KNOWLES-Representation, Experience, and Metaphysics

Synthese Library 473
Studies in Epistemology, Logic, Methodology,

and Philosophy of Science
Jonathan Knowles
Representation,
Experience, and
Metaphysics
Towards an Integrated
Anti-Representationalist Philosophy
Synthese Library
Studies in Epistemology, Logic, Methodology, and

Philosophy of Science
Volume 473
Editor-in-Chief
Otávio Bueno, Department of Philosophy, University of Miami,
Coral Gables, USA
Editorial Board Members

Berit Brogaard, University of Miami, Coral Gables, USA
Steven French, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
Catarina Dutilh Novaes, VU Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Darrell P. Rowbottom, Department of Philosophy, Lingnan University,
Tuen Mun, Hong Kong
Emma Ruttkamp, Department of Philosophy, University of South
Africa, Pretoria, South Africa
Kristie Miller, Department of Philosophy, Centre for Time, University of Sydney,
Sydney, Australia
The aim of Synthese Library is to provide a forum for the best current work in the
methodology and philosophy of science and in epistemology, all broadly understood.
A wide variety of different approaches have traditionally been represented in the
Library, and every effort is made to maintain this variety, not for its own sake, but
because we believe that there are many fruitful and illuminating approaches to the
philosophy of science and related disciplines.
Special attention is paid to methodological studies which illustrate the interplay
of empirical and philosophical viewpoints and to contributions to the formal
(logical, set-theoretical, mathematical, information-theoretical, decision-theoretical,
etc.) methodology of empirical sciences. Likewise, the applications of logical
methods to epistemology as well as philosophically and methodologically relevant
studies in logic are strongly encouraged. The emphasis on logic will be tempered by
interest in the psychological, historical, and sociological aspects of science.
In addition to monographs Synthese Library publishes thematically unified
anthologies and edited volumes with a well-defined topical focus inside the aim
and scope of the book series. The contributions in the volumes are expected to be
focused and structurally organized in accordance with the central theme(s), and
should be tied together by an extensive editorial introduction or set of introductions
if the volume is divided into parts. An extensive bibliography and index are
mandatory.
Jonathan Knowles
Representation, Experience,
and Metaphysics
Towards an Integrated
Anti-Representationalist Philosophy
Jonathan Knowles
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Trondheim, Norway
ISSN 0166-6991 ISSN 2542-8292 (electronic)

Synthese Library
ISBN 978-3-031-26923-3 ISBN 978-3-031-26924-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26924-0
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2023
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of
illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and
transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar
or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the
editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any
errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional
claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Preface
This book is one upshot of a Norwegian Research Council project that I led together
with Anders Nes aimed at promoting interaction between theoretical philosophers
working at different universities across Norway from 2013 to 2016. Entitled
Representationalism or Anti-representationalism? Perspectives on Intentionality
from Philosophy and Cognitive Science (see https://www.ntnu.no/ifr/
representationalism-or-anti-representationalism), the project encompassed a broad
swathe of debates that we believed could be seen through the lens of the question of
its title, and brought together thinkers in various different locations to discuss ques-
tions about representation in contemporary philosophy of perception, philosophy of
language, and cognitive science. This book aims to present my own personal take on
those issues and how they interrelate. It is both an attempt at clarification of how
different debates that nevertheless employ the same ‘representationalism versus
anti-representationalism’ framing nomenclature relate to one another, and an
attempt to argue for a novel combination of positions in these different areas that are
all recognizably ‘anti-representationalist’.
It is not an introductory text but an intervention in an ongoing debate. Though I
do use quite a lot of time setting up my understanding of central concepts and the
dialectical terrain, I also assume some familiarity with the main ideas and trends of
contemporary theoretical philosophy, including the broad outlines of so-called
‘neo-pragmatist’ thinking and debates about perceptual experience and cognitive
science that are its main themes. On the other hand, given such a background, what
I have to say, in taking a ‘big picture’ approach, will hopefully be readily accessible.
Some of the ideas figure in previously published papers of mine, others derive
from papers that are unpublished. But I have changed my mind in relation to nearly
all these works in the interim period, often in subtle but nevertheless important
ways, not least in view of the task of providing a synoptic picture of my thinking as
a whole; hence the material is original (the published work is of course referred to).1
1
Knowles (2019a), a shorter commentary piece, takes up in much more summary form the issues
of Chap. 6. Knowles (2023) is based on parts of Chap. 2, but was not published at the time the final
manuscript of this book was submitted.
v
vi Preface
At the same time, it probably does sometimes bear the mark of descending from
papers: though I pursue (what I hope is) a clear overarching dialectic, I also delve
into certain particular debates along the way, and I could no doubt have delved into
slightly different ones or in slightly different ways. I could also have often delved
deeper at many points, given the foundational nature of many of the issues. To an
extent this limitation is disciplinary (i.e. a function of the literature the book takes
as it point of departure), to an extent a function of producing a piece of work of
manageable size and scope. My hope is that the general perspective and the particu-
lar discussions pertaining to this that I offer are sufficiently interesting and suffi-
ciently integrated to make the book as a whole worth reading.
I am indebted to the following for discussion of and/or feedback on the issues
and/or my material over the last few years: Huw Price (sine qua non), Henrik
Rydenfelt (also for tireless work in coordinating the Nordic Pragmatism Network),
Rasmus Jaksland, Jussi Haukioja, Thomas Raleigh, Anders Nes, Jørgen Dyrstad,
Claus Hahlberg, Ronny Selbæk Myhre, Thomas Netland, Maia Vige Helle, Bengt
Molander, Sami Pihlström, Truls Wyller, Michael Amundsen, Bjørn Ramberg,
Simon Blackburn, Robert Kraut, Amie Thomasson, Paul Horwich, Michael
Williams, Tony Chemero, Michael Silberstein, David Macarthur, Paul Redding,
Georges Rey, Tim Button, Carsten Hansen, Carl Sachs, Steven Levine, Lionel
Shapiro, Luz Christopher Seibert, Walter Hopp, Sebastian Watzl, John Campbell,
Solveig Aasen, Hedda Hassel Mørch, Kevin Cahill, Yvonne Hütter, and William
Bondi Knowles. Thanks also go to Oscar Westerblad and Miguel Ohnesorge for
inviting me to present chapters of the book at meetings of the Pragmatist Reading
Group in Cambridge, UK in Lent term 2022, and to them, Céline Henne, Hasok
Chang, Aditya Jha, Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, Henrik Sova, and others (including
Huw Price, again), for very useful feedback on those (and connected) occasions.
Also thanks to many others for their comments, not least students, at various lec-
tures and seminars, even though I can’t recall all your names! Finally, at Springer,
thanks go to Otavio Bueno for initiating this book project and support throughout
the process, to Palani Murugesan for effective administration, and to Sudha Elite
Vanath for patient help in the final production stage.
The book is dedicated to Janne Bondi Johannessen, my wife, who died of breast
cancer in June 2020.
Contents
1 Introduction�� 1
1.1 Situating Anti-Representationalism�� 1
1.2 Anti-Representationalism About Thought and Language�� 5
1.3 The Rest of the Book�� 22
2 Global Expressivism�� 25
2.1 Introduction�� 25
2.2 The Argument against Object Naturalism
and for Global Expressivism�� 27
2.3 Does Object Naturalism Really Depend
on Representationalism? �� 31
2.3.1 Simpson and Horwich�� 31
2.3.2 Knowles�� 35
2.4 How Does Global Expressivism ‘Hang Together’?�� 37
2.5 Is GE the Best Form of ARTL?�� 43
3 Representationalism Versus Anti-Representationalism
About Perceptual Experience and in Cognitive Science�� 51
3.2 Representationalism Versus Anti-Representationalism About
Perceptual Experience, and Phenomenological Externalism�� 53
3.3 Representationalism Versus Anti-Representationalism
in Cognitive Science, and Enactivism�� 73
4
The World for Us and the World in Itself�� 89
4.2 Umwelts, the World for Us, and the World in Itself�� 90
4.3 Matters Arising�� 97
4.3.1 Non-classical Representationalist Cognitive Science �� 98
4.3.2 Content, Concepts, and Knowledge�� 101
4.3.3 How Is My View Really (Very) Different
from Global Expressivism?�� 104
vii
viii Contents
5 Brains in Vats�� 109

5.2 Button on the Limits of Realism�� 111
5.3 Metaphysical Scepticism�� 117
5.4 Could We Really Be BIVs?�� 121
5.5 The Existential Phenomenological Take�� 125
5.6 Postscript on Dreyfus and Taylor’s Realism �� 127
6 Anti-Representationalism, Realism, and Anti-Realism�� 131
6.2 Semantics and Realism �� 133
6.3 Realism ARTL-Style�� 141
6.4 Conceptual Relativity�� 148
7 Metaphysics for Anti-Representationalists?�� 157
7.2 Thomasson on Metaphysics as Descriptively
and Normatively Conceptual�� 161
7.3 Problems with Thomasson’s View�� 163
7.4 Metaphysics for ARTL�� 171
7.5 A Subject Naturalistic Demarcation Between Science
and Metaphysics?�� 174
References �� 179

Chapter 1
Introduction
Abstract In this introductory chapter I introduce the idea of anti-representationalism

as a counterpoint to the prevailing representationalism of modern and much con-
temporary philosophy, illustrating in relation to perceptual experience, cognitive
science, and the notion of truth. I then outline the fundamental ideas behind a view
that I will elaborate and defend in the book that I dub anti-representationalism
about thought and language (ARTL). This is a position I associate first and fore-
most with the neo-pragmatists Richard Rorty and Huw Price, but is also influenced
by various other philosophers such as Carnap, Quine, Sellars, Horwich, and
Brandom. Central to ARTL is the rejection of what Price calls (‘Big-R’)
‘Representationalism’, to the effect that language has meaning and relates to the
world in virtue of substantial semantic relations of truth and reference. This has
important implications for how we should think about truth, meaning, existence and
reality, but does not mean we have to see as ARTL as in any way an anti-realistic or
anti-naturalistic position.
I end the chapter by outlining the contents of the rest of the book. Central here
will be my argument that while we should accept the basic tenets of ARTL, the
specific forms of this view that Rorty and Price (and several others) defend should
give way to a version that relates it explicitly to other forms of anti-representationalist
philosophy concerning experience and cognitive science.
1.1 Situating Anti-Representationalism
This work is an attempt to present and defend a set of philosophical ideas that
together can reasonably be called, in my view, ‘an anti-representationalist philoso-
phy’. It is concerned first and foremost to articulate and develop one particular kind
of anti-representationalism (as so-called in the literature), but in doing so it also
recommends other kinds, and more generally seeks to shed some light on the pos-
sible interrelations between different kinds of position that have been labelled ‘rep-
resentationalist’ and ‘anti-representationalist’ in recent thinking. Many of these
views can often seem quite closely related on casual acquaintance. For example,
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
J. Knowles, Representation, Experience, and Metaphysics, Synthese Library
473, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26924-0_1
2 1 Introduction
Richard Rorty famously defends a form of what he calls ‘anti-representationalism’

that is – not least with respect to that very form of words – indebted to the work of
the pragmatist John Dewey, whilst Dewey’s thinking about experience has also been
a strong influence on contemporary anti-representationalist or ‘embodied’ cognitive
science (cf. e.g. Chemero 2009). However, as we shall see, Rorty’s anti-
representationalism is specifically a view about language and thought, and though it
may not be hermetically sealed from debates in cognitive science or about the nature
of experience, the areas are separate and the issues involved distinct (something
Rorty himself insisted on: see his 1979, ch. 5; 1982, ch. 5).
An important overarching aim of the book is to argue that there is nevertheless
an interesting mutual coherence between several different kinds of anti-
representationalist position that has hitherto gone relatively unnoticed (as far as
I can divine). At the same time, my starting point and ultimately main concern is the
kind of anti-representationalism about thought and language I see Rorty as a promi-
nent representative of, and some of what I will have to say about this view can be
considered without relating it to other kinds of anti-representationalism.
Though anti-representationalism then is not just one thing, I do think that all (or
most) of its contemporary manifestations can be seen as growing from a common
stem. This ‘stem’ is basically a rejection or at least significant decentralizing of the
idea that representation is or should be a significant philosophical category, perhaps
even a kind of foundation, in thinking about or explaining the mind, language and
the relationship between these things and the world. Most commentators agree that
this idea – representationalism – can be traced back to the thinking of the classical
rationalists and empiricists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for whom a
guiding assumption was that we are in cognitive contact with the world only indi-
rectly, perceiving in the first instance ideas or similar mental entities that somehow
stand in for or represent the mind-external world. But though precisely this kind of
view is less common today, various forms of recognizably representationalist
thought still have strong footholds in contemporary philosophical thinking. Thus a
view standardly referred to as ‘representationalism’ is commonly defended today as
the idea that perceptual experience, indeed experience generally, essentially involves
some kind of intentional content, specifying the way the world (including possibly
our own body) appears to the subject, which way the world may or may not be. Such
views allegedly improve on those which claim we see only ideas or (as it became
commoner to claim in the early twentieth century) sense data, in that we seem not
to be aware of any object between us and the world we experience (experience is
‘transparent’, as it is often put). They are nevertheless still representational in that
contact with the world is mediated by something mental.
More broadly, in contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive science an
enormously influential idea has been the so-called representational theory of mind
(also known as the computational theory of mind), perhaps most famously promul-
gated by Jerry Fodor (see e.g. his 1975, 1987). According to this, the mind is to be
understood as a set of symbolic states interacting computationally with one another
to produce other such states and intelligent behaviour, forming an internal language
of thought, as Fodor put it. These states, as well as having an intrinsic syntactic
1.1 Situating Anti-Representationalism 3
structure, respond selectively to different aspects of our environment and in virtue

of this have a semantic content that can be seen as specifying the way the world is
(or not). Many see representationalism about perception and conscious experience
as part of such a broader representational theory of mind (e.g. Lycan 1987;
Tye 1995).
Much contemporary philosophy of language also presupposes the basic correct-
ness of the representational theory of mind. For many philosophers seeking to
understand linguistic meaning naturalistically it has to be seen first in terms of
underlying mental states – complexes of so-called ‘propositional attitudes’, such as
states of knowledge, belief, intention and so on – and these in turn as inner
representational-cum-computational states. A prominent example of this is the so-
called neo-Gricean approach to meaning (cf. Schiffer 1972, 1987) though the basic
idea is broader than this.1 At a more general level, a common and intuitive represen-
tationalist view of how language, or thought, functions – at a fundamental level – is
as putting forward statements (or furnishing us with beliefs) that depict or describe
reality, and that are true or false depending on whether they, or at least their content,
correspond to this reality or a suitable sub-part of it.
A fuller account of contemporary representationalism would go into more detail
on various fronts, taking up issues such as how exactly we should understand the
idea of truth as correspondence, how we should understand internal representational
states (are they necessarily ‘propositional attitudes’ like beliefs? are they wholly
contained within the brain, or are they extended properties of the brain and the
body/environment? etc.), how we should ‘naturalise’ content, how representational
states and their contents should be seen as relating to action and phenomenal con-
sciousness, and so on. Some of these issues will be broached in this book, but the
general picture is well enough known to take as a point of departure. For what we
can then say about anti-representationalism, in its broadest sense, is that it questions
this, similarly broad, paradigm for thinking about how mind and language should be
understood: as representing or – as Rorty famously put it – mirroring reality. Anti-
representationalism does not necessarily reject the very idea or existence of repre-
sentations or representational content, mental or linguistic, but it does seek to
significantly downplay the role these things can play in explaining perceptual expe-
rience or cognition, and/or in understanding the relationship between thought and
language and the things we think and talk about; at the very least, it denies the idea
of representation can provide a foundational theory in these areas. Historically one
can trace its roots and inspirations to a number of different philosophers including
Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, the phenomenologists (Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-
Ponty), and the American pragmatists (Peirce, James, Dewey). In relation especially
to questions about language, thought and reality, figures of the analytic tradition are
also important, notably Carnap, Quine, Sellars and (the later) Wittgenstein, plus
other contemporary thinkers about whom I will have more to say later. Certain
1
Thus it is also employed in (so-called) ‘Chomskyan’ approaches to semantics based on the notion
of ‘knowledge of meaning’ (cf. e.g. Larson and Segal 1995). Chomsky himself is not a supporter
of such accounts (see Chomsky 2000; Knowles 1995; also below, section 2.ii).
4 1 Introduction
people that are more usually classed as psychologists or cognitive scientists rather
than philosophers can also be seen as having played a significant role in the overall
development of the idea of anti-representationalism in contemporary thought, such
as Francisco Varela and James Gibson.
In this book I will be concerned first and foremost with expounding and develop-
ing a particular type of anti-representationalist position extant in contemporary ana-
lytic philosophy that I call anti-representationalism about thought and
language – ARTL for short.2 However, I will also, by way of doing this, discuss
other kinds of (so-called) anti-representationalist (and representationalist) position,
about perceptual experience and cognitive science,3 and take up how they relate to
ARTL. The central upshot of this will be a suggestion to the effect that the anti-
representationalist approach in cognitive science known as enactivism and ARTL
can be seen as mutually supporting positions. Enactivism can also, in my view, be
independently motivated by consideration of the philosophical literature on percep-
tual experience. In relation to this area I defend a distinct though closely related
anti-representationalist position from enactivism that I term phenomenological
externalism (cf. Knowles 2019b). Phenomenological externalism has it that, while
experience does not consist in representational states but has rather to be understood
in terms of the worldly, material items we perceive (and perceive with, i.e. our bod-
ies), at the same time, these items we experience are part of a world that is relative
to an experiencing subject: it is not the world of physics or the world in itself, but a
world for us, or world for the organism in question. I will argue that this kind of
view (which I will argue enactivism is also committed to) is not idealist, nor anti-
realist about the world of experience, at least when coupled with ARTL insofar as
this rejects the very idea of ‘mind-independent reality’ as incoherent.
Though ranging rather broadly, the different kinds of anti-representationalism
I take up will not and are not meant to give an exhaustive taxonomy of all possible
or actual forms of anti-representationalist philosophy. For example, many of the
specific philosophical positions developed by the historical thinkers above would
count as anti-representationalist, but I will not be discussing them as such here
(there are of course large influences from many of these thinkers on the views I do
discuss). My discussion aims rather to offer an overview of anti-representationalism
as I see it figuring in contemporary philosophy and cognitive science, going into
most detail about ARTL and connections of other views with ARTL.
2
In fact this position is arguably one of two contemporary positions that might be characterized as
such, the other being a view one might call (quasi-)Kantian anti-representationalism about thought
and language, which stresses the idea of conceptual relativity, in the sense defended by Putnam
(my use of the label ‘Kantian’ here is due mainly to Sami Pihsltröm’s connecting the ideas of these
two thinkers, see his 2003). I discuss and argue against this kind of view in Chap. 6 (see also foot-
note 5 below).
3
In cognitive science, the label ‘non-representationalist’ is also often used. I will understand the
terms ‘non-representationalist’ and ‘anti-representationalist’ as pretty much synonomous in this
book, and, for at least the most part, use just the latter.
1.2 Anti-Representationalism About Thought and Language 5
In the rest of this introductory chapter I will first: introduce and characterise
ARTL; and second: outline the other chapters of the book.
1.2 Anti-Representationalism About Thought and Language
Though I am very sympathetic to phenomenological externalism and enactivism, it

