Monk on scientism and Wittgenstein

Nice discussion here.

Since I'm not a naturalist, I'm sort of on Monk/Wittgenstein's side, but I find some of the dichotomies to be a little bit tendentious. Monk opposes "non-theoretical understanding" to the kind of understanding proper to science, and argues that naturalizing programs in philosophy all fail because they don't realize that the domains proper to the two forms of understanding are pairwise disjoint.

Maybe something in the neighborhood of this is true but Monk doesn't mark the distinction in the Sellarsian way one would expect now in terms of the kind of normative presuppositions required by the relevant kind of understanding. Instead, we get this:

One of the crucial differences between the method of science and the non-theoretical understanding that is exemplified in music, art, philosophy and ordinary life, is that science aims at a level of generality* which necessarily eludes these other forms of understanding. This is why the understanding of people can never be a science.

I'm just not sure this is true. It's not at all clear to me that morphologists in biology aim at a greater level of generality than music theorists do.

Nonetheless, there's certainly something to the intuition that there are characteristic differences. But it's so easily Dennettizable that I don't see how the anti-naturalist can make much hay. One could say that given a set of discourse relevant norms held fixed, understanding in general just is the ability to make novel predictions. For Davidson/Dennett, we assume that human systems are largely rational according to belief/desire psychology and then this puts us in a position to make predictions about them. We make different normative assumptions about functional organization of organs, and different ones again about atoms. But once those are in place, understanding is just a matter or being better able to predict.

The interesting question concerns the status of the norms themselves. As far as I can tell, Monk is just mistaken here. That is, Monk's Wittgenstein is much closer to the scientistically minded philosopher here than to the anti-naturalist. If the naturalistically minded philosopher is doing hetero-phenomenology in Dennett's sense (that is, coming up with a causal explanation for why people behave the way they do, as opposed to an explanation that justifies any of those beliefs)** there is simply no category error of the sort Monk supposes.

I really am going to have to immerse myself in the "Cornell style moral realists" some day soon. From second and third hand, it's my understanding that the tradition confronts all of this head-on.

[Notes:

*Didn't Davidson appeal to a dichotomy like this in his early anomalous monism stuff, the whole thing hinging on the impossibility of psycho-physical laws that possess the kind of "strictness" we find in science proper? There's been some really great recent stuff on Davidson I haven't read yet, and I know his main insights and arguments are being reconfigured so as to be shown not to fall with the generalized philosophy of science characteristic of his time.

**Should be citations to Nietzsche (and Marx and Freud) as well as Foucault here!]