Sider's "Knee-Jerk Realism"

Imagine that a philosophically and psycho-analytically literate, Martian philosophical score-keeper descends down to earth and after being told that Theodore Sider is one of our most important contemporary metaphysicians, encounters this confession, which takes up most of section 2.5 "against subjectivity," in Writing the Book of the World:

But this is autobiography not argument. The argument here, such as it is, is that any subjectivity in the notion of structure would infect all the domains in which structure is applied. If structure is just a reflection of our language (or whatever) then so are the facts about similarity, intrinsicicality, laws of nature, the intrinsic structure of space and time...And this is incredible.

At its last step the argument again reverts to autobiography. Certain philosophers will rightly remain unconvinced, for example "antirealists" of various stripes--pragmatists, Kantians, logical positivists, and so on.

A certain "knee-jerk realism" is an unargued for presupposition of this book. Knee-jerk realism is a vague picture rather than a precise thesis. According to the picture, the point of human inquiry--or a very large chunk of it anyway, a chunk that includes physics--is to conform itself to the world, rather than to make the world. The world is "out there", and our job is to wrap our minds around it. This picture is perhaps my deepest philosophical conviction. I've never questioned it; giving it up would require a reboot too extreme to contemplate; and I have no idea how I'd try to convince somebody who didn't share it. (Sider (2011), 18; emphases in original.)

I bet such a Martian would note that if you have never tried to question your own fundamental convictions,  you most feel very anxious about the status of your convictions.  Moreover, she would add that one way to convince another is to engage their arguments and positions; maybe rational persuasion is too much to be wished for among Terrestrials, but the other may feel 'heard' and, thus, secure enough to re-evaluate their own stance. Finally, she would note the religious language here (e.g., convictions, conforming, unquestioning, etc.).

So much for Martains.

I love reading Sider. He gets to the point quickly in a very lively style (I am not sure I want to wrap my head around anything, but I am sure glad Sider is trying to do so). I share some of his doubts about the significance of modality and conceptual analysis within metaphysics, and I am grateful he has articulated these better than I ever could. I also love criticizing him because of his tendency to wrap his philosophical rhetoric in the authority of science (recall this old, pre-NewAPPS post). But I find the passage above troubling in so far as it is representative of our philosophical culture. So here follow some critical bullet-points:

• The the varieties of non-realisms are all treated as subjective and this, in turn, is identified with world-making. But (a) some of the movements Sider lists (Kantianism, Logical Positivism) were (and are) all very keen to explain why with their doctrines (and, perhaps only their doctrines) objectivity is possible at all. (b) While it is true that some of the movements may have been invested in world-making of some sort (Kantians), not all were.
• The varieties of non-realisms are all treated as nothing-but or just-that doctrines. The very idea of mind & world co-constitution (a doctrine that is orthogonal to any objective/subjective distinction) seems, well, unthinkable to Sider. Here the point is not to claim that co-constitution is true, but rather to offer an example of a non-realist view that is not reductive toward some nothing-but claim. (It also is a position that avoids claiming that we just make the world.)
• It is open to debate if the point of all inquiry is to "conform" to the world. (I am, however, grateful Sider did not tell us that -- like good old Bertrand Russell -- that our duty is to submit to the facts.) A lot of our enquiry (including in physics) has at its fundamental aim control and manipulation of the world; sometimes healing (of the sick, societies, etc.). (Undoubtedly such hard facts on the ground may have confused those scientific philosophers whose fundamental philosophical convictions tend toward world-making.) This does not deny that truth, which Sider ends up claiming is what conform to the world amounts to, and understanding (insight, predictions, etc.) are not also very important aims. Interestingly enough, Sider also wants to insist that beliefs fundamentally have as their aim to conform to the world (62), although one would have thought that the main aim of beliefs is to be action-guiding.

I want to end with a serious point. It does not seem to occur to Sider that by engaging critically with the most fundamental arguments of those that really do not share his knee-jerk realism, he could actually strengthen his position (philosophically and rhetorically). Imagine what Aristotle would be like without engaging Plato, Kant would without Hume,  Spinoza without Descartes, Quine without Carnap (as an irrelevant aside: together with Bricker and Lewis, Quine is despite considerable disagreement, one of Sider's crucial intellectual lode-stones, but one can read Quine as a linguistic idealist, too!), Russell without Bradley, etc.?

More important, perhaps, is that when one of our acknowledged disciplinary leaders proudly announces that he does not have to examine either his own core commitments nor engage with the arguments in support of those held by others, what example does that set to those lower down the intellectual food-chain?  I worry that such stances just further a practice of routine, sectarian dismissiveness toward those that do not think alike. (To be fair: in later chapters Sider does argue with at least some folk who do not share his fundamental outlook.) One can note this and still admire the ingenuity and brilliance of Sider's philosophical argument (and, more generally, be excited about the richness of contemporary metaphysics).

Of course, I am not claiming that all journal articles or books should try to canvass and attempt to refute the views of those that do not think alike fundamentally (progress can be made within one's school), but if purported agenda-setting books do not even bother to do so then philosophy just devolves into sociologically driven changes of fashion. As my dad (a fashion designer) often reminds me, one shouldn't knock the conformity of fashion (it put me through college); it is beautiful for a season or two.