is anti-representationalism about thought and language – ARTL – I am first and
foremost committed to. What then is ARTL? The generic position I wish to develop
and (thereby) defend a version of in this book is, in my view, one that can be identi-
fied most clearly in the work of Rorty and Huw Price. It may well be that several
other philosophers in the contemporary analytic debate about thought and language
can and/or should be seen as subscribing to the view, implicitly or otherwise. Of the
giants of analytic philosophy, it is I believe reasonable, as we shall see, to attribute
the view to Quine, or at least a position very close to Quine’s actual one. Perhaps
under a certain interpretation or construal of the work of Wilfred Sellars, one might
also view him as propounding a form of ARTL (see Price 2015), whilst the thought
of the later Wittgenstein, in a different way, might also be understood in terms of it
(see Price 2009a). I do not, however, in any case, mean to suggest these philoso-
phers’ contributions can be reduced to articulating the kind of unitary position I will
be laying out here. ARTL is first and foremost a position I see Rorty and Price, along
with certain other contemporary thinkers, to be responsible for and to converge on
(its significant debts to others notwithstanding).
There are several other central twentieth century analytic philosophers whose
work can be seen as having an important impact on or as developing importantly
similar ideas to those of ARTL, though who do not, at least explicitly or clearly,
hold the view; these include Gottlob Frege, Rudolf Carnap, Frank Ramsey, Peter
Strawson, Thomas Kuhn, Nelson Goodman, Donald Davidson, Hilary Putnam and
Arthur Fine (probably inter alia). More recent thinkers still active in the contempo-
rary debate who hold views that are at least close to it, or which have significantly
influenced its development, include Paul Horwich, Michael Williams, Simon
Blackburn, Robert Brandom, Amie Thomasson and (at least in my opinion) John
McDowell. The ideas and views of several of these philosophers will feature in vari-
ous chapters of this book. There are other historical precursors to, influences on or
parallels with ARTL one could trace and explore. Insofar as the view is (and is also
generally described as) pragmatist, the classical pragmatist thinkers are obvious
candidates here. The German idealist tradition from Kant and Hegel through to
Heidegger and Foucault also contain ideas conducive and/or similar to it (for illumi-
nating exposition of this tradition that connects it to the realism/anti-realism debate
in analytic philosophy, see Lee Braver 2007; the issue of realism in relation to ARTL
will be taken up in Chap. 6). Going into these historical connections in any detail
however is not what this book is about.
What then are the guiding ideas behind ARTL? I believe we can summarise these
as follows (these points will be embellished in relation to following discussions of
6 1 Introduction
Rorty and Price). Firstly, it rejects the idea that our cognition of the world – the
thinking of ours that can be evaluated most fundamentally in terms of its truth or
falsity – should or can be explained or understood in terms of substantial semantic
relations – relations of truth and reference – between language (or thought) and
mind-independent reality. Often in the relevant literature this view is called ‘repre-
sentationalism’, but in view of the many different ways this label can be used Price
terms it ‘Representationalism’ (or ‘Big-R Representationalism’), and I will follow
him in this. Secondly, ARTL puts in place of Representationalism an account of
truth and meaning that is deflationary, and otherwise based essentially on the use of
language – in some way or other.4 Thirdly, ARTL holds that Representationalism is
necessary for making sense of the idea of there being a completely mind-independent
reality to which all of our truth-directed thought and talk is ultimately answerable.
The idea that there is such a reality – a view I will call ‘metaphysical realism’, or
MR – is thus not denied by ARTL, but rejected as incoherent. Fourthly, though
ARTL is not metaphysically realist, it does not see itself as any kind of anti-realist
position, which would see our thoughts as concerning some kind of mental or lin-
guistic reality, or a reality restricted by our abilities to find out about it, or our
descriptions of reality as inexorably relative to a choice of conceptual scheme
(framework or something similar).5 By rejecting the very idea of a completely mind-
independent, non-conceptual reality, we can uphold (at least, taking into account
several other considerations) a common-sensical realism – one that is moreover the
only coherent kind available, according to ARTL. Fifthly, and finally, ARTL is a
naturalistic philosophical position (a commitment in turn connected to the previous
idea of being common-sensical). Human beings are wholly natural creatures, and
broadly continuous in their function – at least, language aside – with other animals.
ARTL’s naturalism is not (at least typically) a reductive naturalistic position which
sees all truth as, say, ultimately physical, at least in the sense of ‘given by physics’,
but philosophy must be consistent with scientific results, and would ideally be in
some way continuous with science. As I see things, this kind of view will induce a
4
This may involve a very broad sense of ‘use’, as well as ‘deflation’; I offer a brief discussion
below of how ARTL conceives of the theory of meaning after my presentation of Rorty and
Price below.
5
This last category is meant to accommodate thinkers like Putnam and Hirsch who, though reject-
ing MR, believe in conceptual relativity, quantificational variance or something similar. Though a
taxonomy might have made room for this kind of view as a distinct subcategory of ARTL this
would have overcomplicated my presentation and discussion. I consider this kind of view explic-
itly in Chap. 6, where I argue it is, pace its proponents’ protestations to the contrary, committed to
some kind of Kantian Ding an sich. (Though, as we shall see, I think this is problematic, it doesn’t
render their view inconsistent, insofar as MR, as I and these thinkers understand the position, is not
merely a commitment to there being a reality in itself in the way Kant thought of this.)
A more general question here (one that Jørgen Dyrstad urged me to clarify) is whether ARTL
and Representationalism amount to exhaustive positions (i.e. whether one is an ARTList just in
case one is not a Representationalist). As should be clear from what I have just said, I do no believe
this to be the case, in particular, there are many who reject Representationalism who would not
accept ARTL (Putnam and Horwich are two examples who feature as such in this book; another is
Tim Button, see Chap. 5; out and out linguistic idealists might be yet another).
scepticism towards traditional ‘dualistic’ kinds of philosophy that posit distinctively

