§  "I cannot do this evil act."

It can recognize these as functional or pragmatic within a linguistic framework, but it cannot see that such statements might be disclosures of reality rather than just conventional (pragmatic) uses of language. It is mirrored in the “academic” language I try to get my students not to use: a language devoid of allusions, connotations, associations – of poetry! A depersonalized, flat, dry language. The language of an android (passives, nominalizations, jargon, wordy and trite expressions, etc.).

      All of this rests on one massive presupposition: this is the way to see the world as it really is. The subjective life of even the wisest and most profound of human beings is irrelevant to knowledge. What makes this so persuasive to many (to me as well in the past) is the "faith" that you see the world right this way, by blocking out the subjective life, by eliminating the inner life from language (using words denuded of connotation and cultural or personal associations, by eliminating the personal perspective, etc. Like describing a lab experiment in chemistry. And that is because of a prior ontological commitment to the view that reality just is, absolutely, as natural science reveals it to be. If that is how reality is in fact, that android rationality would be rationality as such. This largely subconscious commitment assumes it is not metaphysical and actually eliminates metaphysics. But it is in reality metaphysics gone mad.

    This kind of rationality (that I am calling it android rationality but is better known as scientific-objectivist rationality) persuades precisely because it presents itself as the absence of metaphysical commitment, as if stripping away subjectivity, emotion, and personal perspective leads to a pure, unbiased, and finally true way of seeing reality. But that’s an illusion, because this very way of seeing is itself metaphysically loaded to the brim.

    I know why it appeals to people because it once mightily appealed to me. (My childhood hero was Spock, who precisely embodied this rationality in the old Star Trek series but grew out of it in the later films.) It feels like you’re avoiding error when you eliminate subjective and intersubjective experience. The scientific method – which rightly brackets out emotion in its practice – is misapplied as philosophy (as an ontological stance) – as if all knowledge should look like a chemistry lab report. The immense success of natural science makes it seem like this must be the right way to think about reality in general. Science does give us knowledge of a certain kind (depersonalized, e.g. regularities that can be captured in mathematical equations) but that does not mean its method is the only valid way to understand reality. Its cultural power consists in creating the illusion of escape from the hermeneutic circle, allowing one to feel as a god standing outside of and above mere human existence and its “folk metaphysics.” Epistemologically, one feels as if one has stepped outside of bias and into an objective “real” world. But what is actually happening is the adoption of a particular perspective that denies it is a perspective – the typical move of metaphysical naturalism. It is a massive metaphysical commitment, just a hidden one.

       Since it cannot account for these, it either dismisses them or reduces them to epiphenomena of the physical world, which is precisely the error of scientism.      And as Wendell Berry has so often pointed out, it demeans and then destroys what it cannot account for. Because this rationality assumes only neutral, external, depersonalized descriptions are valid, it cannot account for: l love in all its forms, moral horror, remorse, beauty, grief, joy, longing, and much more – not as psychological states but as disclosures of reality. Indeed, it cannot account for the very things that make life meaningful. Is it any wonder that this is an age of Nihilism – es fehlt die Antwort auf das Warum (the answer to the Why? is missing); and is it any wonder why when the dominant metaphysics, become ideology, denies the very possibility of the reality of everything that could give answers to the Why?

     Natural science does give us real knowledge – insofar as it is benevolent, I love science. But that does not mean all knowledge must take its form. The assumption that it does is a metaphysical totalization, not a neutral stance. And thus android rationality is not a window to the world as such; more like a microscope or an x-ray. As an interpretation of reality as such it is a negative metaphysics; one that does not see but erases. It is not metaphysically neutral as it assumes a materialist ontology as given; defines reality by what can be measured; denies the evidential weight of lived experience; and cannot justify its own starting assumptions. This is why it is metaphysics gone mad. It is not neutral reason but a self-blinding dogma, one that feels like clear thinking because it eliminates uncertainty and subjectivity but only by eliminating the conditions for recognizing deeper truths.

I

Goodman’s Problem  

    If neutral rationality is the only way to know reality, then why accept Goodman’s world version pluralism? Why not just say there is one scientific world, and everything else is illusion? Why study philosophy at all? If science is the only route to truth, then philosophy is obsolete. Goodman knows this is wrong, which is why he insists on world-versions. But he cannot escape the android stance when he operates at the meta-level.

