Timothy Williamson opinionates on naturalism at the Times.
He starts with a pre-1960 view of physics and biology: considered at a “sufficiently abstract level”, they are hypothetico-deductive. (I’ll let other people deal with that.) Naturalism would then be the view that all that exists is what will be asserted to exist in a completed hypothetico-deductive science of everything.
Williamson’s next move is not to refute that claim; instead he argues that not all science is hypothetico-deductive. It seems to me that the naturalist can happily agree & yet still affirm that all that exists is what will be asserted to exist in a completed science of everything. The notion of a science, to be sure, must be clarified if that claim is to be clear. Williamson seems to regard the project as hopeless. In other words: if science can’t be characterized as HD (and it can’t), then there is no adequate characterization of science, and so the naturalistic view fails to assert anything definite.
There cannot be an adequate philosophical characterization of science, it would seem, because to be scientific is to have the scientific spirit, a wild horse no theory can tame… (It’s idle to say that no theory can “replace” that spirit. My theory of aerodynamics won’t get me to New York either.) But why can’t there be a theory of curiosity, honesty, precision, and rigor (but doesn’t the Church-Turing thesis affirm successful characterization of rigor in mathematical reasoning)? The naturalist is going to hold—is bound to hold—that if there is such a thing as the scientific spirit, then it too must fall within the purview of science. Williamson’s argument hinges on a Romantic assertion of art against science which comes close to begging the question it wants to answer.
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