non-material entities with special causal powers, as well as to the idea of philosophy
furnishing us some special kind of knowledge or method – completely a priori or
transcendental insight, say – divorced from the kind science or common sense
provides. On the other hand, not all knowledge need be scientific (and of course
science itself is not necessariy just one kind of thing), whilst philosophy can legiti-
mately draw on common sense – though nor is common sense any absolute court of
appeal. I do not suppose this characterization settles all issues about what being a
naturalist commits one to – what I have to say in the course of the book will clarify
my own commitments somewhat further – but I believe it does give some substance
to the idea of what it is to be a naturalist in the general way ARTL aims to be.6
Let us now try to unpack these ideas in a little more detail in relation to Rorty and
Price. Taking his inspiration from Heidegger, Dewey and the later Wittgenstein, in
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) Rorty famously argued that the modern
philosophical project initiated by Descartes and Locke and canonically formulated
by Kant reached an endgame in the combination of critiques of empiricist episte-
mology proffered by Quine – in his attack on the a priori and analyticity – and by
Sellars, in his attack on the idea of the empirically given as a kind of ‘non-conceptual’
mental mediator between thought and reality. Other analytic philosophers – espe-
cially Davidson7 – are also important to Rorty’s wider project (see his 1982, 1989,
1991), but a guiding thought throughout his oeuvre is the idea of Western philoso-
phy as an attempt, or a series of attempts, to provide an epistemological-cum-
metaphysical basis for our thinking, and that it is now time to retire that project. The
so-called ‘modern’ version of this sought to ground the idea that it is the new sci-
ence that puts us, uniquely, in touch with ‘mind-independent’ reality, with other
‘mind-dependent’ discourses being somehow answerable to this one (Rorty 1999).
This is a prime example of what Rorty understands representationalism to involve:
the idea that there is some privileged discourse secured through a kind of not merely
causal but semantic contact between the mind and mind-independent reality. Though
the idea of such a physical reality was instrumental in ousting the theistic world-
view that preceded it, the underlying idea behind the enlightenment is, or should be,
the emancipation from all non-human authorities, the physical world included
(ibid.). Rejecting representationalism is thus coeval with a broadly coherentist and
behaviourist conception of epistemology, whereby responsible epistemic practices
reduce to what we can ‘get away with’ saying to our contemporaries (see e.g. his
1979, 176). Rhetoric aside – of which Rorty uses much, appearing thereby, I think,
more controversial than a more sober reading of his work can in fact suggest – the
basic idea here is that justification and meaning are internal to human practices of
‘giving and asking for reasons’, as Brandom has put it (Brandom 1994). Though
truth does not transcend these or constitute a separate norm for inquiry, the notion
6
For some further discussion of what naturalism amounts to for ARTL, see e.g. Knowles (2013,
2018a) (focussing on Rorty) and (for discussion of Price’s view in relation to so-called ‘liberal
naturalism’) Shapiro (2022).
7
I will take up relevant points of contact between Davidson and ARTL in the discussion to follow.
8 1 Introduction
of truth does – even for Rorty – have a profile that is distinctive in comparison with
that of justification (Rorty 1986).8 Rorty is also clear that his position is not anti-
realist: the very possibility of a contrast between realist and anti-realist treatments
of discourses is one that vanishes with the rejection of representationalism (Rorty
1991), whilst he sees no content – or at least useable content – to the Kantian idea
of an unknowable reality ‘an sich’ (Rorty 1972). Nor is his view relativistic, or at
least meant to be. We are certainly committed to the truth of our own views as
opposed to those of other groups who disagree with us (an idea he calls ethnocen-
trism: Rorty 1991), and there is no way to, as it were, get somewhere else without
starting from these views; but relativism – the idea that all beliefs are equally true or
justified – does not follow from this, and could only do so given a kind of hyposta-
sizing of belief systems which would be totally artificial.9 In line with his pragmatic
forbears, especially Dewey, Rorty is also a naturalist: we are fundamentally
Darwinian creatures who seek to cope with and thrive in our environments as best
we can.10
Famously, Rorty does not so much argue systematically for this package of
views, or analyse the various different arguments that support it as put it forward as
a new, brave model for philosophers, who should be primarily concerned to forge
new, ‘edifying’ ways of thinking in the service of widening the scope of enlightened
discourse, rather than, like philosophers of the past, with ‘mirroring reality’. I note
that I do not see this ‘activist’ aspect of Rorty’s neo-pragmatism – nor his accompa-
nying ‘ironic’ attitude to his own philosophical views (cf. Rorty 1989) – as endemic
to ARTL (hence to his view regarded as promulgating ARTL as such). More in the
spirit of Price, I think there is room for interesting theoretical philosophical work to
8
I will have more to say about the notion of truth in ARTL below.
9
Cf. Williams (1999, ch. 11) for discussion of this idea of the ‘myth of the system’. The thought is
that if we were locked into discrete belief systems we might have to say that no view is better than
any other, but insofar as we patently are not, the thought gets no purchase. Rorty does tend to
deride appeals to ‘truth’ when it comes to so-called clashes between ‘final vocabularies’ and say
relativist-sounding things (Rorty 1989), but given his deflationary attitude to truth it is not at all
clear that he should (apart from the issue of whether the sharp distinction between final and non-
final vocabularies is itself sustainable).
10
Rorty also uses the slogan ‘coping not copying’, taken from Dewey, to argue against representa-
tionalism. Contrary to the idea that evolution favours creatures who correctly represent – have true
beliefs about – their environment, all evolution in fact requires is that their beliefs lead them to act
in a way that allows them to survive in it. I don’t think this argument is a very good one, not least
from the perspective of ARTL insofar as it contrasts copying and coping in a way that is inimical
to semantic deflationism (more on which shortly). As we shall see below, Price’s view offers a way
of substantiating the idea of ‘coping not copying’ in a way that is more in keeping with ARTL
(albeit a way I myself will also ultimately reject).
I should also add that Rorty’s attack on representationalism via a rejection of classical founda-
tionalist epistemology is probably insufficient to repudiate it (or at least Representationalism),
since I take it many today would want to give a merely quasi-foundationalist or some kind of so-
called ‘externalist’ but substantive account of our knowledge that precisely builds on
Representationalist ideas. As I see things, Price’s metasemantic arguments against
Representationalism supplement Rorty’s, though Rorty’s remain important too; again, more on
this below.
be done even once representationalism and the idea of ‘reality’ have been abjured.
It is to a large extent such a project this book attempts. This doesn’t mean that I
think philosophy (under the star of ARTL) can have no impact on practical affairs,
as I also hope to show it can, but I think in fact the model for thinking about this can
(and should) be relatively traditional (see Chap. 7).11
Let us turn now to Price, who has presented and developed his views through a
series of publications stretching over the least four decades (see e.g. Price 1988,
2007, 2011a, 2013, 2015, 2019). In part through an explicit embracement of Rorty’s
anti-representationalism (Price 2010a), Price has described his more recent work as
an attempt to make clearer and more accessible the essential ideas contained in his
more technical 1988 monograph Facts and the Function of Truth; the resulting view
is what he now calls a generalized or (more usually) global expressivism. My focus
will be on the ideas as these are presented in the more recent work, many of which
heavily inform the generic position of ARTL as I understand this.
What Price offers (rather like Rorty) is not so much new theses as a framework for
thinking about how several different philosophical theses hang together; a synoptic
picture of what they imply. One such thesis, a very central one for him, is semantic
deflationism, a view which has received perhaps its most extensive treatment and
defence in recent years in the work of Horwich (1990). Price often seems to have
Horwich’s version of this view –minimalism – in mind when he talks about deflation-
ism, but he has also defended a version close to Quine’s disquotationalism (Quine
1970, disussed in Price 2004; cf. also Field 1994). Semantic deflationism generally
holds that neither truth nor reference are properties with an underlying, explanatory
nature, contrary to what representationalists – or Representationalists – hold. It denies,
while Representationalists affirm, that truth is a property which explains why some
claims or sentences are true and others not, such as a relation of correspondence
between sentences and sentence-like objects like ‘facts’ or ‘state of affairs’ in a mind-
independent reality.12 Similarly, it denies that reference is a substantial natural relation
which we might build empirical theories about, as Representationalists have attempted
(a project first envisioned by Field 1972 and pursued by people like Fodor 1990 and
Millikan 1984). For Price, following Quine, to say that ‘snow is white’ is true is not to
make a new, substantive claim beyond saying that snow is white; in saying the former,
we are still really only talking about snow and saying it is white. Conversely, if you
can assert that p, you can eo ipso say that p is true. Something similar applies to
11
I do not discuss Rorty’s broader metaphilosophy in this chapter, but critique a distinct pragmatist
construal of philosophy – metaphysics in particular – due to Thomasson. I have elsewhere argued
that Rorty’s overall position would be more stable if it acknowledged, rather than rejected, a sui
generis category of the theoretical in the academy (Knowles 2018a, cp. Tartaglia 2010; and for a
response on Rorty’s behalf, Gascoigne and Bacon 2020), but for my purposes here I can remain
agnostic about the extent to which the activist side of Rorty’s pragmatism (which, for the record,
is not crudely utilitarian) might in fact be compatible with everything of substance I want to argue
for in this book.
12
As noted above (footnote 5), not all who reject a substantive theory of truth and embrace some
kind of deflationism should be classed as supporters of ARTL. Horwich himself is a leading exam-
ple; see Chaps. 2 and 6.
10 1 Introduction
reference: in saying that ‘snow’ refers to snow, we are just saying something like
‘there is something that is snow’, and vice versa. The two notions, truth and reference,
are of course internally related. That ‘snow’ refers to snow follows trivially from the
fact that ‘snow is white’ is true, insofar as that kind of sentence is true iff the subject
term refers to something, and this satisfies ‘is white’. And that ‘snow is white’ is true
follows trivially from the fact that ‘snow’ refers to snow and satisfies ‘is white’. But
there is nothing substantive to say about what truth or reference amount to beyond
this, and the same goes, mutatis mutandis, in the case of satisfaction and the other
semantic formation rules of language.
Although Price is thus far a deflationist, he does not think (as, say, Horwich does)
that the significance of truth as a concept or property is exhausted by its role in say-
ing things like ‘“snow is white” is true iff snow is white’ (plus quantifications like
‘Everything the pope says is true’, used when we don’t know exactly what it is
someone says). We will have more to say about his understanding of truth below.
However, just accepting deflationism as thus far sketched has important implica-
tions for certain kinds of realism versus anti-realism debates (Macarthur and Price
2008). In particular, it means that we cannot readily make sense of a traditional kind
of non-cognitivist or expressivist view which would see a seemingly well-functioning
assertoric practice, like ethical talk, as in fact being in the service of some aim other
than truth, like expressing emotion or prescription (a view going back to Hume and
defended in well-known versions by Ayer 1936, Hare 1952, Blackburn 1984 and
Gibbard 1990). Price doesn’t think expressivism needs to be understood in this way:
a good expressivism can maintain the idea that, say, ethical talk functions to express
emotion, but also reject the idea that it is not truth apt (indeed, Blackburn’s ‘quasi-
realism’ already involves the kernel of this idea, thinks Price). But the main point
for now is that one traditional way of dividing up our discourses into those that do
and those do not express cognitive, truth-evaulable claims looks like a non-starter,
given semantic deflationism.
A further consequence of semantic deflationism is that there is nothing of a
semantic kind to say about how different discourses relate to reality. This has impli-
cations for how we should think about certain metaphysical projects, most notably
for Price the project of ‘locating’ or ‘placing’ common sense categories like mind,
meaning and value in the natural world (cf. e.g. Jackson 1998). I will have more to
say about this in Chap. 2, but briefly stated Price argues that once one rejects
Representationalism, this way of doing metaphysics necessarily lapses.
The overall upshot is very similar to Rorty’s pragmatism: we should acknowl-
edge an irreducible plurality of vocabularies or discourses, none of which can be
seen as merely expressive (i.e. non-cognitive), and none of which latch onto the
‘real’ and articulate what in the world makes our statements true. Price however also
thinks the positive aspect of expressivism can give the idea of being a naturalist
behind this pragmatism more substance. More generally, what we can do, according
to Price, is ask questions about the different underlying functions of our different
discourses, with this function being understood non-representationally (‘representa-
tional function’ being trivially satisfied by all discourses in view of semantic defla-
tionism). He thus holds his view diverges from what, following Sarah McGrath (2014),
he calls ‘relaxed realism’, a view that also goes under the name of ‘metaphysical
quietism’ (Price 2019). Relaxed realists typically believe that the reluctance we feel
about accepting the existence of so-called ‘non-natural’ entities like meanings,
numbers, colours, values etc. along with irreducible truths about these things is due
to a kind of philosophical anxiety that needs to be exorcised, not answered;
McDowell is a prominent proponent of such a line in recent years (see e.g. his 1984,
1985), as is perhaps, if in a rather different way, Rorty himself. Relaxed realism has
also less flatteringly been characterized as ‘soggy pluralism’ by Blackburn (2005,
113). Price’s view is similar to relaxed realism in being ‘anti-metaphysical’, but he
thinks relaxed realism unreasonably demurs at questions about how to account for
differences between discourses, questions that expressivists, moreover, can give
answers to, in broadly naturalistic terms. His view is thereby reminiscent of prag-
matism’s conception of language as a tool, and in particular, at least according to
Price, of Wittgenstein’s view of language as a bag of different tools (Price 2009a).
For these reasons, he also refers to it as global pragmatism. Whatever one calls it,
however, it is important to note that precisely this expressivist/pragmatist dimension
of Price’s view is not part of ARTL by definition, or at least needn’t and in my view
shouldn’t be seen as being so. As we shall see in Chap. 2 there is, pace Price, space
for both relaxed realism and a different form of what we might call ‘explanatory’
ARTL from global expressivism, within the parameters I have set as defining ARTL
and what reasonably can be seen as following from these.
This dialectic will lead to the ideas of Chaps. 3, 4 and 5 concerning anti-
representationalism in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science as an alterna-
tive to an expressivist grounding13 of ARTL. Other ideas that Price has put forward
are however important to understanding the general discussion of the book, as well
as the debates in the later chapters which abstract to an extent from different opin-
ions concerning how best to understand ARTL. One of these concerns Carnap, or at
least the Carnap of ‘Empiricism, semantics, and ontology’ (Carnap 1950), an impor-
tant inspiration for Price that casts further light on both his global expressivism and
ARTL more generally (Price 2007, 2009b). Famously Carnap distinguishes between
external and internal questions, arguing that we can ask and answer ontological
questions internally, that is, assuming a given discourse or framework, but not exter-
nally, outwith any framework. Within the discourse of arithmetic, we say things like
‘there is a natural number between 3 and 5’, and trivially it follows that natural
numbers exist. You can’t make arithmetical claims and in the same breath deny there
are numbers. But if you ask, do numbers really exist, independently of any connec-
tion to the discourse of arithmetic, you are asking an external ontological question
that is senseless. There is much debate about how to understand Carnap’s distinction
(see e.g. Kraut 2016), but Price sees it fundamentally in terms of use versus men-
tion. Using our terms as we in fact do, we commit ourselves to certain ontological
implications, and others follow logically from these. These are internal matters. But
13
To avoid any confusion, in talking of ‘grounding’ here I do not mean the idea that has gained
currency in recent analytic metaphysics and metametaphysics (seminally propopouneded by
Schaffer 2009 and Fine 2001). The sense in question will be further elucidated in Chap. 2.
12 1 Introduction
if we merely mention a term – ask an external question about it – we are left without
a context in which to assess or even make sense of what ontological implications it
might have. As I understand Price here (though he doesn’t make this aspect of his
thought explicit), he is tacitly assuming that Representationalism cannot provide
this context. On the face of it, this might seem to provide a good way of asking a
substantial ontological question independently of a proprietary discourse, i.e. Does
the phrase ‘the natural number 4’ refer to anything? But it does so only if reference
is substantial; if it is not, you can again only be asking, indirectly, an internal ques-
tion, parasitic on accepting that there is a natural number between 3 and 5, which all
would acquiesce in (at least, insofar as one accepts the autonomous integrity of
arithmetical discourse).14 Either way, metaphysical ontological questions, as we
might call them – ones that seek to articulate the structure of absolute reality, inde-
pendent of any kind of language – lapse. This kind of view is commonly known as
ontological deflationism, and has been defended in different ways by Hirsch (2011)
and Thomasson (2015), among others. It is very closely related to semantic defla-
tionism and we can for our purposes regard them as coterminal.15
Famously, Quine rejected the internal-external dichotomy, on grounds at least in
part of it resting on or even being identical with the analytic-synthetic distinction.
Now the latter idea seems doubtful, though exactly what the relationship between
the two distinctions is a complicated question (see e.g. Bird 1995 for discussion).
Suffice it here to note that while Price accepts that Quine may succeed in erasing the
distinction between internal and external questions, in the sense that there may be
no purely internal questions decidable by reference to meaning and empirical input,
he also notes this does not imply – as many have taken it to – that Quine thereby
reinstated metaphysics or non-deflationary ontology (or intended to) (see Price
2007). It remains the case for Quine that we discern our picture of reality from
within science, not by reference to some philosophical account of what makes our
science true. Our science is not grounded in some kind of metaphysical foundation,
but is ultimately just another – albeit for Quine all-encompassing – linguistic frame-
work that we have developed for thinking about the very world this framework
serves to articulate for us.16
14
The parenthetical remark alludes to the idea which I maintain, and also I believe Price maintains,
that it is coherent for a supporter to ARTL to hold a position more like Quine’s on which, though
there are no purely internal questions, the sense in which all questions thus are ‘external’ is not a
metaphysically realist sense of externality (cf. Knowles 2017; Price 2007). See also below in
the text.
15
Thomasson (2014) offers arguments to this effect.
16
Thus: ‘Whatever we affirm […] we affirm as a statement within our aggregate theory of nature
as we now see it; and to call a statement true is just to reaffirm it. Perhaps it is not true, and perhaps
we shall find that out; but in any event there is no extra-theoretic truth, no higher truth than the truth
we are claiming or aspiring to as we continue to tinker with our system of the world from within.’
(Quine 1975, 327). And again: ‘Truth is immanent, and there is no higher. We must speak from
within a theory […]. What evaporates is the transcendental question of the reality of the external
world – the question whether or how far our science measures up to the Ding an sich.’ (Quine
1981, 21–2).
Another central component in Price’s overall case for his view that will be impor-
tant in the sequel is his set of arguments against Representationalism. In contrast to
Rorty’s largely metaepistemological objections, Price argues metasemantically
(Price 2004, 2009c).17 One can see his project as one of critiquing Representationalism
viewed as part of a broader metaphysical (i.e. metaphysically realist) naturalism
(see Knowles 2011, 2014); that is, a position that sees the world as wholly natural –
not ‘magical’ – and in which we can talk about things in the world in virtue of
substantial relations of reference between our language and them. What are the
grounds for concern here? Price presents arguments that are similar to those given
by Putnam against a position that he also famously called ‘metaphysical realism’
(Putnam 1983) – and as far as I can see is the same view that ARTL rejects. Broadly,
what both sets of arguments do is suggest that there is a problematic kind of self-
referentiality about substantive notions of reference, of the relevant naturalistic vari-
ety, that renders them incoherent. One of several arguments Price employs (cf. Price
2004), which he identifies in the work of Paul Boghossian (1990), is as follows. If
reference is substantive and natural in this way, then it is possible that there is noth-
ing in the real, natural world that grounds it or vindicates it (if this is denied, the
very idea of metaphysical naturalism lacks substance). We could end up, in other
words, with a so-called ‘error theory’ about reference itself, in which the term ‘ref-
erence’ fails to refer to anything. But this looks incoherent, at least from the point
of view of metaphysical realism, for which reference is the basis of all meaningful
talk. Ergo, there must be something wrong with the idea that reference is substantial
and natural. Boghossian himself opts for the idea that it cannot be natural; Price
points out one can instead decline to see it as substantial.
Though not in published work, Price has linked his arguments against
Representationalism to Putnam’s ‘model theoretic’ arguments against MR, which
strongly resemble those Price uses in their ‘self-referentialist’ character (cf. Price
1998; for more on Putnam’s arugments against MR, see Chap. 5). Though Price’s
focus here is not MR per se but rather ‘placement metaphysics’, as I understand it
these ideas are tightly interwoven in the way ARTL supposes (Chap. 2 will further
defend the connection between Price’s arguments against placement metaphysics
and the rejection of MR, a theme that will also figure in the discussion of realism in
Chap. 6).
Rorty clearly sees Representationalism and MR as two sides of the same coin.
Though his own arguments are, as noted, based largely on epistemological consid-
erations, he also deploys his hero Davidson’s rejection of a distinction between
‘scheme’ and ‘content’ (Davidson 1984) as further support for the idea. One part of
this involves the rejection of the idea of substantial truth makers of the kind the cor-
respondence theory of truth can seem to involve; the other essentially recapitulates
Sellars’ argument against ‘the given’ (see Sect. 3.2). As I see things Davidson’s
argument against the correspondence theory of truth – based on an argument of
Frege’s that if any language-external entity like a ‘fact’ makes a given sentence true,
17
I will say more on these and other differences between Price and Rorty below.
14 1 Introduction
all such entities do (Davidson 1969) – is not as clear cut as Price’s and Putnam’s in
repudiating its intended target, or indeed in undermining MR and
Representationalism. Of course, some may think the latter arguments are less than
decisive, so I should perhaps underline that what I mainly want to stress here is what
ARTL internally takes itself to involve, which is that Representationalism is a pre-
supposition of MR and that, in rejecting the former, we must thereby also reject
the latter.
Continuing with the theme of MR, it is also interesting that Price offers a couple
of (later) Wittgensteinean arguments that can be seen as targeting specifically this
view. The first is based on the so-called rule-following considerations, i.e. the prob-
lem of specifying what makes it the case that we are following the correct ‘rule’ in
our linguistic practices, and hence are going on ‘in the same way’ when we describe
things over time in the way we do (cf. Kripke 1981). Price argues (see e.g. Holton
and Price 2003, Price 2019; cf. also Pettit 1991) that this shows that ultimately our
subjective reactions must play a role in understanding what it is for a description we
proffer to be objectively right or wrong: though we may correct each other, there are
no use-transcendent facts nor any worldly ‘structure’ (cf. Lewis 1984; Sider 2014)
that might dictate how we should ‘go on’ in particular cases. Now Price sees this as
a ‘thin end’ of the wedge that his global expressivism constitutes, i.e., while some
discourses are more dependent on our natural reactions to things than others, none
are completely independent of these (Price 2019); he also links it to his account of
truth (Price 1988, 2003; more on this below). As far as I can see, however, and as we
shall see more fully in Chap. 2, the point stands on its own feet (if at all); that is to
say, it needn’t be seen as part of Price’s programme of, at least, Hume-inspired
expressivism, though I would want to see it as being a natural and indeed integral
part of ARTL and its rejection of MR.18
The other Wittgensteinean argument concerns the idea there is a contingency
concerning the very languages we speak (Price 2013, 53–4; cf. also Rorty 1989, ch.
1). In rejecting MR, ARTL rejects also the idea that there is any sense to the idea of
a privileged ontological language or ‘book of the world’ (Sider op. cit.). What the
facts are (even in the ideal) is just a function of what facts our languages discern,
and our languages could have been very different (hence ARTL also distances itself
from any metaphysical understanding of the early Wittgenstein’s idea that the world
is ‘the totality of facts’). However this contingency has to be delicately handled.
Acknowledging it doesn’t mean, Price tell us, that if we spoke different languages
that the ‘facts would then have been different, only that […] we would have made
18
Cp. Shapiro (2021), who also points out how this ‘global subjectivist’ aspect of Price’s view, as
Shapiro calls it, is distinct from his global expressivism. Indeed, Shapiro argues that seeing the
point in terms of a distinct subjective reaction to some given objective reality, which would seem
to be Price’s rendering, is inconsistent with his rejection of Representationalism, i.e. the idea that
there is some substantive story to be told about reference. If that is the case, then we need some
other way of thinking about the point (perhaps along the lines of McDowell 1984). For present
purposes all I want to insist here is that the point seems distinct from an expressivist commitment,
even though it is an important part of ARTL.
factual claims different from […] any that we actually make’ (Price 2013, 54).
Thinking different languages would yield different facts is another use-mention fal-
lacy. He also thinks this view thereby evades the force of Davidson’s famous argu-
ment against the coherence of the idea of conceptual schemes, for the relevant
alternative conceptual schemes are not on Price’s view interpretable.19
One might of course have qualms about all these arguments and the others Price
uses. Though I will return to the ideas above at several junctures, systematically
addressing these qualms will not be my main focus in this book, something that
would require at least another volume; rather, I want (for the most part) to presup-
pose them and ask what kind of wider view we can construct in the wake of so
doing. (The strategy is similar in Chap. 5, where I will present Putnam’s arguments
against MR, but focus on looking at what follows if you accept them.) Of course,
I also hope that if the view I construct seems tenable, this will also lend increased
credibility to the starting points.
The foregoing offers only an outline of ARTL, but one I hope that readers will
find serviceable as an introduction; many of the themes will be elaborated on in the
coming chapters. Before turning to a presentation of these, however, I want to end
this section with four short supplementary discussions to further clarify how
I understand ARTL, or how one might understand it in relation to its overall prin-
ciples. The first concerns the relationship between Rorty’s and Price’s critiques of
representationalism, or Representationalism. The second concerns the relationship
between thought and language for ARTL, and the third its understanding of truth
and meaning. The fourth offers a brief discussion of why investigation of ARTL is
something that I think should appear worthwhile, at least for a philosopher with
certain metaphilosophical sensibilities.
(i) Rorty versus Price: I mentioned above that Price’s arguments against repre-
sentationalism (or Representationalism) rest on metasemantics rather than,
like Rorty’s, metaepistemology. Price’s are thus plausibly more trenchant inso-
far as relatively few philosophers today espouse a foundational epistemology
(at least, in the classical internalist sense), and would not see this as a presup-
position of Representationalism (or indeed of a substantive epistemology). If
we can make sense of our thought latching semantically onto reality in terms
made available by our conception of that reality itself – causally, say – then that
would be good enough for most Representationalists. However, the question
naturally arises whether Price shares or should share Rorty’s critique of classi-
cal epistemology, or, more generally, whether the latter (classical epistemol-
ogy) really involves Representationalism.20 I think the answers here at least to
the second and third question should be affirmative. As for the first, when it
19
There is more one might say about the issues of this paragraph than this brief overview provides;
since they are relevant to understanding ARTL’s realism, I return to them in Chap. 6.
20
We can perhaps more safely assume Rorty would endorse (or at least not object to) Price’s
metasemantical arguments, not least insofar as he explicitly expressed sympathy with Price’s over-
all project (Rorty 2007).
16 1 Introduction
comes to analyticity, Price seems, as we noted above, happy to go Quinean,