    Goodman would allow for different conceptions of rationality internal to particular world versions. But when he is on the meta-level, as he is as a philosopher in his book, he definitely decides from a neutral rationality. This is an internal contradiction.  If rationality itself is world-relative—if different world-versions operate with different conceptions of what counts as evidence, good reasons, explanation, etc.—then there should be no privileged, neutral standpoint from which Goodman, as a philosopher, can adjudicate among them. But when he is operating at the meta-level, he implicitly relies on a neutral conception of rationality to analyze and compare world versions. This is a contradiction because for him there should be no neutral rationality. If rationality is always embedded in world versions, then there should be no universal standpoint from which to analyze all world versions. But in Ways of Worldmaking, Goodman does presuppose that there is such a standpoint when he discusses world-construction at the meta-philosophical level. His own philosophical method assumes criteria that his theory denies. When Goodman compares different world-versions, he still presumes that logical consistency, coherence, and empirical adequacy are relevant criteria. Yet, if rationality is only valid within world-versions, those criteria themselves are just another world-version’s rules rather than universal measures.  

     The "view from nowhere" problem. Goodman’s irrealism rejects an independent reality that adjudicates between world-versions. But his own philosophical project, as a meta-theory of worldmaking, presumes he can make valid statements about world-versions from outside any particular one. This is analogous to an AI cataloging world-versions as an external observer without being able to step inside them. If Goodman were truly consistent, he should say: “I am offering one world-version of rationality, no better or worse than others.” But instead, he implies that his philosophical analysis is objectively valid across world versions, meaning he is, in effect, stepping outside his own relativism when it suits him. Goodman’s meta-philosophical stance – no independent reality against which to compare world versions; the world is representation, and we can’t get out of representation to see how it really is – presupposes precisely the kind of privileged (android) rationality that his system claims does not exist.

   How could Goodman have failed to anticipate this objection? I think the answer lies in his pragmaticism. He might have thought pragmatic success could justify his meta-framework: worldmaking is useful for understanding knowledge, so we use it, no need for further justification. But that doesn’t solve the contradiction; it only shifts the justification to usefulness, which is still a universal criterion he cannot objectively invoke.

    Goodman seems to believe that pragmatism allows him to sidestep metaphysics, as if adopting a pragmatic approach means he doesn’t have to answer foundational questions about truth, reality, and reason. But then, he proceeds to make metaphysical claims anyway, particularly about how knowledge and worldmaking function. This is a classic case of smuggling in metaphysics while pretending to avoid it. If he were really just a pragmaticist in the sense of James or Dewey, he should simply say:

We construct world-versions because it works for us, and there’s no need to ask about ultimate reality.

But when he says "there are many worlds," that is an ontological claim – not just a statement about human knowledge, but a statement about reality itself. If he were truly pragmaticist, he would just say, "We describe things in different ways," not, "There are many worlds." But Goodman doesn’t stop there. He develops an ontological framework that says there are many worlds, not just many interpretations of one world. That is not a mere pragmatic move; it is a metaphysical claim about the nature of reality itself.

     Pragmatism, however, cannot justify metaphysical claims. Pragmatism can partly explain why people believe what they do (e.g., we adopt beliefs that are useful for survival, for knowledge-making, for social order). But pragmatism cannot tell us whether any of those beliefs are true in a deeper sense i.e. whether they correspond to reality or disclose something fundamental. Goodman tries to make a pragmatic case for metaphysical irrealism but that’s a contradiction. Pragmatism only justifies belief in terms of usefulness, not truth. Pragmaticism is not philosophy at all but the refusal to think philosophically. And so he ends up doing metaphysics anyway, and is guiding by android rationality.

    I think Goodman’s pragmatism reveals an underlying fear of metaphysics in much of modern thought, and it’s deeply tied to the cultural obsession with autonomy and the domination of nature (including human nature). To think metaphysically is to attempt to learn about reality beyond the self, beyond personal construction, beyond mere human projection. But the very idea that there could be a truth or an order not of our making is threatening to a worldview that insists on individual autonomy and the conquest of nature as its highest goods. Figures like Goodman, Rorty, and postmodernists try to avoid metaphysics by claiming that truth is just a matter of what works or what we construct within language-games and world-versions. But this just covertly engages in metaphysics while denying it. The irony is that by refusing to think metaphysically, they still make implicit metaphysical claims, just without admitting it.

     Other modern thinkers flee from metaphysics into science as the only legitimate form of knowledge (as seen in logical positivism or contemporary materialism). But this is also a metaphysical stance: it assumes that only what is empirically testable (Empiricist tradition) or logically demonstrable (Rationalist tradition) is real, which is itself an empirically or logically unprovable metaphysical claim. It also denies the authority of moral, aesthetic, or existential experiences as modes of knowing reality.

    In popular culture the aversion to metaphysics has different root. Metaphysics, like religion, if taken seriously, might impose demands on us. If reality includes moral truth, then we are not (contra Nietzsche and his many followers) entirely free to invent meaning. The modern ideal of autonomy, in line with the desires of egoism, dogmatically believes that we can construct our own values, our own identities, and our own meanings without reference to an independent reality. Partly understandable as “nature” has often enough functioned as an ideology legitimating injustice and oppression. I get that. Still: to accept metaphysical reality would mean acknowledging that not everything is up to us, that some truths are not human constructions but authoritative disclosures of Being itself. That is precisely what modernity, in its most radical forms, does not want to confront. Just because the Catholic Church legitimated the feudal class system by appealing to “nature” does not mean that all appeals to reality are wrong – e.g. the Holocaust was evil.

     The fear of metaphysics is not an intellectual problem but a moral and existential one. It stems from a deep-seated resistance to the idea that reality might not be entirely malleable to human will.

Goodman’s evasion of metaphysics is just one intellectual expression of a broader cultural impulse: to refuse to look at anything that challenges the supremacy of autonomy.

    I think that this fear of metaphysics leads to deliberate blindness. Modern thought often refuses to consider whether reality might disclose itself through love, remorse, joy, and beauty, because to acknowledge such disclosures would mean surrendering the illusion of total control, the foundation of autonomy and the domination of nature. But reality leaks through anyway – in moral horror, in awe, in remorse, in grief, in joy, in longing, in love. The very things modern rationality tries to reduce or explain away are the things that most stubbornly resist neutralization.

    Metaphysics is unavoidable. Philosophy is avoidable, clearly, but living without an implicit metaphysics is not. The only question is whether one faces it honestly or suppresses it in bad faith. That is what my argument lay bare, I think.

 

Goodman on my example.

    For Goodman it makes no philosophical sense to imagine Himmler and Stein leaving their experience of life behind, taking their pictures of life in a purely theoretical sense, and comparing these pictures with an uninterpreted world. Thus the android/Goodman would have to conclude that Himmler and Stein were both “good” within their frame-of-reference, but the question which was really good would be mute. The rationality of Goodman indeed operates much like this android intelligence at the meta-level i.e. the philosophical level.  It acknowledges multiple "versions of the world." It restricts itself to analyzing internal coherence and external consistency. It can only see a constructed nature of human meaning-making but it cannot step inside and grasp some meanings as more real than others; nor can it see love, remorse, or joy as modes of disclosing reality rather than just psychological states. In other words, it cannot transcend the assumption that all truths must be externally verifiable, thus dismissing disclosive forms of truth as merely "subjective" or "interpretative" – rather than more or less insightful understandings of a world that ultimately transcends us. Thus the android intelligence:

·        Can process facts but not meaning.

·        Can evaluate coherence but not disclosure.

·        Can compare frameworks but not see from within them.

 

 

A note on Star Trek’s Data.

I have often used Data as a model of the rationality preferred by most philosophers in the English-speaking world. Without a body of flesh-and-blood, he was devoid of emotions and thus should be perfectly rational on the Stoic and modern assumption that emotions reveal nothing of reality and get in the way of clear thinking. Data from Star Trek actually exceeds this android model. But Data actually goes beyond android intelligence as I have just sketched it. What makes Data different is that he desires to understand what he lacks. His curiosity about human emotions and moral insight means that he is not a purely external observer. He actively seeks participation in human meaning. He does not experience emotion but recognizes that emotion is an insight into reality that he lacks. He does not love, for example, but he respects love as real rather than as just a biochemical phenomenon. He cannot grasp music as a human would, to take another example, but he seeks to experience it in a way beyond mere mathematical appreciation. This is why Data, in a sense, moves beyond neutral rationality. Indeed, his very curiosity signals that he is open to a reality he does not control. He is not trapped in a world of pure logic because he acknowledges that something escapes his logical net. That makes him profoundly different from Goodman-style rationality, which simply flattens the problem and denies the need to account for what cannot be formally captured.