though he does not explicitly endorse this line (Price 2007). He has had less to
say about distinctively empirical knowledge or ‘the given’, though has sought
to ally himself with Sellars (Price 2015), who of course is the originator of the
idea that there can be no such thing.21 In any case, I take it one might in prin-
ciple seek to combine the ideas of Price’s outlined above with a view that
didn’t reject analyticity and/or the idea of distinctive empirical knowledge.22
However, given the overall spirit of ARTL, it would strike me as odd if any
subscriber to it cleaved to these ideas, at least insofar they are meant to involve
a mental contact with some non-mental reality. The ideas of (classical) founda-
tionalist epistemology are certainly distinct from the ideas Price criticizes, but
if they are combined with a position that rejects idealism, as ARTL does, they
do end up in a similar place, it seems to me. To put it bluntly: foundationalist
epistemology (in non-idealist form) maintains that in virtue of contact between
thought/talk and mind-independent reality at a certain level,23 certain dis-
courses provide us with our basis for justifying and understanding the truth
content of all talk and thought. But if that was how things were, Price’s dis-
course pluralism surely wouldn’t have much going for it. I conclude that
Rorty’s metaepistemological and Price’s metasemantical arguments naturally
supplement one another as part of a more general case against
Representationalism.
21
Whether Sellars was true to his own rejection, and what exactly his rection commits one to, are
further matters: see e.g. Maher 2012, McDowell 2009a, b, as well as various discussions later in
this book.
22
Thomasson is perhaps an example; see Chap. 7. (As we shall also see there, I think in fact that it
isn’t totally clear that there is not a distinctive category of analytic truth that ARTL might accept.
However, this would have to be one that divorced it from anything to do with epistemology i.e. as
providing a priori warrant of some kind. In the current context, it is the latter understanding of
analyticity that is at issue.)
23
The paradigm of this kind of view is something like the acquaintance-based empiricsm of
Bertrand Russell (see Russell 1912). In light of this, I should however consider a possible objec-
tion. I characterised Representationalism above as the idea that there are semantic relations
between thought/language and reality. But might there not be a more primitive, non-content-
involving relationship between our minds and the world – acquaintance in Russell’s sense, or at
least a closely related sense? Moreover, isn’t a view which stresses this itself a form of anti-
representationalism? Not in the sense in which ARTL is anti-representationalist, though this is a
point that I think needs stressing in the context of a more general discussion about different forms
of contemporary anti-representationalist philosophy (something I will try to provide in Chap. 3).
The basic point is that ARTL rejects any kind of view which connects thought up to thought-
independent objects, at least in other than purely causal terms.
A further position which may seem to challenge my divorcement of ARTL from any kind of
epistemological foundationalism, though in a different way, is John McDowell’s, on which percep-
tion has conceptual content – and thus is not meant to constitute any kind of ‘given’ – but neverthe-
less retains a distinctively receptive nature, and is thus in a position to ground distinctively
non-perceptual thought (McDowell 1994). McDowell’s position will also be taken up in
Chaps. 3 and 4.
(ii) Language and thought: The position I have outlined is one I have called anti-
representationalism about thought and language. This may prompt the old
question, which of the two has primacy for ARTL, and in what sense? Here
I want to remain in principle agnostic about these questions (as also Price does,
see e.g. his 2011a, b, 231 and 273). Though it probably seems natural for a
position like ARTL with its stress on use to think of (presumably public) lan-
guage as being the primary focus, not least in relation to the theory of meaning,
there are also more internalistic accounts which are compatible with rejecting
Representationalism, at least in principle – that is, with rejecting the idea that
language is fundamentally to be understood semantically, in terms of substan-
tive relations to bits of the world. The obvious example here is Noam Chomsky’s
version of linguistic internalism, which Price cites approvingly as a possible
conception of what he calls ‘i-representation’ (Price 2011b, 103 fn; for expla-
nation of what he means by ‘i-representationalism’, see Chap. 2). I do not want
to rule this view out, though nor will I be concerned with showing how the rest
of what I have to say might relate to it, and I will be assuming in the following
a public language first perspective, if only for ease of exposition.
(Of course, in some sense Chomsky is also a language-first theorist too, so
for completeness’ sake I should also mention that ARTL might in principle be
combinable with an internalist or even externalist view that sees thought as
primary; but here the theoretical possibilities that don’t involve tacit commit-
ment to Representationalism seem less clear.)
(iii) Truth and meaning: I said above that Rorty has a deflationary though distinc-
tive conception of truth. This may sound surprising to some in view of his
derisive and dismissive attitude to the notion and his espousal of pragmatism,
which traditionally sees truth as tied to what we can ideally justify or in some
other way make use of. However, I think this is to a large extent just another
example of provocative Rortian rhetoric. Truth is not for Rorty a separate aim
or goal from that of justification, but it is a distinct concept, having identifiable
disquotational, endorsing and, in particular, cautionary usages (Rorty 1986).
Thus, something may be justified as we understand things now, but not turn out
to be so to future and different audiences; may not, as we would ordinarily put
it, turn out be true after all. That is all the idea ‘justified but possibly not true’
amounts to for Rorty – but it is not nothing.
Whether this amounts to an adequate understanding of truth is another mat-
ter – though one, I believe, that is independent of accepting ARTL itself. In my
view Rorty’s disquotational understanding itself forces us to see that claims
can be true or false whether or not they are justified; there is more distance
between the concepts than he acknowledges (Knowles 2018a, cp. Wright 1991,
ch. 1). Price is more radically opposed to Rorty, arguing that truth is a demon-
strably distinct aim of belief beyond that of justification (Price 2003; the rea-
sons for this are similar to those which lead him to reject Horwich’s minimalist
conception of truth). Price makes a similar point via the idea of no fault dis-
agreements (Price 1988). According to him, we can apply a deflationary notion
of truth to claims like ‘this chocolate ice-cream tastes great’; we can also in a
18 1 Introduction
sense see these as justified (for me, here and now, say). Nevertheless, if some-
one else disagrees with this there need be no question of either being at fault;
of having made a mistake. However, we also do apply a further norm in certain
cases, such as morality or science: here disagreements are not merely shrugged
off, we see them as indicating a fault in one party or the other and hence as in
need of being resolved. This leads to Price’s notion of truth as ‘convenient fric-
tion’ (Price 2003): it is a notion of a belief being correct or incorrect in a biva-
lent, ‘transcendent’ manner, but nevertheless one we have adopted for
pragmatic reasons: to induce a drive to find reaons for one’s view, and perhaps
find reconciliation with those one disagrees with.24
Again, whether this argument of Price’s against Rorty (and others) is suc-
cessful is a further matter.25 Moreover, nothing of what I have to say here will
depend on adopting any particular theory of truth; I assume only a common
sense ‘realist’ but also deflationist notion, i.e. one that that does not reduce it to
any actual or idealised agreement, nor to correspondence or coherence. I also
abstract away from the issue of no fault disagreements, and indeed whether
there can be such things (at least, where one can meaningfully apply the truth
predicate). Price seems to see the account of truth he offers on the basis of this
phenomenon as integral to his overall anti-representationalist programme, but
I have not managed to see what the essential connection is, and in any case
believe what I have to say in this book is unaffected by consideration of
these issues.
The issue of meaning is another one I want to stay as neutral as possible on,
within the parameters set by ARTL. Horwich (1998) argues that his minimal-
ism about truth, which precludes it from having an explanatory role, should be
coupled with a theory on which we give a reductive account of meaning in
terms of use (one he also seems to think might be seen as a form of internalist
approach to meaning along the lines urged by Chomsky: see Horwich 2003).
Price thinks this reductive line backfires in relation to the general goals of
deflationism, i.e. that with substantial meaning will come substantial truth,
willy nilly; what deflationists need is rather a view that explains meaning attri-
24
As I noted above, Price also connects his theory of truth to the consequences he draws from the
rule-following considerations. However, just as what Shapiro (op. cit.) calls Price’s ‘global subjec-
tivism’ would seem an independent commitment from his global expressivism, the idea that that
either of these is beholden to his theory of truth (or vice versa) seems to me at the very least
unclear, and I will at least not assume it here.
25
Macarthur (2020) defends Rorty against Price. One might also question the pragmatist creden-
tials of Price’s truth norm. The view is that in some kinds of case but not others it will be useful to
care about who is right about a question – something that goes beyond any evident instrumental
value making that judgment may have. But why should this be? If it is because we thereby latch
onto mind-independent facts, we seem to may have the beginning of an explanation. But then it
seems a fact is more than a true proposition, a result which sits uncomfortably with semantic defla-
tionism, or at least ARTL’s rejection of MR. Perhaps other explanations can be given but none
readily spring to (my) mind. (This argument would obviously require a fuller development to be
fully convincing as an objection to Price’s view!)
bution in terms of things we do with language (Price 1997a, see also below).
However, it is not at all clear that ARTL needs to accept Horwich’s starting
point in any case. Thus, Michael Williams, whose overall orientation is very
close to that of Rorty and Price and hence ARTL, argues that the Davidsonean
idea of basing a theory of meaning on a holistically constrained theory of truth
can be maintained with a deflationary concept of truth (Williams 1999; Gross
2015), and that this is preferable to Horwich’s reductionist approach to mean-
ing which specifies a meaning property for every individual word (Williams
2007; though see also Williams 2013 for a somewhat different kind of use-
theoretic proposal based on ideas from Sellars).26 In his more recent writings
Price has embraced Brandom’s account of meaning as based on practices of
giving and asking for reasons and deontic scorekeeping (Brandom 1994, 1998;
Price 2011a; Price et al. 2013). A central issue here is the question of whether
use theories can be suitably normative and naturalistic in character, at least
without lapsing into some kind of Representationalism. Price seems to think
Brandom’s view offers the prospects of such a line, but whether this is so is
somewhat unclear in view of Brandom’s explicit disavowal of naturalism.
Having said that, Brandom’s anti-naturalism is not of a strong, Platonistic or
Cartesian kind, and McDowell, who also espouses a form of use theory, albeit
a more quietist one, sees his own view as both irreducibly normative and natu-
ralistic (McDowell 1984, 1994). Perhaps such a naturalism is within the scope
of ARTL’s common sense naturalism or could be argued to be so.
The issues here are complex (for a somewhat more detailed overview of
some of these ideas and use-theoretic approaches to meaning generally, see
Loeffler 2009), but I won’t have much to say about them in the following,
rather simply assuming that some kind of deflationary-cum-use theory of
meaning can be defended in a naturalistically respectable way (though the rela-
tion between in particular Brandom’s and Price’s views will be taken up in
Chap. 2).
(iv) Why might one subscribe to ARTL at all? – someone might finally ask.
There is a lot that could be said here. A full defence of the position would need
to provide a more rigorous defence of amongst other things semantic deflation-
ism, the arguments against epistemological foundationalism, and the argu-
ments against substantial theories of reference that Price and others have
provided. However, this book is not aimed at systematically justifying ARTL
from the ground-up, so to speak (if that were possible, which even by its own
lights is probably doubtful), but rather exploring its relationship to other kinds
of anti-representationalism and clarifying its status on various broader issues.
26
Indeed, it is perhaps not even ruled out that Davidson’s line on meaning might be compatible
with ARTL. That is: even if Davidson is right that the concept of truth is primitive and therefore
not deflationary (Davidson 1990), and also that meaning has to be understood in terms of a truth
theory, this may still count as a use theory in the broad sense of ‘use’ ARTL accepts. Davidson’s is
at least definitively not a Representationalist theory.
20 1 Introduction
If you just don’t like it and are happy with your own alternative philosophy,
then probably little of what I have to say here will be of interest.
There are however two more things that I want to say, and I think should be
said, in answer to the question that entitles this subsection. The first concerns
the status of ARTL itself. A critical reader might wonder whether the position
as I have defined it amounts to little more than a hodgepodge of ideas from
Rorty and Price; moreover, insofar as it excludes or remains non-committal on
other ideas of these thinkers, ones that they would see as integral to their own
philosophical positions, and also insofar as I am not going to defend the posi-
tion in detail, it might appear both gerrymandered and philosophically uninter-
esting. Putting aside the subjective aspect of what might be found ‘interesting’,
I think this objection can be answered by pointing out that ARTL is a distinc-
tive and significant position insofar as (a) there is an identifiable anti-
representationalist position about thought and language in the current literature,
one that Rorty and Price are the central proponents of (and others, such as
Williams, also subscribe to) and (b) that ARTL can make a plausible claim to
articulate what this position amounts to insofar as it involves the highest com-
mon factor of Rorty’s and Price’s somewhat different overall views (along with
syntheses of things they individually espouse compatible with this denomina-
tor). Thus, for example, since Rorty does not espouse an expressivistic pro-
gramme for understanding our discourses, while Price does not espouse a
rejection of theoretical philosophy, neither of these features are defintional of
ARTL. ARTL also remains agnostic on matters where the thinkers disagree,
such as exactly how we should understand truth. What we get by this method
is, in my opinion, something at least very close to ARTL. It is true that Price
has had more to say by way of positive characterization of the view, as is
reflected in the above, but I take it that none of this are things Rorty did or
would object to (except insofar as he might generally question the value of
such theorizing in philosophy).
The second thing concerns the wider metaphilosophical dialectic surrounding
ARTL. Though I take it this won’t be news for most of those who are reading
this, ARTL is, at least in large measure, meant to be a demystifying, therapeutic
philosophy; one aimed, not at giving the kind of answers to big questions that
philosophy traditionally has aimed to do, but at showing how, given that they
have appeared largely unanswerable, we can avoid having to do this – though
also without merely shrugging one’s shoulders, or opting out of the whole prob-
lem complex (we want to avoid Blackburn’s ‘soggy pluralism’). This is an
approach that I think we can first clearly identify in modern philosophy in Hume,
though possibly also further back in the ideas of some of the ancient sceptics.
ARTL seeks to build on this broad tradition, in a particular way.
Of course, Kant could perhaps also be seen as fitting this ‘therapeutic’ job
description in that he too thought we had to radically reconceive the job of
metaphysics; what it could achieve and how. For Kant, however, this led to a
philosophical system that involved postulating an unknowable reality an sich
to make sense of our other rational discourses and practices, as well as certain
distinctive kinds of philosophical knowledge – contrary to even a broad natu-

ralism. The Ding an sich has always been something subsequent thinkers found
hard to swallow and is also something ARTL would eschew. How to draw the
lines from Kant and onwards as to which of the great names offers systematic
philosophy and which therapeutic is a complex question that I won’t go into
here. What remains today, both in more popular culture and also academic
philosophy, is a central tension in our conception of ourselves and the world
we take ourselves to inhabit that is at least similar to that Kant took himself to
inherit from the scientific revolution. The modern formulation of this tension
has been most famously articulated by Sellars in his distinction between the
‘scientific’ and ‘manifest’ images of reality (Sellars 1963): we have, on the one
hand, the picture yielded by contemporary physics and perhaps other natural
sciences, and, on the other, the picture that builds on our intuitive understand-
ing of ourselves and the world around us: human beings as rational, language-
using, experiencing, morally aware, free agents in a world of coloured, noisy,
extended objects moving through time, of social institutions, and so on and so
forth. Much of Sellars’ complex oeuvre attempts to give a philosophy that
reconciles these two images in a ‘synoptic’ view, but more generally very
much contemporary theoretical philosophy can be seen as seeking to under-
stand how things like rationality, experience, morality, colours, modality and
so on fit into or, as it is often put, can be ‘placed’ in a world that at the same
time seems to have a complete description, in principle, in physics – and more-
over a description that seems to be simply at odds with acknowledging that
things on the first list can exist, as such, at all.
An updated Kantian solution might still be applied to this legacy of the
scientific revolution – as it is probably still appropriate to think of the contem-
porary problem, in spite of advances in physics and (albeit perhaps to a lesser
extent) our understanding of ourselves. By ‘Kantian’ I mean one that does not
necessarily understand our knowledge in precisely the way he did, but never-
theless invokes the idea that there is some underlying reality which different
perspectives may provide equally valid but in some way conflicting accounts
of. Kuhn famously saw science in this way, and the idea of a Kantian natural-
ism has been defended by a number of pragmatist philosophers (see Pihlström
op. cit. and the thinkers he discusses). As far as I can see the main problem for
such views remains that however natural it may seem to talk of ultimate reality
being susceptible to several valid but incommensurable descriptions, we still
bump up against the problem of having to countenance unknowable or even
unconceivable things in themselves – things about which we can say and know
nothing, in principle. I will have more to say of relevance to this Kantian prob-
lematic in Chaps. 4 and 6, but for now the point is just that ARTL, as a more
purely therapeutic philosophy, does aim to do without such ideas.
For others the whole point of philosophical activity is to tackle the difficult
placement issues more or less head-on – even if all our attempts have so far
failed. For many such philosophers, in lieu of new positive suggestions as to
how we might solve them, philosophy at least needs to give an understanding
22 1 Introduction
of reality – still often taken to be fundamentally physical – as the reality we

take it to be – not least to give us some faith in the very idea of knowledge or
justified belief in an absolute sense. As we have seen, ARTL rejects the meta-
physical realism that underlies this (and the Representationalism it takes MR
to presuppose). But in terms of motivating ARTL, the point is that these tasks
are tall orders indeed, whilst – as most also tend to think – the very prospect of
metaphysically naturalistic philosophy failing to vindicate our common sense
categories is too terrible to be envisaged (if indeed it is thinkable). It seems to
follow that if we can glimpse a path that allows us to demur at solving these
problems, though without simply saying nothing about them, and also avoids
the Ding an sich – then surely we should explore it and see what it can offer?
That then is why ARTL is worth looking into and taking seriously, in my
opinion. Of course, it may be that its promises are false, or that in delivering on
them it encounters insuperable objections or gives implausible solutions, or
that its overall response is too vapid to count as philosophy at all. I don’t for the
record think it is obvious that none of this is the case. Moreover, unlike Rorty,
I do want to assess ARTL as a broad kind of theoretical philosophy, offering,
in some broad sense, hypotheses for testing, not as a mere rallying cry for a
different kind of activity entirely.
It is in this spirit I invite you, gentle reader, to see if it is worth the candle…
1.3 The Rest of the Book
Chapter 2 is devoted to a fuller presentation, discussion and critique of Price’s

global expressivism (GE). It focuses firstly on Price’s argument against object natu-
ralism (essentially what I called above metaphysical naturalism) through the rejec-
tion of Representationalism, and discusses to what extent the former view might
survive doing the latter. It also considers Price’s alternative subject naturalist view
and how this leads to GE. Having defended Price’s argument against object natural-
ism from some recent objections in the literature, I discuss more broadly what
ARTL and subject naturalism are and how they should be seen as related. This dis-
cussion leads me to suggest, firstly: that ARTL is not constitutively dependent on
GE – other forms of it are coherently possible; and secondly: that the particular kind
of subject naturalism Price recommends might not be the only or best one.
Chapters 3 and 4 form a unit and together serve several different purposes.
Chapter 3 offers a survey and to an extent my own evaluation of two further ‘repre-
sentationalism versus anti-representationalism’ debates that are prominent in cur-
rent philosophical thinking – one concerning perceptual experience, the other
cognitive science – and discusses how different positions here relate to different
kinds of ARTL. It also suggests that we can see enactivism – a form of anti-
representationalist cognitive science that has also been proferred as a theory of per-
ceptual experience – as capable of providing an alternative and potentially more
satisfying form of subject naturalistic substantiation for ARTL than Price’s GE
1.3 The Rest of the Book 23
(which at least in certain respects builds on ideas from representationalist cognitive

science). Enactivism can be seen as grounding the idea that we can draw a natural-
istically kosher distinction between something like a world for us and the world in
itself, a distinction which is also central to an anti-representationalist view I identify
in the debate about perceptual experience that I call phenomenological externalism.
On my understanding of ARTL, discourses about the world for us are those that are
grounded in our embodied engagement with our environment, as conceived along
enactivist lines, while the latter are those that are not so grounded but seek to articu-
late whatever such enactivist explanations presuppose, ultimately in terms of funda-
mental mathematical physics. As I understand it, the world in itself is not ‘reality’
or Kant’s Ding an sich: what is really real. The truths and entities of the world for
us have just as much claim to that title, given ARTL’s rejection of MR. In this way,
enactivism, phenomenological externalism and ARTL form, I argue, a mutually
supporting cluster of anti-representationalist views.
Chapter 4 pursues these ideas further. It aims to clarify how idea of the world for
us relates to the enactivist idea of the umwelt – which is applicable to many different
kinds of organism, not just humans – and thereby how my view can avoid a form of
the ‘myth of the given’. It also seeks to clarify and justify talk of the world in itself
in view of my rejection of the idea of ‘reality’. I then take up several ‘matter arising’
including how my ideas relate to embodied but apparently still represetantionalist
forms of cognitive science (notably, the recently much discussed predictive process-
ing paradigm), what role notions of content and knowledge play on my understand-
ing of enactivism and experience, and, finally, how exactly – to what extent and in
what way – my form of subject naturalist ARTL is different from Price’s GE.
Chapter 5 is a relatively self-standing essay that takes up questions closely asso-
ciated with the issues of the foregoing chapters from a different angle, extending the
discussion to various other thinkers who have thoughts related to those I have put
forward. Specifically, it aims to independently motivate the idea that we should and
can distinguish between a world for us and a world in itself via a consideration of
the implications of Putnam’s argument about the brain in a vat – which is further
related to ARTL itself in that this argument is used as part of Putnam’s argument
against MR. I introduce the issues through the lens of Tim Button’s recent book The
Limits of Realism (Button 2013). According to Putnam’s classic attack on MR, we
cannot be brains in vats, and this, along with his model theoretic arguments, shows
MR to be incoherent. Button endorses this line, but develops a position on its basis
on which this leaves many other sceptical scenarios open, something which means
that though we cannot accept MR, nor can we accept any kind of anti-realism of the
sort Putnam also defended. I suggest this position is dialectically unstable and go on
to argue that accepting Putnam’s arguments is compatible with allowing a different
sense in which we could be brains in vats, along the lines developed by David
Chalmers (2005). Chalmers’ idea involves something similar to the split between
the world for us and the world in itself that I argue for in Chaps. 3 and 4. But, in
accord with my enactivist grounding of this idea, I think Chalmers’ line in turn
should make way for what I call, inspired by Hubert Dreyfus, an existential phe-
nomenological take on the brains in vats thought experiment (Dreyfus and Dreyfus
24 1 Introduction
2005). I end by briefly outlining how my conception of the distinction between the
world for us and the world in itself diverges from Dreyfus’ own understanding of
this kind of distinction as this is presented in his book with Charles Taylor Retriveing
Realism (Dreyfus and Taylor 2015).
Chapters 6 and 7 take up more purely metaphysical issues in connection with
specifically ARTL, and can be appreciated somewhat independently of the argu-
ments of Chaps. 3–5. Chapter 6 takes up the question of realism, arguing that ARTL
is compatible with as fully a realist picture as one can coherently hope to have. In
this my view resembles that of people like Michael Devitt, John Searle and Horwich
who have argued that the realism issue is quite distinct from any semantic or metase-
mantic theory, such as the correspondence or deflationary theory of truth. However,
I will argue – here siding with Putnam and Price (as I interpret him) – that precisely
this line is too glib, and that appreciating what an optimal form of realism amounts
to must proceed via an appreciation of the incoherence of MR. I go on to argue that
ARTL’s deflationary-cum-use theory of meaning and truth is compatible with all the
realism one might want, and further that ARTL need have and should have no truck
with any kind of Kantianism which sees us in some way falling short of absolute
reality in putting forward our truth-evaluable claims. This is an idea I think, in spite
of his protestations to the contrary, infects the conceptual relativity view of Putnam,
which towards the end of his life was what he saw as his deepest insight into why
MR makes no sense. My line, and Price’s I take it, differs from Putnam’s here, and
I attempt to show that the idea of conceptual relativity is not just worryingly Kantian
but also undermotivated by the examples and arguments Putnam gives.
The final Chap. 7 turns to how we might understand metaphysical enquiry within
ARTL – a central and traditional pursuit of philosophy, arguably. My starting point
is Amie Thomasson’s so-called ‘conceptualist’ view of metaphysics: a view of this
as either descriptive and ‘easy’, or ‘difficult’ and normative (see e.g. Thomasson
2017a). Thomasson connects her deflationary stance on semantics and ontology (in
line with ARTL’s precepts) with a sceptical take on the idea of epistemically sub-
stantive metaphysics. Seemingly substantive metaphysical debates are for her to be
seen as veiled ‘metalinguistic negotiations’ (Plunkett and Sundell 2013), or as an
attempt at ‘conceptual engineering’ (Burgess et al. 2019). I will argue that
Thomasson’s bifurcation is implausible, would have unfortunate consequences for
philosophy considered as discipline, and in any case is not forced upon us if one
embraces ARTL. ARTL can accept the idea of metaphysical enquiry in a more or
less traditional sense, albeit this will be limited in various (and independently moti-
vated) ways. In the final section, I draw some connections between these limitations
and the ideas developed in Chaps. 3 and 4.
The overall position that emerges from these discussions is one that is, I hope,
philosophically and metaphilosophically both interesting and attractive. Though no
doubt in need of fuller embellishment to be ultimately convincing, I believe it pro-
vides a novel way of thinking about how language, world and experience interrelate,
avoiding many of the pitfalls that have plagued previous philosophical thinking
about these things, while also allowing us meaningfully to continue doing many of
the things we have traditionally been concerned to do as philosophers.
Chapter 2
Global Expressivism
Abstract This chapter is a critical discussion global expressivism (GE), the version
of ARTL that Price defends. It revolves around two main issues. The first is Price’s
idea that by rejecting Representationalism we can, without abjuring naturalism,
sidestep metaphysical questions concerning how entities and phenomena of the
common sense world fit into the natural world, in the way many naturalists and
physicalists take it they must to be real. I defend this argument of Price’s against
various recent critiques. The second concerns the issue of whether GE is the best or
only way of defending and/or substantiating ARTL. I argue, pace Price, that GE is
not the only coherent way of defending ARTL, and that even if one adopts his sub-
ject naturalistic approach, there are other ways of substantiating ARTL than GE.
2.1 Introduction
This chapter focuses on global expressivism (GE), the version of anti-

representationalism about thought and language (ARTL) that Huw Price defends. It
revolves around two main issues. The first concerns Price’s idea that GE can, with-
out abjuring naturalism, nevertheless sidestep metaphysical questions concerning
how entities and phenomena of the common sense world fit into the natural world,
in the way many naturalists and physicalists take it they must to be real and our talk
about them to be fully knowledge-involving. The second concerns the issue of
whether GE is the best or only way of defending and/or elaborating ARTL – which
is something like Price’s view, construed in my terms.
Much of the background for GE has already been sketched in Chap. 1 (since it is,
I am taking it, at least a form of ARTL, and indeed much of what inspires the latter
comes from Price’s writings on GE). As we have seen, according to ARTL,
Representationalism is a presupposition of metaphysical realism, the idea that there
is some wholly mind-independent reality with its own intrinsic structure to which
all our truth-aimed thought and talk is ultimately responsible. Though I also read
this into Price’s view, what he has argued specifically in relation to the possibility of
metaphysics is that what are known as placement problems – as standardly

Switzerland AG 2023
473, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26924-0_2
26 2 Global Expressivism
understood – are dependent on accepting Representationalism. Placement problems

concern how entities of the everyday, common sense world like mental states, mean-
ings, moral values, modalities (‘the four Ms’: Price 1997b) and so on fit into or can
be ‘placed’ in the natural or physical world. The issue is how to construe the rele-
vant entities and/or claims in terms of underlying natural or physical ones, opening
the way to theories like reductionism or eliminativism, or perhaps a response such
as non-cognitivism or fictionalism (which deny the talk in question should be under-
stood as articulating literal truths). For Price this metaphysical project – object natu-
ralism as he calls it1 – lapses once one relinquishes Representationalism, something
which he thinks a naturalistic approach to language – what he calls a subject natu-
ralist enquiry – suggests we should. As part of this subject naturalism, we can nev-
ertheless continue to aim to address placement problems, but now understood in a
pragmatist or anti-representationalist ‘key’, as Price often puts it. This is the project
of GE. GE can thus be seen as a philosophy that serves to insulate the common
sense world from answerability to scientific facts without having to seeing it as
something unnatural.
I am, as I made clear in Chap. 1, in broad sympathy with many of Price’s argu-
ments and ideas. I also think the argument as just sketched can be defended against
several objections in the recent literature that in various way reject the idea that an
assumption of Representationalism is necessary to do metaphysics. On the other
hand, I do not think Price makes totally clear how GE as a whole is meant to, as it
were, hang together. Moreover, in light of this, I believe the expressivist project that
his particular subject naturalism involves can appear non-obligatory, and even sub-
optimal. Assuming that we remain committed to ARTL, this might mean we have to
stick with relaxed realism (McGrath op. cit) – which might or might not amount to
a ‘soggy pluralism’ (see Chap. 1 and below). I will also suggest that, in any case,
there is the possibility for something different from the particular kind of subject
naturalism – global expressivism – that Price understands as endemic to ARTL. It is
such a different subject naturalism that Chaps. 3 and 4 aim to identify, through
investigation of forms of anti-representationalist philosophy and science relating to
experience and cognition.
The chapter is divided into four further sections. Section 2.2 lays out Price’s
argument that object naturalism and placement metaphysics depend on
Representationalism. Section 2.3 takes up several objections that have been made to
this argument, and responds to them on Price’s behalf. Section 2.4 takes up how the
various parts of GE are meant to ‘hang together’, arguing that it is not, pace Price,
the only way of understanding a position that subscribes to the basic precepts of
ARTL, and that relaxed realism should remain on the table. Section 2.5 suggests
that even if we seek to go beyond relaxed realism, GE is not obviously the best or
only way of doing so, paving the way for Chaps. 3 and 4.
1
Others might call it ‘metaphysical naturalism’ or ‘physicalism’. The former label is perhaps
unfortunate to the extent it suggests the view is necessarily a form of metaphysical realism, which
as we shall see I don’t think is the case.
2.2 The Argument against Object Naturalism and for Global Expressivism 27
2.2 The Argument against Object Naturalism

and for Global Expressivism
In his paper ‘Naturalism without representationalism’ (Price 2004), Price mounts a

two-pronged attack on object naturalism (ON) by a) arguing that it depends on
Representationalism and b) casting doubt on Representationalism. (Price 2009c,
and Menzies & Price 2009 cover somewhat similar ground.) ON involves the view
that all truth or knowledge is fundamentally of natural scientific character; that ulti-
mately ‘all there is is the world studied by science’ or ‘that all genuine knowledge
is scientific knowledge’ (Price 2004, p. 185). The main problem for ON according
to Price is not so much that it is false, but that it is, or at least is in danger of being,
incoherent, or at least irrational or unmotivated. Price’s attack on ON is thus in fact
a more general attack on the idea of a certain kind of metaphysical project, natural-
istic or otherwise, that lies behind it, though we will for the most part just be con-
sidering the naturalistic version.2
Price’s reasoning proceeds via a dilemma for ON: one can understand ON as
having either a linguistic (or conceptual) starting point, or a material one; but on
neither understanding is ON coherently or at least rationally motivated. Though the
latter understanding might appear more straightforward, and indeed what ON as a
doctrine states, it is precisely one of Price’s aims to show that the common under-
standing and motivation for ON is not as straightforward as many have assumed.
Price considers the linguistic understanding first. He argues that many metaphysical
issues typically start in the linguistic realm as questions about what we mean by this
or that term or locution, how we might analyse it and so on. At some point however
a supporter of ON who adopts this starting point will have to assume that certain
linguistic items represent bits of extra-linguistic reality – in order to take us from
language to the world, allowing us thereby to ask what (say) moral value is in terms
of the underlying natural reality. Thinking of this theory at the level of propositions
or claims (like ‘what he did was wrong’) ON thus becomes, on the linguistic con-
strual, the idea that all the substantive truth makers of our various claims are natural
truth-makers – i.e. states of affairs that physics or at least natural science (in some
suitably circumscribed sense) can countenance, and which account for or constitute
whatever truth we are concerned with. According to Price, this understanding of ON
is defended by those who cleave to the so-called ‘Canberra plan’, such as David
Lewis and Frank Jackson (cf. Jackson 1998; Menzies & Price op. cit.). ON, thus
understood, depends on there being substantive reference and more generally truth-
making relations, that is, ones which explain meaning by relating bits of language
2
The kind of project in question can be seen as invidious in operating with a distinction between,
on the one hand, categories that are seen as fundamental, and, on the other, those that are not and
hence have to placed within the world view constituted by the former. Exactly what kind of such a
metaphysics object naturalism involves – that is, where exactly it draws its invidious distinction –
will not be directly relevant to our discussion here; the most prominent version is probably a form
of physicalism, but a broader, non-exclusively physics-based conception of what is fundamental in
the natural world is of course also possible.
to bits of the world – that is, on Representationalism (see Chap. 1). Thus, when we
say that experiences or values are ultimately natural or physical, we are saying that
the referents of terms like ‘pain’, ‘good’ and so on are physical or natural in nature,
and that claims like ‘this hurts’ or ‘what he did was wrong’ have physicalistic or
naturalistic truth-makers.
Elsewhere Price has used the following analogy to convey the underlying idea
behind the linguistic construal of ON:
Imagine a child’s puzzle book, arranged like this. The left-hand page contains a large sheet
of peel-off stickers, and the right-hand page shows a line drawing of a complex scene. For
each sticker – the koala, the boomerang, the Sydney Opera House, and so on – the reader
needs to find the unique outline in the drawing with the corresponding shape. The aim of
the game is to place all the stickers in their correct locations, in this sense.
Now think of the right-hand page as the world, and the stickers as the collection of all
the statements we take to be true of the world. For each such statement, it seems natural to
ask what makes it true; what fact in the world has precisely the corresponding “shape”.
Within the scope of this simple but intuitive analogy, matching true statements to the world
seems a lot like matching stickers to the line drawing. (Price 2011a, 3).
It is worth pausing here to stress that Representationalism is not merely the idea of
there being truth-makers and reference and truth-making relations. Semantic defla-
tionists, like Price, can accept that moral states of affairs exist and make moral state-
ments true or false – in a trivial, deflationary sense.3 Rather, Representationalism
assumes that there is some non-trivial specification of reference that also allows for
non-trivial truth-makers, in a way that in turn makes space for ON. The sticker book
analogy brings this out insofar as there is more than a trivial correspondence between
the shapes on the left and the lines on the right; what it takes for a sticker to be
placed correctly – to refer – is thus far from trivial.
Another clarification that needs to be made, at least as I understand the dialectic,
is that the argument presupposes that the idea that ON could be vindicated purely
through conceptual analysis is quixotic. That is, though analysing our everyday con-
cepts might well help to show how they relate to physical reality, the idea that they
might analytically reduce without residue to purely physical or natural ones is not
on the cards. If this were possible, ON would perhaps not have to take the represen-
tationalist ‘leap’ from language to the world (we could simply gesture at the defla-
tionary truth makers of physics). But I take it few physicalists if any believe that
such a reduction is possible (cf. Stoljar 2021).
Price thinks ON has a clear content when construed on the linguistic model.
However, there is just one hitch: Representationalism is not something you get for
free, rather it is a substantial theoretical claim about how language functions.
Thus one needs at least what Price calls a subject naturalistic enquiry – one into
the underlying nature of human language and thought, construed itself as a scien-
tific project, in a broad sense – prior to declaring ON viable. Moreover,
Representationalism is something Price thinks we should be suspicious of as such
3
Whether there is on this view an asymmetry in explanatory direction in a biconditional like ‘p’ is
true iff p is a further matter that I will not broach here.
2.2 The Argument against Object Naturalism and for Global Expressivism 29
a theory of language (for reasons we surveyed in Chap. 1); moreover he thinks

there is a promising alternative to it, semantic deflationism, which avoids the
problems that infect Representationalism. Assuming, as we are doing insofar as
we are accepting ARTL, the basic correctness of this line, a linguistic understand-
ing of ON, though clear in principle, looks to be ruled out.
But is ON really dependent on the linguistic starting point, and thus on
Representationalism? Price turns next to the material understanding of ON, accord-
ing to which ‘we do metaphysics without semantic crutches’ (Price 2004, 196), i.e.
by invoking the referents of our terms directly and asking how they can be natural,
and in what way. Here he argues there are two fundamental barriers to a vindication
of ON. One rests on the idea that a supporter of ON should be able to frame an argu-
ment for her position. Such an argument can be mounted through the Canberra
planners’ idea that all semantic roles, or variables, in so-called ‘Ramseyfied’ ver-
sions of the theories for the concepts in question have to be filled by naturalistic
occupiers4; but this takes us back to the linguistic conception, and the problems with
Representationalism (ibid., 197). Without this framework, it is just not clear how
one would frame a general argument for ON, and hence how it can get off the
ground (ibid.). The second problem is that the possibility of a deflationary treatment
of discourse shows that ‘the cat is out of the bag’, as Price puts it (ibid., 195). Given
semantic deflationism we do not need to think in terms of any worldly items that our
words may correspond to in order to understand their role in our lives; hence, we
can rather focus on explaining the talk itself, from a (subject) naturalistic point
of view.
It is the latter that forms the project of GE, which can be seen as a further elabo-
ration of Price’ conception of what subject naturalism involves. GE seeks to explain
a discourse by looking at its underlying function, taking as its starting point a view
of humans as natural, evolved beings in a natural environment. It is a global project
because, though different discourses serve different functions, an anti-
representationalist, pragmatic explanation applies to each – including our talk about
the natural world itself.
One might feel an intuitive unease about the idea of a global expressivism.
Traditionally expressivism has been a local doctrine, and this might seem endemic
to its explanatory structure insofar as, however far one’s expressivist explanations
4
A Ramseyfied theory (after Frank Ramsey) is one in which the theoretical terms in a suitably
axiomatized empirical theory are replaced by quantified-over variables. Jackson (op. cit.) links
such theories to the products of conceptual analysis, and hence the starting for doing metaphysics
‘Canberra-style’.
Note that Price allows that Ramseyfication can play a role in a theoretical reduction or identifi-
cation without any assumption of representationalism, along the lines of Lewis (1972) (cf. Price
2004, 196), though it is unclear why one would hold the assumption such reductions presuppose –
that all causal roles are filled by physical realisers – without being an object naturalist about causa-
tion in the first place, which then itself requires justification, as Price himself clearly sees and we
shall discuss more fully in Sect. 2.4 below. (Perhaps there are still good empirical reasons for a
version of this view within science, see e.g. Papineau 2000, but even here the issues are dialecti-
cally delicate.)
might extend, at some point one will presumably need to presuppose some non-
expressivistically understood vocabulary in which to couch the former explana-
tions. Relatedly, one might think that at some point in our explanations of why we
talk in the different ways we do ‘our spade will turn’ (as Wittgenstein would put it):
to explain discourses about chairs, tables, viruses and so on surely we will have to
talk about these entities themselves. (Blackburn, 2013, 79, raises this ‘no exit’5
worry for global expressivism, cf. also Knowles 2011). Doesn’t this inevitably rein-
troduce Representationalism?
In response to this kind of worry, Price admits that to explain the characteristic
function of some vocabularies we will need to invoke (or use) their referring terms,
while with others this will not be necessary (that is, we will only need to invoke the
referring terms of other discourses) (Price et al. 2013, 157–9).6 Price expresses
this by saying that the former but not the latter have an e-representational character
(ibid., ch. 2). However, e-representation for Price is a non-semantic, non-
inententional relation of something like covariation, causation or tracking between
terms of a vocabulary and the items these terms genuinely semantically, albeit defla-
tionistically, refer to in the natural world. Price uses the term ‘i-representation’ to
characterise this latter, inferential or ‘language-internal’ relation, which applies to
all assertoric discourses (at least by default).7 Neither i-representation nor
e-representation, singly or in combination, correspond to representation in the sense
assumed by Representationalism: that of a substantive truth conditional content. In
Price’s view, this idea makes the mistake of merging what are in fact two separate
notions or ‘poles’ of our everyday concept (or lexical item at least) of representa-
tion, one of which has to do with inference, one with correspondence. The trick is
to see that these are in fact two quite different phenomena. The bet is that in domains
like ethics, though terms will i-represent they will not e-represent (and hence the
discourse will be explained in a way similar to classical expressivism, e.g. emotiv-
istically), whereas in, say, those of middle-sized dry goods or science – the domain
of the natural, in a certain recognizable sense – they will do both. The distinction is
not meant to be absolute, thus allowing gradations of e-representationality; nor is it
given a priori which domains will and will not turn out to be e-representational. But
5
The expression is due to Robert Kraut (1990).
6
Given this distinction, label global expressivism might be somewhat misleading, as this tends to
imply an approach to a vocabulary that does not make use of its (putatively) referring terms to
explain its existence and function. Price acknowledges this non-standard usage, gesturing further
at how GE’s deflationary understanding of truth provides a further, non-standard way of exempli-
fying an ‘expressivist’ approach (2013, pp. 177–8). He avers that global pragmatism might thus be
more appropriate as a label. On the other hand, he also thinks expressivist explanations in a more
traditional sense can be extended at least a lot further and deeper than is often assumed (for exam-
ple, to categories like causation; see Price & Menzies 1993, Price 2005). His main point in any
case is that the explanations in question are (uniformly) not Representationalist and (hence) not
metaphysical, but rather based on use and function. I will recur to some of these points in Sects.
2.3 and 2.4 below.
7
For those acquainted with Sellars’ work, i-represenaton corresponds to to Sellar’s idea of
‘S-assertibility’, cf. Sellars 1968).
2.3 Does Object Naturalism Really Depend on Representationalism? 31
however things exactly pan out, Price’s overall point is that his anti-representationalist
enquiry into our different discourses need leave no significant placement question
unanswered, and hence no room for metaphysical quandaries.
Whether this is enough to assuage all worries about coherency is not totally clear
(cf. Knowles 2011), but I will not be pursuing those further here. Rather I want to
focus on Price’s argument against ON when understood as having a material start-
ing point. Even if GE (or global pragmatism) is a coherent project, I think one could
be forgiven for finding the logic behind this second stage of Price’s argument against
ON and placement metaphysics somewhat less than wholly transparent. Is the argu-
ment cogent, even on its own terms? The feeling that it is not has been evident in the
recent commentary on Price’s argument, and it is to critiques of this kind I now turn.
2.3 Does Object Naturalism Really Depend

on Representationalism?
I will consider two broad lines that answer ‘no’ to the above question. The first is
identifiable in the work of Paul Horwich (cf. his 2008, 2013), and has recently been
clarified and defended by Matthew Simpson (2021) (there are, as we shall see, sev-
eral arguments against Price in these papers but I think there is one underlying
thought behind them all). The other derives from some of my own earlier work
(Knowles 2017). I believe the first line can be effectively rebutted by Price, at least
so long as one sees GE as a form of ARTL. As for the second, I still think my argu-
ment reveals a hole in Price’s argument for ON; however, I also now think that,
given a suitably broader dialectical context, Price in fact has enough to establish
what he wants to (this ‘context’ being roughly the kind of metaphilosophical moti-
vation for ARTL I sketched in the last subsection of Sect. 1.2).
2.3.1 Simpson and Horwich
Simpson’s rendering of the first line – inspired by Horwich (2008) – is that semantic
deflationism is consistent with the idea that there can be non-trivial truth-makers for
our different discourses. Price’s argument against ON targets the idea that there can
be such truth-makers if Representationalism is rejected – equivalently, if deflation-
ism is accepted – so as Simpson sees things, that argument fails. Simpsons’s basic
claim is that though deflationism rejects the idea that truth is a substantial property
that consists in relations to such truth makers, the latter can exist for all that, and we
can still ask what they themselves consist in. In particular, Simpson argues that
deflationism is quite consistent with their being ‘bearerless’ truths, or, in a certain
sense of the word, facts, understood simply as different ways the world is; and that
since we can seek to explain these ways in more fundamental terms, we can still do
metaphysics. It is true that grass is green (that snow is white etc.), but even if this is
not explained by relating the sentence or proposition to the fact that grass is green,
we can ask what the latter amounts to in the world; what it consists in. Or again: as
a sentence’s or proposition’s being true implies there is a corresponding bearerless
truth, we can ask about what makes this bearerless truth true, and in that way keep
doing metaphysics.
We will return to Simpson presently but before doing so I want to consider the
second paper of Horwich’s referred to above, which is a direct reply to Price’s argu-
ment against ON. Horwich does not raise the issue of truth-making here though
presumably what he says is meant to cohere with his earlier work. He summarises
Price’s ideas as follows. Firstly, metaphysics is taken as having, in the first instance,
a linguistic subject matter; that is, Price thinks that ‘[m]etaphysical questions can be
answered only insofar as they are transformations of more basic linguo-conceptual
questions.’ (Horwich 2013, 115). To become genuinely metaphysical, however – to
be about the world and not just our concepts – a metaphysical view such as natural-
ism (by which Horwich means pretty much the same as Price’s ON) requires us to
transpose these questions from a linguistic to a material setting; and this in turn
requires substantive semantic relations (ibid.), i.e. Representationalism. Rejecting
Representationalism thus yields the result that naturalism is, as Horwich puts it,
‘impossible to establish’ (ibid., 123–4).
Horwich has several critical remarks about this argument, but his central objec-
tion seems to be that though linguistic analysis may be a necessary preliminary to
metaphysical concerns – in the sense that one needs to ask whether, say, ethical
claims are so much as in the business of ‘saying how things are’ – it remains open
once one has decided, as the case might be, that they are, that they might neverthe-
less be seen as uniformly false, a useful fiction, reducible to naturalistic truths of
some kind, or whatever more suitably subtle account the placement metaphysi-
cian might come up with (ibid.). Thus the linguistic starting point does not after
all preclude the typical metaphysical gambits of ON, even if one rejects
Representationalism.8
In his reply to this paper, Price first avers that Horwich has misunderstood him.
GE isn’t meant to be ‘a way of doing metaphysics in a pragmatist key [but] a way
of doing something like anthropology [;…] not a matter of recasting issues of meta-
physics as issues about language, but of abandoning the metaphysical questions
altogether’ (Price et al. 2013, 181). On the other hand, Price accepts that metaphys-
ics understood as mere conceptual analysis may legitimate, as we have seen (this
might embrace something like Strawson’s descriptive metaphysics; cf. Strawson
1959).9 An important issue thus does seem to be raised by Horwich – as indeed
Price finally accepts (ibid., 182) – which is to understand exactly why, if one rejects
8
I should stress that though Horwich rejects Price’s argument against object naturalism, he himself
also rejects the position for other reasons (related to his Wittgenstein-inspired scepticism towards
substantive philosophy; cf. Horwich 2012). For further discussion and critique of this line, cf.
Knowles (2018b).
9
Personal communication.
Representationalism, one can only engage in this and not in material metaphysics –
or metaphysics ‘proper’, as one might say.
Price, recall, had two arguments for this claim. Firstly, Representationalism is
part of the Canberra plan’s standard ‘toolkit’ and gives a framework for mounting
an argument for ON. To this, Horwich replies that there might be other motivations
for ON, and moreover that the point doesn’t affect non-naturalistic metaphysical
positions (Horwich 2013, 123 fn). Price largely concedes the force of this, stressing
instead his ‘cat out of the bag’ argument. As he explains, this builds on the idea that
as far as ‘saying how things are’ is concerned, there is no deep distinction between
assertoric vocabularies that do and don’t do this to be revealed by linguistic analy-
sis; that is, the fact-stating/non-fact-stating distinction is deflated along with truth.
Metaphysics is then by-passed by focussing on explaining how we talk: to explain
some vocabularies we will need to make use of the referring terms – those which
have a more e-representational character – but to explain others not. The bet is that
with domains like ethics this will not be the case. But the metaphysical – or, rather,
meta-metaphysical – point is that there is no further issue to be addressed or resolved
(Price et al. 2013, 182–4).
Is Horwich thus rebutted? I suspect he might think not. Even if all assertoric
discourse is putatively fact-stating, such that there is no distinction to be drawn here
a priori or just on the basis of the kind of discourse it is, nevertheless it could turn
out – couldn’t it? – that some of this discourse in fact fails to latch onto anything that
is ‘out there’ and hence articulates only falsehoods – that a so-called error theory
applies to it (as Mackie 1977, famously proposed in relation to ethics)? Moreover,
if this is a possibility, so presumably is the alternative that there is something to
which it does so latch, and in some particular way. Either way, placement metaphys-
ics is still in business.
However, I think Price here would, or at least should, point out that it is hard to
see what kind of perspective might justifiably allow us to make the first such judg-
ment – that, say, ethics is systematically false – at least so long as the discourse in
question functions adequately on its own terms. Now if whatever realm we held,
say, ethics answerable to in the way ON takes it to be could be regarded as some
kind of absolute reality, then no doubt such a judgment would be possible. But
ARTL would reject the very idea of such a reality on the grounds that it depends on
Representationalism. Talk of an ‘absolute reality’ is surely tantamount to the posi-
tion we (following Putnam) have been calling metaphysical realism, or MR. If we
accept Putnam’s conception of MR and his arguments against it (see Chap. 5; they
are, as we have noted in Chap. 1, similar to those Price employs against
Representationalism) then MR is ruled out, and with it then this way of motivating
placement metaphysics. But even without Putnam’s arguments, I see no way around
the dependency between MR and Representationalism. What can we make of the
idea of ‘reality’ if we cannot think of this as lying at one end of a genuine semantic
relation to something external to our thought and talk? (Just stipulating one particu-
lar vocabulary as our ‘bedrock’, so to speak, does not answer that question, though
might be legitimate as a way of defending ON; see below.) I am not totally sure that
Price himself would want to put things this way, though as far as I can see his
position is naturally understood thus (as, again, I argued in Chap. 1). In any case, at
least as I am setting up things here, with Price’s GE understood as a form of ARTL,
appealing to ‘reality’ to motivate metaphysics is a non-starter. So Horwich’s objec-
tion to Price’s argument it seems does after all lapse: semantic deflationalism
remains a serious obstacle to placement metaphysics.
But perhaps this misses a simpler or more ‘piecemeal’ route to resisting the idea
that ON depends on Representationalism? We saw above that, at least according to
Simpson, we can ask substantive questions about worldly, bearerless truths in such
a way that metaphysical enquiry – uncovering the nature of the relevant truth – can
continue, even if one accepts semantic deflationism. Now it should be immediately
recorded (as Simpson is aware) that many commentators are directly sceptical of
this kind of inquiry. Here is Blackburn giving voice to an attitude about his own
well-known ‘quasi-realist’ position about ethics, something I take it Price would
wholeheartedly endorse (for him, GE is precisely a kind of generalisation of
quasi-realism):
There is a story to be written, in this view, about the ethical proposition, and how it holds
its place as a focus for discussion and thought. But there is no last chapter to be written
about ‘what makes such a proposition true’. ... If a David Armstrong or a David Lewis
comes along demanding a ‘truth-maker’ we can profit from deflationism, and simply say
that what makes it true that honesty is good is that honesty is good. Nothing else needs to
be said, wearing allegedly metaphysical hats, or allegedly scientific hats. (Blackburn 2012,
195, cited by Simpson 2021, 3175).
Simpson retorts, however, that it doesn’t follow from this that one might not reason-
ably seek something more, or even should do so if one’s concern is a full under-
standing of the world. As philosophers we want to know for example why honesty
is good, in virtue of what this truth is a truth, or what it consists in – just as we at
one time wanted to know what in virtue of which my glass is full of water, and have
since found out that this is its being ‘full of H2O’, as Simpson puts it (ibid.). This
might seem to show that something like naturalistic metaphysics is still possible
after all.
By way of response to this I want first to note that there is scope for questioning
the idea that the kind of uncontroversial explanations Simpson alludes to here are
‘metaphysical’ in any recognizable sense. To start with, though the molecular the-
ory of water is of course established science, I take it chemists would balk at the
idea that H2O is really such that my glass might be said to be literally ‘full of it’, as
it is full of water – as if ‘H2O’ referred to some kind of underlying fluid-like suspen-
sion of tiny little balls. We do of course achieve various kinds of explanation of
water and its properties through chemistry and physics, but the idea that we can
somehow fully reductively account for all everyday facts about water in this way –
such that we might think we thereby have said what my glass being full of water is
true in virtue of – is not, I take it, simply part and parcel of accepting the science.
Turning to why honesty is good, there may also be things we can say that explain
this to an extent or in different ways, in terms of moral genealogy, evolution or cog-
nitive development. We might also, in another sense, explain to a recalcitrant child
why it is true (painstakingly giving examples, trying to make them understand moral
concepts, and so on). But, again, from none of this does it follow that we might
identify some state of affairs, however complex, that tells us in virtue of what it is
so, in some special metaphysical sense – something which accounts for it fully, only
in other terms.
Of course, there is room for argument here, as is borne out inter alia by recent
literature on whether claims like ‘water is identical to H2O’ can be literally true.10
However, given just the fact that there is this divide in opinion it can seem reason-
able to offer as a diagnosis that those who insist that such explanations are in the
offing are in fact smuggling in a conception of a privileged ‘reality’ to ground their
conviction. For on reflection, it is surely highly unclear what grounds one could
have for thinking that a certain truth is nothing above and beyond certain other
truths – given that it doesn’t analytically conceptually or reduce to the latter – absent
the idea that the latter have some kind of privileged ontological status. And then if
we ask what might ground our conception of such privilege, a substantial notion of
‘reality’, to which they belong, might seem the only plausible answer. But, as
already noted, assuming GE is understood as a kind of ARTL, we can reply that this
notion is unavailable without appeal to Representationalism. The upshot is that
Simpson’s objection to Price’s argument also fails.11
2.3.2 Knowles
In earlier work I offered an argument for a conclusion somewhat similar to Simpson’s

(Knowles 2017), an argument that can also be understood as a reply to the above
responses on behalf of Price to the idea that ON does not depend on
Representationalism. In that paper my line was, in the first place, that even if one
rejects Representationalism – and thus, in Price’s terms, is left at best with a mate-
rial conception of ON – this doesn’t seem to make it plain incoherent to privilege a
certain discourse or set of discourses in terms of which all others will have to be
rendered or made sense (even if not analytically reduced to).12 Someone who privi-
leged a given discourse in this way needn’t claim that it ‘represents reality’; there
might rather be pragmatic grounds for favouring it. I further identified a naturalistic
version of this line with something like Quine’s view, who is a self-declared
10
For voices in this debate to which I am sympathetic, see Johnston (n.d.) and Chang (2012).
11
I think this kind of assumption – of it being unproblematic to invoke the idea of ‘reality’ – prob-
ably underlies quite a lot work that sees no tension between deflationism and metaphysics. For
example, an assumption of the availability of a ‘reality discourse’ seems to inform Dorit Bar-on
and Keith Simmons’ (2018) distinction between semantics and metaphysics, which allows them to
argue that though (e.g.) ethical claims are truth apt, realism (or non-anti-realism) about ethics does
not follow. We will also return to it in relation to the broader theme of realism versus anti-realism
in Chap. 6.
12
Thus Carnap’s idea of explication, taken over by Quine (see e.g. his 1960, 258 ff), might be used
as a way of understanding one vocabulary in terms of another (Knowles 2017, 4790).
p hysicalist but also as far as I can see a subscriber to ARTL in maintaining a kind of
semantic deflationism and denying metaphysical realism (an understanding of
Quine with which Price, as we saw in Chap. 1, would presumably concur). Even if,
as Quine himself believed (1960, 265), there is no significant distinction between
reduction and elimination on his naturalism, there would seem no doubt that Quine’s
view should count as a kind of ON.13
I then considered the riposte that such a position might be said to be, if not inco-
herent, nevertheless irrational (notwithstanding its Quinean pedigree!), insofar as its
privileging of physics would still seem to be arbitrary. I pointed out, however, that
Price himself employs at least a more or less standard naturalistic vocabulary to give
his expressivistic explanations in, i.e. one that restricts itself to the results and expla-
nations of natural science (the exact extension of this naturalism is not important to
the underlying point here, as long as the notion is understood invidiously). I then
concluded that it is not clear why ‘what is good for gander is not also good for the
goose’ – i.e. why, given Price’s predilection for (scientific) naturalistic vocabularies,
a Quinean of the kind I identify should not enjoy similar privileges in carrying out
her (object, metaphysical) naturalistic project (Knowles 2017, 4791 ff.).
However, I now think this argument fails to appreciate the wider dialectical con-
text of the question at stake. As we saw in Chap. 1, a major motivation for ARTL is
the promise of side-stepping a kind of dilemma that faces modern philosophy and
indeed culture more generally: embrace physicalism and risk saying goodbye to
cherished categories of common sense, or else accept a soggy pluralism that just
opts out of the whole problematic. Given this backdrop, it now seems clear to me
that a person who supports ARTL but also wants to support ON is really just making
things very difficult for themselves – given that there is an alternative, i.e. GE, that
lets them off the hook, or at least promises to do so. It is not as if our Quinean is just
facing up to the facts (in something like the manner Alexander Rosenberg often
presents his hard-nosed physicalism as doing; see Rosenberg 2012). She is rather
deliberately opting for a line which carries with it real dangers of undermining our
very understanding of ourselves as rational and ethical agents operating in a world
of chairs, tables and the rest. And then the question must be: why do this – given
there is a coherent naturalistic alternative?
It is in the light of this consideration I now think we should understand Price’s
arguments – which to be fair to him also include remarks like the following:
13
It is worth adding at this point that Sellars’ overall view, his large differences from Quine not-
withstanding, might also be seen as fitting this bill in view of his commitment what he called
‘scientific realism’ (i.e. a kind of metaphysical or object naturalism) coupled with what looks like
a rejection of Representationalism. Though I lot of what I, along with Price and Rorty, have to say
is deeply influenced by or at least reminiscent of Sellars (as will also be evident in later chapters)
I have decided to refrain from explicit commentary (to any great extent at least) on Sellars in view
of the shere complexity of his oeuvre and its susceptibility to diverging interpretations. Obviously,
a more detailed comparison would be the occasion for interesting further work (as no dobut would
a more detailed comparison with Quine or other philosophers I see as cleaving closely to ARTL,
such as Davidson).
2.4 How Does Global Expressivism ‘Hang Together’? 37
The difficult opponent [for the object naturalist] is the naturalist who takes advantage of a
non-representationalist theoretical perspective to avoid the material mode altogether. If
such an opponent can explain why natural creatures in a natural environment come to talk
in these plural ways – of ‘truth’, ‘value’, ‘meaning’, ‘causation’, and all the rest – what
puzzle remains? What debt does philosophy now owe to science? (Price 2004, 198).
That is to say: in the absence of such a debt, there seems little point investing heav-
ily in order to redeem it.
In sum, then, it seems to me that Price’s argument against ON is successful, at
least on the terms he sets for it, and given my understanding of what rejecting rep-
resentationalism involves. Given the viability of something like GE, we can dis-
charge our naturalistic responsibilities without facing up to a potentially ‘suicidal’
metaphysical programme. However, what we have not so far considered (beyond
the question of its shere coherence) is the independent viability of GE, especially in
the role Price envisages for it (i.e. as a form of subject naturalism), and whether
there might be alternatives to it within the matrix of options defined by ARTL. If the
latter is the case, then, even if GE is problematic, facing up to hard-nosed physial-
ism might still be something we can avoid. It is to these issues I now turn.
2.4 How Does Global Expressivism ‘Hang Together’?
I have been talking so far of GE as a more or less unified philosophical theory.

However, it is important if we are to evaluate it properly to appreciate that it involves
two distinct kinds of commitment about the nature of language. Thus Price tell us
that, on GE’s view of language
we have a two level picture. At the top level we seek an account of what assertoric vocabu-
laries have in common – their common function, both in the day-to-day sense, and, if pos-
sible, in a genealogical sense. At the lower level, we seek an account of what distinguishes
one vocabulary from another. The picture puts our (i-representational) account of saying,
asserting, judging, and (propositional) thought in general at the higher, uniform, global
level, and combines this with the various kind of things we ‘do’ with this general resource,
at the lower, diverse local level. If we wanted a slogan for the two-level view, it might be
‘think global, act local’ – so long as we keep in mind that at the higher level, too, we have
a kind of doing, or acting: a multipurpose doing, with application in a range of cases. (Price
et al. 2013, 155).
The question I want to investigate in this section is how these two levels ‘hang
together’, and also to what extent they necessarily do so. It is part and parcel of
Price’s GE both that they do, and that they ideally ought to (that is, that our under-
standing of them should show how they do so). Thus, in a recent paper (Price 2019)
he has argued that if we reflect on the general matter of placement problems we will
come to see that the kind of picture GE involves is the only one that can coherently
or at least cogently do justice to various different intuitions and desiderata that
emerge from thinking about Representationalism, naturalism and so on. In the
sequel, I will raise some doubts about this claim.
Though Price takes up a number of positions in the paper just mentioned, the one
that is most relevant for me here – insofar as it can be seen as a variety of ARTL – is
the metaphysically quietist view he calls ‘relaxed realism’ (following McGrath
op. cit.; see Chap. 1). This kind of line denies the relevance of what Price calls
‘lower level’ accounts, at least in a constitutive sense, to understanding discourses
at the top level. Price thinks this is too quietist to be plausible: there are clearly dif-
ferences between, say, ethical and scientific talk, and his lower level will be able to
illuminate what these amount to. Now, I am not opposed to the idea that the two
levels do hang together and in some sense ideally should (even if this ‘should’ is
only methodological, insofar as we want to avoid the philosophical ‘loss of prob-
lems’ or ‘soggy pluralism’ which relaxed realism threatens). However, I do want to
raise a dissenting voice to Price’s claim, on two fronts. Firstly, I want to argue that,
since it is not obvious that the relation between Price’s levels is, even on his own
view, a necessary or constitutive one, it is not clear that relaxed realism is ruled out
as a version of ARTL – even if it is not a very attractive one. Secondly, I think it is
not obvious that the expressivist account that Price offers at the lower level is actu-
ally suited to the task of illuminating the top level in an optimal way (this will be
topic of the following section). For both of these reasons, I think the idea that GE is
the only way one might conceive of ARTL, which seems to be Price’s line, must be
rejected. I do think a supporter of ARTL should ideally seek to say more than
relaxed realism does, but also that they might well do this by finding a different way
of understanding the project of subject naturalism: a different way of substantiating
ARTL, as I shall put it, from Price’s GE.
To understand all this better, we need first to say more about how Price under-
stands the two level picture. Price suggests we can see the levels as corresponding
to two different kinds of expressivist tradition in philosophy (see Price 2011b). On
the one hand, we have Humean expressivism (‘HEX’, as he calls it): the idea, first
suggested by Hume, that we understand the meaning of at least certain of our dis-
courses not in terms of the objects in our environment that we seem to refer to in
these discourses, but in terms of the emotional reactions we have to such objects. It
is this kind of expressivism, suitably modified and generalised, that Price sees as
informing the lower level. Price builds most directly here on Blackburn’s quasi-
realism (Blackburn 1984, 1991, 1998), according to which we seek to explain natu-
ralistically how we come to speak as if there are, say, ethical properties and facts,
and do so rightly, though without assuming worldly ethical states of affairs or facts
in doing so. The terminus of this kind of expressivism for Price, which he also reads
into Blackburn’s later works, is the idea that we must simply slough off any ‘as if’
talk, but retain the naturalistic account of how we come to speak the way we do. The
significance of the ‘as if’ disappears with semantic deflationism: truth and represen-
tation are not substantial, explanatory properties, so if a discourse is assertoric and
suitably functional, its claims are ipso facto truth-apt and, presumably, at least in
large part true. Therefore there is and can be no ‘bifurcation’ (to use Robert Kraut’s
Rorty-inspired term, cf. Kraut 1990) between discourses that merely usefully
express something and those that genuinely correspond to facts, represent or
describe the world, or whatever. One can nevertheless remain a pluralist in that
different discourses will be explained in different ways, according to their differing

underlying natural functions. Some of these functions will be not be the kind of
thing that expressivist philosophers standardly have thought of as coming under
their remit. Thus, as we have seen, some of our discourses to be properly explained
must refer to things in our environments with which they covary – which they
e-represent, as Price puts it. However, again, this difference is not a difference in a
capacity to simply ‘represent reality’.14
At the upper, i-representational level Price suggests we can make use of a differ-
ent kind of expressivism, one that he associates with Hegel and more particularly
Brandom (1994, 1998), hence referring to this as ‘BEX’. BEX involves the idea of
making explicit, in normative and inferential terms, things that we do in using
vocabularies, of any kind. And what we do, at a fundamental level, is, as Brandom
has famously put it, engage in a practice of giving and asking for reasons. Our
claims bring with them commitments to defend them if challengd, and entitlements
to accept them as premises for further claims. Language thus has what Brandom
calls a ‘down town’, a central kind of functioning – assertion – and other kinds of
speech act are to be understood derivatively on this basis.15
Now Price also takes Brandom’s view to involve the idea that we do different
kinds of things with language, and thus that there is a natural and indeed unavoid-
able connection between HEX (Humean expressivism) and BEX, and that both per-
spectives should inform a more complete ‘total expressivist’ theory of language
(‘TEX’; Price 2011b, 110; cf. also Price 2010a). However, I think here one might
reasonably stop up a bit and ask exactly what follows from Brandom’s picture. Even
if one accepts that we ‘do different things with different parts language’, does one
inevitably have to accept HEX?
Price argues that if we only have BEX, only an expressivist story at the upper
level – a story that then applies to the lower levels in the same way – then we have
only been given pragmatic theory of force, not of content, contrary to what Brandom
intends (Price 2011b, 99). However, this seems mistaken (at least, the claim seems
incorrect, whatever Brandom exactly intends). One of Brandom’s central philo-
sophical ideas, inspired by Sellars, is that we are doing different kinds of thing when
we use, say, modal, mathematical or logical language, and that none of these should
be understood in terms of a representational function. Formal (or quasi-formal) dis-
courses like these have a meta-linguistic expressivist character, making explicit dif-
ferent kinds of practical commitments, of everyday or scientific reasoning, or both.
However, this character is surely central to understanding not just the force but also
the content of discursive activity. If I assert that all F are G and that a is F, but deny
14
Though acknowledging e-representation is thus not meant to be any kind of backpedalling with
respect to the rejection of Representationalism, it is nevertheless a central and important compo-
nent of Price’s overall picture, as we shall see in Sect. 2.4.
15
This means, as Price puts it in another paper, that we can give ‘One cheer for representational-
ism’, as opposed to the ‘no cheers’ that Rorty and Wittgenstein, under some interpretations at least,
might seem to give it (Price 2010a). Insofar as I interpret Rorty as an ARTList, I would probably
beg to differ here but the details of this disagreement need not concern us here.
a is G, then, for whatever range of predicates is in question, I will be held to account

in virtue of flouting a logical truth. The practical commitments underlying logic are
thus a pragmatic constraint on all rational, contentful thought. By contrast, if we
think about what we are doing when we use the language of ethics or middle-sized
dry goods, it does not seem that the truths we articulate encode practices that demar-
cate the realm of the rational as such. We could, it seems, coherently drop talk of the
ethical entirely, for example. Exactly where the demarcation between vocabularies
which do and do not do have this character goes is no doubt a difficult issue to
resolve. There may also be several different kinds of practical constraint that apply
to any rational thought whatsover. But my point here rests only on the idea that for
Brandom some though not all aspects of language-use are plausibly constitutively
bound up with the content of any assertion.
Of course, we must, as good anti-Representationalists, still accept that our mean-
ing theory will be couched in terms of use-theoretic properties for all our different
discourses. However, we can now distinguish between two broad ways of under-
standing this idea. Under what I will call ‘the thick interpretation’, which is Price’s
reading, something at least like an expressivist account will be required to under-
stand all these discourses. There would however seem to be another understanding
available: the ‘thin interpretation’. Under this, from outside the various practices we
should say that what we do is simply to talk about many different kinds of thing –
values, middle-sized dry goods, sub-atomic particles, perhaps probabilities and so
on and so forth – in accord with various fundamental rational practices, as articu-
lated by logic and other formal vocabularies (again, exactly where the boundary
goes here is not important, only that there is one). The latter do have to be under-
stood in terms of things we do in a more concrete, specifiable sense (at least, assum-
ing Brandom’s framework), but these doings are part of our rationality itself in a
way the doings underlying the first kind are not. As regards the latter, there are
certainly differences between discourses like morality and science, but, pace Price,
it seems one might reasonably claim that these can only be appreciated from enter-
ing into the different discursive activities themselves, not by reference to notions
like ‘internal emotional response to stimuli’ or ‘e-representation’. Talking and rea-
soning about morality and value is different from talking about things like tables
and chairs, but to understand that difference it is necessary and sufficient, according
to the thin interpretation, to engage in the different kinds of talk. As far as I can see,
nothing of what Price makes use of in Brandom rules out this thin interpretation of
a use-theoretic understanding of our different discourses. But the thin interpretation
makes no appeal to HEX.
Independently of considerations from Brandom, Price seems committed to the
coherence of the thin interpretation in virtue of the overall structure of his view. GE
aims to explain our various discourses from an external perspective; it does not
address what we take ourselves to be doing in engaging in these practices, which
can only be appreciated by those who do just that. But then it seems this latter, inter-
nal perspective might be the one that we need to adopt to explain them. One might
also put this in Carnapian terms, which one presumes Price would be happy to
accept: the very idea of there being internal questions presupposes there are
different sets of semantic rules (in a broad sense) for our different discourses, rules
you have to master to ‘play the relevant game’, and that doing this constitutes play-
ing this particular game, mastering this particular discourse. Given this, it is not at
all clear why anything more should or could be relevant to understanding our differ-
ent discourses.
The thin interpretation would seem, moreover, to correspond to one way of
adopting the relaxed realism Price thinks is untenable or at least sub-optimal.
Relaxed realism registers an irreducible plurality in our ontological commitments,
but holds there is not much more to say beyond this (or at least beyond this and what
might be necessary to make sense of us being rational thinkers at all). Price, as we
have seen, thinks relaxed realism is deeply unsatisfactory. But why exactly?
He writes:
[W]e could say that relaxed realists face a trilemma. Faced with what seem to be legitimate
questions about particular discourses – why we have them, how they differ, how they relate
to our sensibilities – there are three main options. In the metaphysical corner are views that
appeal to the nature of the properties or entities in question (e.g […] colours and values) to
answer such questions. In the extreme quietist corner are views that simply fail to engage
with such questions. And in the third corner is expressivism. The first corner seems off
limits for anything worth calling relaxed realism – but that leaves a choice between what is
arguably an excessive quietism, and expressivism itself. (Price 2019, 143).
The first corner is Representationalism and if relaxed realism is a version of our

ARTL it will of course want to distance itself from that. Price then thinks the view
must become expressivist in order to avoid simply refusing to answer good
questions.16
However, though I think this is potentially a problem for relaxed realists, there is
a question that they in turn could pose to Price: Does saying more about how our
different vocabularies function, at least in the way Price does, tell us anything of
constitutive relevance about them? For example, if what is constitutively relevant
can only be appreciated by one involved in the practices – from, moreover, a first-
personal point of view – then it is not clear that expressivist accounts do count as so
relevant, for they do not depend on this perspective.17 More generally it can seem
that Price is faced with a dilemma here. If he says that expressivist explanations are
constitutively relevant to explaining our different vocabularies, then won’t he have
to say that different vocabularies have different kinds of meanings – different ways
of relating to the world – and hence subscribe to some kind of bifurcation thesis
after all (something he clearly doesn’t want to do)? If this is right, he must soft-
pedal the idea of constitutive relevance, in which case what the expressivist provides
would have to be understood in some other way. For example, it might be seen as
detailing the natural supervenience base of our different discourses: that which, in
16
Price refers in support of his line to Michael Ridge who in his (2019) provides a similar but paper
length critique of William Scanlon’s form of relaxed realism (‘reasons fundamentalism’). As far as
I can see, the dialectical line I offer here would also apply to Ridge’s arguments (at least insofar as
they are meant to be support for something like GE).
17
This point will also be important in Sect. 2.5 below (as well as Chaps. 3 and 4).
brute nature, fixes the truths in the different domains but doesn’t explain them or
give an understanding of them to one who has no understanding of the matter in
question. But surely a relaxed realist herself could accept such a supervenience
claim. GE’s expressivism is meant to amount to much more than this.
Some might think that this is not really a dilemma for Price, for he can easily opt
for the first horn, arguing, not that ethics and science have different semantics, but
rather different metasemantics: what makes ethical claims truth-apt is different from
what makes scientific claims truth-apt (see e.g. Simpson 2017, Ridge op. cit.).
However, it is not clear that this can be an option for someone like Price who, as we
have seen, rejects substantive truth-maker theory or placement metaphysics as
dependent on Representationalism. If the relevance is constitutive it is going to have
to concern the semantics of the terms itself, but that again conflicts with semantic
deflationism.
Perhaps Price could push back against relaxed realism by arguing it slides inexo-
rably not just into a soggy pluralism, but in fact into a kind of metaphysical plural-
ism18 whereby all the different entities we are committed to through our various
practices accrete on top of one another, so to speak, in a metaphysical ‘reality’ that
is mind-independent and Represented. Presumably if that were the case it could not
be a form of ARTL even. However, here I think the relaxed realist (or at least one
such who wants to be an ARTList) can point out that her position is free to embrace,
indeed, perhaps most typically presupposes the kind of (later) Wittgensteinean ideas
that Price stresses and that I took up in Chap. 1, i.e. the idea that ‘how we go on’ is
conditioned by our subjectivity, and that the languages we speak is a contingent
matter – without either thought implying any substantive kind of anti-realism.19 As
I pointed out, while this may be consistent with Price’s GE, it doesn’t have to be
seen, as he sees it, as proprietary to GE. It follows that relaxed realists, at least of the
relevant kinds, need not be metaphysical realists or Representationalists any more
than Price. Moreover, it seems this Wittgensteinean point concerns only the upper
level in Price’s two-tier system, and hence provides no vindication of the need for
lower level HEX-theories that Price thinks relaxed realism rejects only at the
expense of an implausible quietism.20
18
This is the title of Price (1992), a discussion of what this concept involves that argues for what is
essentically a deflationary, non-metaphysical form of the idea.
19
These issues, already touched on in chapter 1, are complex and deserve further discussion than I
can provide here. Chap. 6 takes up the question of the relationship between ARTL and realism at a
more general level.
20
One might also question whether relaxed realism really is quietist. Thus, McDowell, who I have
been using a representative of relaxed realism, also grounds our rational thinking in what he calls
our ‘first’ nature (i.e. our nature as biological beings) in a more substantive sense insofar as he sees
our capacity for sensory perception, which we share with non-language using animals, as integral
to understanding this. One might therefore think that he is in fact a kind of subject naturalist after
all (if not a supporter of GE). I will not try to resolve that issue here, though Chaps. 3 and 4 offers
some further discussion of McDowell relevant to these and other more general issues of the book.
The main point for now is that I at least have seen no argument from Price for thinking the
Wittgensteinean ideas he uses lead one inevitably in the direction of GE or HEX.
2.5 Is GE the Best Form of ARTL? 43
There is no doubt more that could be said about these issues and perhaps
responses that could be made on Price’s behalf. But for my purposes here I want to
leave the issue of GE versus relaxed realism there. Summing up, the dialect we have
sketched suggests that relaxed realism – at least, for all Price has said against it –
should be acknowledged as a coherent and consistent, even if not a very exciting
form of ARTL, and one that is moreover distinct from GE. To say it is excessively
quietist presupposes that one needn’t be so quietist, but that is precisely what Price
has not shown, it seems to me. Having said that, I also find relaxed realism unsatis-
fying and also problematically anti-scientific in relegating questions about the natu-
ralistic anchoring of our vocabularies to a ‘non-constitutive’ level. Or perhaps one
rather wants to say: why should this constitutive/non-constitutive difference – even
understood in the way a supporter of ARTL would understand it – carry such signifi-
cance in delineating what a philosophical theory might reasonably seek to encom-
pass? Nevertheless, my discussion thus far does also, and importantly, suggest that
GE and ARTL are distinct positions in logical space, and that there is more wriggle
room for one enamoured of the latter but not the former.
2.5 Is GE the Best Form of ARTL?
The previous section was concerned with whether GE is the only coherent node
within the space defined by the basic precepts of ARTL. In this section, I turn to
whether it is the best such node. In view of what I have just said, I think one could
still reasonably mount a case for GE over relaxed realism: ideally, we do want to say
more than relaxed realism does, and we do want what we say to connect to issues
about the natural beings we are. However, that doesn’t mean that GE should be
accepted: perhaps there is another form of subject naturalism – another naturalistic
substantiation of ARTL – in the offing. In my view, there are two substantive prob-
lems for GE that make a search for such an alternative worth undertaking.
The first problem has to do with the fact, mentioned above, that our various lin-
guistic practices are things we engage in an involved, first-personal (plural) and,
relatedly, normative manner. We are trying to get things right in relation to the
domain in question. Expressivism, by contrast, offers a sideways on, descriptive and
(natural scientific) explanatory account of what we are up to in doing this. Various
authors have raised this as a problem for GE, taking up different aspects of the
objection (see e.g. Macarthur 2014, Redding 2010, Cozzo 2012, Showler 2021).
The worry is related to the issue of constitutivity versus non-constitutivity discussed
above, but the problem I am raising here is not that of there being a categorical
divide here, but more concretely that of whether expressivism gives the right kind of
account of our linguistic practices, or at least an optimal one. For example, in the
ethical case, seeing our claims as based in emotional responses to an essentially
valueless environment arguably does not properly capture what makes our ethical
judgements important to us: why we feel committed to making them and getting
them right. This can be appreciated through the fact that one apprised of the
expressivist story about ethics might surely wonder whether there really is any ratio-
nal basis to it – whether there is any ‘getting it right’ in ethics – even if they can
appreciate why, given the natural facts the expressivist uncovers, they and their
peers go in for it and think there are such answers to be had.
Price is aware of this kind of worry and has responded that it is not a serious
option for us to cease engaging in the various practices that we do. Hence even one
apprised of the naturalistic basis underlying their language-use will not be able to
desist in engaging in it in the way they do, even if they felt so-inclined (Price 1996,
§13).21 One might also retort that it is not totally clear exactly what people would be
inclined to do on learning about the expressivist basis for ethics; relatedly, that it is
not totally clear how exactly we should think of what the expressivist explanation is
meant to be missing. After all, GE is not denying the existence of anything we are
pretheoretially committed to, but only seeking to give an account in naturalistic
terms of what talk about the things in question amounts to; how that fits into our
lives as natural creatures. An expressivist explanation in no way brings the threat of
any kind of debunking, in the way certain people have argued that other kinds of
naturalistic accounts of ethics do (se e.g. Joyce 2006).
Notwithstanding these replies, I do think that if there were a naturalistic account
of our different vocabularies that did more justice to their involved, first-personal,
normative nature than expressivism does, this would count ceteris paribus in favour
of it over GE. One recent suggestion along these lines is Paul Showler’s idea that
subject naturalism be linked more explicitly to a genealogical approach to philoso-
phy associated with thinkers like Nietzsche, Foucault and, in analytic philosophy,
Bernard Williams (Williams 2002). According to this line, though we will typically
start with some kind of naturalistic, functional story about how a certain discourse
came into being, this story needs to be contextualized in the manner of the historian
to understand how this function is realized in different epochs and societies so that
we can appreciate its value and seek to uphold, maintain and develop this in our own
times. Showler’s main example here is Williams’ account of sincerity and truth-
telling, which, according to Williams’ can be seen as having a social function based
in how things were for us in a certain ‘state of nature’, but which also needs to be
reflected upon actively when conditions of communication change. This would
involve a subject naturalism that understands ‘naturalism’ rather broadly, as involv-
ing subjects like history, as well as psychology and biology (the latter are the sci-
ences Price typically seems to see as informing it), but is arguably still a naturalistic
position for that.
I have sympathy with this line. One can see it as trying to combine the benefits
of relaxed realism’s internal perspective on discourses with GE’s external explana-
tory illumination; it wants to suggest that the two projects need not be separate.
However, one might worry whether in laying emphasis on history, which is first and
foremost a non-natural, humanistic discipline, any residual gesture to a natural
21
The strategy seems reminiscent of Hume’s response to scepticism: although reason might tell us
that our beliefs are unfounded, scepticism does not follow because we cannot desist from forming
the beliefs that we do; in a word, scepticism is motivationally and thereby rationally impotent.
scientific account of the discourse will be little more than that: a gesture. Perhaps
something like it is ultimately the only illuminating kind of account we can hope to
give of our discourses, and it is of course one with many illustrious forbears. But as
I see it is not in the spirit of Price’s idea that we try to give some kind of deeper,
non-historical account of how our discourses fit into nature. It is not clear that it gets
beyond relaxed realism in terms of its overall structure.
Of course, even if that is the case, it need not be an objection. Perhaps the bound-
ary between relaxed realism and more ‘explanatory’ forms of ARTL is not sharp
(and for the record: I never meant what I called above the ‘thin interpretation’ of
what we are doing in saying the various different things we do to preclude the pos-
sibility of illuminating philosophical reflection upon them). Relatedly, perhaps the
boundary between natural and non-natural science is not sharp. More generally,
I don’t want to dictate in advance what kind of thing an interesting explanation of
our discourses must amount to count as subject naturalistic. Perhaps acknowledging
pluralism will take one in a whole variety of different methodological directions
when it comes to giving an account of what underlies our different discourses,
drawing on different elements or aspects of natural science, human science, sociol-
ogy, philosophy and so on.
However, when it comes to what Price has offered, it seems clear the broad out-
lines of this are of a broadly natural scientific character – at least when it comes to
his lower, HEX level – and for my purposes it is that point of departure I want to
adopt here. At the upper, i-level, as noted in the discussion of Brandom, there is
certainly more work for an armchair philosopher to do, at least as things stand (in
illuminating our concepts of truth or consistency, amongst others). But when it
comes to having something to say about the difference between discourses of ethics
and of middle-sized dry goods (the HEX level), Price’s picture seems distinctively
natural scientific in character, drawing on broad ideas from evolutionary biology
and cognitive science (in principle, if not in practice). Remaining within such a
natural scientific understanding of our capacities, in line with that GE adopts, I want
in any case to ask whether there is a view that can illuminate our discourses in a way
that is as naturalistic, or naturalistic in roughly the same way, but less alienating
than HEX can seem to be. In the next two chapters, I will sketch the outlines of a
possible positive answer to this question. This addresses itself both to the issue of
first-personal involvement already mentioned, and to another worry I have about
GE, to which I now turn (this is my second problem for GE).
This concerns the idea of e-representation and, relatedly, the concept of causa-
tion in Price’s overall picture. We have seen that according to Price some vocabular-
ies have e-representational relations to their referents whereas others don’t. To
understand or explain talk of ‘tables’, ‘chairs’ and ‘viruses’ we have to see these as
tracking, indicating or covarying with tables and so on in the environment, in a way
we do not to understand or explain talk of what is ‘good’ or ‘beautiful’ or ‘possi-
ble’ – which rather requires something more like a story along the lines classical
expressivism would offer. This is, I would aver, a very important distinction for
Price. A lot of what makes his subject naturalism interesting is that there is this kind
of difference in functional account amongst our different vocabularies. These kinds
of account do not exhaust the kinds of expressivist (or pragmatist) account that Price
sees as applicable to vocabularies; for example, that applicable to truth involves
neither e-representation nor appeal to the ideas of classical expressivism (cf. Price
et al. 2013, 177–8, also footnote 6 above). However, truth is presumably something
that is to be explained at the top level – the BEX level, not the lower HEX level. At
least in terms of what distinguishes GE from relaxed realism, a vocabulary being
e-representational or not is a, if not the central explanatory crux within GE.
The centrality of e-representation is also evident in the way Price situates his
position in relation to that of other similar positions, which he wants to see as all
ultimately pointing in the direction of GE. A central example is Blackburn’s quasi-
realism. We have seen in Chap. 1 how Price sees quasi-realism as inherently unsta-
ble and inexorably leading to a global anti-representationalist view. By way of
riposte, Blackburn has, as we saw in Sect. 2.2, worried that GE, in being global,
seems to offer ‘no exit’ for the expressivist explanations it offers. As we also saw,
for Price the response to Blackburn is to concede that some discourses do indeed
require invocation of their referents to explain their peculiar functionality (roughly,
those of natural science and middle sized dry goods), but that by understanding this
in terms of the concept of e-representation – applying to these vocabularies but not
those of value or modality – and stressing the distinctness of e-representation from
i-representation, we can do this without lapsing back into Representationalism.
Price also draws on the idea of e-representation to bring his picture into contact
with that of Sellars (ibid., 166 ff., Price 2015). I haven’t space here to go into the
fine details of Sellars’ position, but briefly Price sees Sellars’ idea of ‘S-assertibility’
(Sellars 1968) – the idea that ‘true’ means something like assertible in accord with
various language internal rules – as corresponding to his idea of i-representation,
whilst his idea of ‘picturing’ (ibid.) is to be understood in terms of e-representation.
Picturing and e-representation are both non-semantical, causal relations between
items in the natural world. For Sellars this idea was essential to understanding how
a linguistic framework can be concerned with factual or ‘real’ truth and thus ulti-
mately with his particular form of ‘scientific realism’ (as he called his view). Price,
as I understand him, follows Rorty here (see Rorty 1991, 152) in regarding the idea
of picturing and the scientism that follows on its heals as at least risking falling back
into a form of Representationalism and/or bifurcationism. Price’s irenic move
involves talk of two different worlds, or kinds of world: the i-world (or i-worlds)
and the e-world (2013, ch. 3). The latter is the world of natural science and other
‘naturalistic’ discourses, and is often what we mean by talking of the world or real-
ity. The i-world is Wittgenstein’s ‘eveything that is the case’, but understood not as
a metaphysical totality but just as the ontological ‘shadows’ if one likes – the vari-
ous i-worlds – that are cast by our different discourses. But of course for Price (and
ARTL generally) this distinction cannot amount to a divide between what is and
what isn’t real or true (or ‘really real’ or ‘Big-R Real’ or whatever). Nevertheless it
is clearly important for Price to have the distinction itself at his disposal, for explan-
atory purposes, and this again underlies how important the idea of e-representation
is to him.
E-representation thus seems central to much of what is interesting and philo-

sophically substantial about GE. Moreover, Price seems to think he can just use the
idea of e-representation for free, as it were, insofar as it is a scientifically and natu-
ralistically respectable notion. Sometimes, this reliance seems to go via the idea that
something at least very much like e-representation is a staple of contemporary cog-
nitive science (see e.g. Price et al. 2013, 36; 2011b, 102). At others, it seems to go
via the idea that the natural world – the e-world – just is the causally efficacious
world, with substantial causal relations obtaining between things in it (Price 2015).
However, I will now argue that neither of these things can be just assumed, the latter
not least by Price’s own lights.
Jerry Fodor is famous for his quip that the representational, computational theory
of mind is ‘the only game in town’ when it comes to scientific psychology or cogni-
tive science (Fodor 1975). It is partly from this kind of cognitive science (at least
broadly understood to embrace a philosophical understanding of its central con-
structs) that the idea of e-representation stems; given its validity, it is perhaps plau-
sible to think that there are indeed ‘indicating relations’ holding between bits of our
macroscopic natural environment and bits of the brain (and hence bits of language)
of a kind which do not hold between values and our beliefs and assertions about
them. However, as we shall explore more fully in the following chapter, the repre-
sentational theory of mind is today by no means as generally accepted as it once
was. In particular we have various proposals that take an ‘anti-representationalist’
stance towards explaining mind and behaviour. One of these in particular, enactiv-
ism, sees our relationship to the world not in terms of bits of language or the brain
representing things given independently of the organism, but in terms of a construc-
tive activity of sense making by the organism that blurs the boundary between it and
its environment. On this kind of account there is plausibly no space for the idea of
indicating relations or e-representation to items like tables and chairs – even when
understood, as Price intends, non-semantically.22 The idea that an appeal to cogni-
tive science in itself justifies e-representation is thus dubious without further ado; it
would require a vindication of the representationalist over the anti-representationalist
paradigm, at least in the relevant respects, whilst this issue is I take very much a
moot one given the current state of the discipline.
Price might retort that his point does not depend on accepting representational-
ism in cognitive science, but only the common-sensical and – surely? – unexcep-
tionable idea that things like cups do cause things like our thoughts about cups in a
way values do not cause our moral thoughts. However, common-sensical or not, it
is not clear that Price can make appeal to this idea, by his own lights. For he has also
argued that our concept of causation is itself susceptible to something like a classi-
cally expressivist treatment (or at least is not simply to be understood in terms of
e-representing some feature of reality). Price builds here on a well-known if not
uncontroversial line of thought which has it that the concept of causation plays no
role in fundamental physics, on the grounds that the latter operates with a
22
This claim requires further discussion: see Sects. 3.3 and 4.3.
fundamentally symmetrical conception of reality that is at odds with the asymmetri-

cal nature of causation. Our causal thinking is thus rather to be explained by the fact
that we are agents embedded in a particular way in spacetime. This embeddedness
is characterized by a thermodynamic gradient from lesser to greater entropy, such
that through action we can produce differential effects in the future, but not in the
past (Menzies & Price 1993, Price 2005). For A to be a cause of B is just for B to
follow A along this gradient such that we can ‘twiddle’ the situation surrounding A
to differentially increase or decrease the chances of B occurring, but not vice versa.
But in principle, such twiddling could also affect ‘the past’, as we would put it. Price
does not want to see this as implying anti-realism about causation; our talk about
causation is simply more like our talk about values than we have tended to think.
Nevertheless, saying this makes it somewhat unclear how the idea of causal con-
nectedness can be simply assumed as a kind of basic natural relation that could
inform a subject naturalistic theory of our different discourses incorporating, funda-
mentally, the idea of e-representation.
Price might immediately respond here that science is many things, not just fun-
damental physics. Higher level sciences, such as biology, psychology and social
science, can legitimately employ a notion of causation, even if this is to be under-
stood as a function of our contingent placing in a physical world that is not itself
fundamentally causal. However, I think this line fails to secure the crucial idea in
question here, namely, that e-representation marks a fundamentally important dis-
tinction between vocabularies. For that to be the case, it would have to be somehow
given that things like chairs cause beliefs about chairs in a way values do not cause
corresponding ethical beliefs. But, not least given Price’s view on causation, the
idea that it might be restricted to the kinds of vocabulary he wants it to be restricted
to seems problematic. For surely it is not absurd to suggest that our ethical talk
tracks and is indeed caused by ethical reality in being counterfactually dependent on
it: if someone were to do something reprehensible in our presence, we would tend
to believe this, and if we came to have that belief, it would probably follow some-
thing reprehensible being done, ceteris paribus.23 Why shouldn’t this be just as good
a use of the concept of causation as any we find in relation to any other vocabulary,
given that causation is the kind of thing Price takes it to be – or indeed, given only
that is something other than an intrinsic feature of the natural world? If this line of
thought is accepted then the contrast between ethical talk and talk of, say, tables and
chairs can seem to evaporate.
Now these latter arguments are not and are not meant to be knock-down argu-
ments against GE or its viability as a subject naturalistic enquiry. To start with,
I have not shown, and will not attempt to show, that representationalist cognitive
science is not in fact preferable to an anti-representationalist variant (nor have I
shown that e-representation, or at least its use in the way Price uses it, cannot sur-
vive within the latter framework, though I will have more to say about this in
A somewhat similar idea can seem to underlie Bernard Williams’ idea that we can be said to have
23
knowledge of ethical features of the world even though they are not part of the physical or the
world in itself in virtue of the fact that the relevant beliefs track the relevant truths (Williams 1985).
Chaps. 3 and 4). If Price’s view on causation is accepted, or at least a view that does
not regard it as an intrinsic feature of the natural world, I think this might well in
itself be enough to show that the idea of e-representation is impotent to do the
demarcation job he wants it to do. For such a representationalist cognitive science
standardly builds on causation to understand its central notion, and then it would
seem consistent with there being representations (in its sense) of, say, values. This
would not support anti-representationalism in cognitive science but it would still
support looking for alternative subject naturalistic substantiations of ARTL insofar
as the notion of e-representation would be deflated.
One might also respond by saying that Price’s treatment of causation as a kind of
‘secondary quality’ is not compulsory for his overall kind of view: perhaps ‘causa-
tion’ is, after all, a concept that e-represents what it (deflationarily) refers to in the
world. This view is obviously circular and problematic from the perspective of
Price’s overall aim of ‘ironically’ deflating metaphysical discourse, also in science
(2011a, 31–32). But that it is incoherent or inconsistent with either ARTL or GE in
particular is not clear and certainly not something I will try to show here.
However, I do not need to do this or provide other more knock-down arguments
against GE for my purposes. What I think the above considerations do show is that
GE’s invocation of e-representation as a way of demarcating between different dis-
courses is not straightforward, or perhaps even coherent from its own perspective;
moreover, the impact of accepting an anti-representationalist cognitive science on
the idea surely does need to be addressed. Finally, we should not forget the first
problem I mentioned for GE, that of its explanations involving an alienation from
the engaged, first-personal nature of the practices themselves. In light of all of this,
the question naturally arises whether some alternative constructs or framework,
taken from or at least inspired by a different kind of cognitive science than that Price
assumes, might inform a more coherent, stream-lined and/or illuminating subject
naturalistic account of our various different discourses. I believe that this is indeed
the case. But to understand fully why we need to turn to current representationalist
versus anti-representationalist debates that more directly concern experience and
cognition.
Chapter 3
Representationalism Versus
Anti-Representationalism About
Perceptual Experience and in Cognitive
Science
Abstract This chapter and the next form of unit. In this one, I present and explore
two further representationalist versus anti-representationalist debates that are preva-
lent in contemporary philosophical discussion: one concerning the nature of percep-
tual experience (indeed, experience more generally), the other how we should think
of a scientific psychology or cognitive science. I lay out the interconnections
between the different views in these debates and how they impact on and relate to
different understandings of ARTL (here consider I amongst other things Rorty’s and
John McDowell’s views on perception). The main argumentative aim of the chapter
is to develop an alternative and in my view superior framework for a subject natu-
ralistic substantiation of ARTL to that Price has offered through GE. I do this by
advocating two other kinds of anti-representationalist position. The first of these
I call phenomenological externalism (PE), a view that can be motivated by an
assessment of the debate about perceptual experience, and involves the idea that,
while experience is not a matter of representation, what we perceive in experience
is something like a world for us, not the world in itself as described by physics. The
other, which I see as providing a deeper, naturalistic undergirding of PE insofar as
it is a position within cognitive science, is enactivism, under a certain understanding
of what this position involves.
3.1 Introduction
This chapter and the next form of unit, together serving several different functions
in the book as a whole.
One, which this chapter discharges, is to present and explore two further repre-
sentationalist versus anti-representationalist debates that are prevalent in contempo-
rary philosophical discussion: one concerning the nature of perceptual experience
(indeed, experience more generally), the other how we should think of a scientific
psychology or cognitive science. Though obviously not independent of one another,

Switzerland AG 2023
473, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26924-0_3
52 3 Representationalism Versus Anti-Representationalism About Perceptual Experience…
these discussions have distinct histories and are pursued today to a large extent
within separate disciplinary spheres. Both however relate to ideas in ARTL in vari-
ous different ways; for that reason, but also because the very ideas of ‘representa-
tionalism’ and (not least) ‘anti-representationalism’ in contemporary discussion are
in need of clarification, it is strikes me as worthwhile going into what these debates
are about, and laying out the interconnections between the different views in them
and ARTL. This discussion also thereby involves some assessment of how well
ARTL and its various commitments stand up against leading contemporary theories
in these areas of the philosophy, in accord with my broadly ‘theoretical’ understand-
ing of what ARTL amounts to (see Chap. 1).
Another aim of the current chapter – the main argumentative one – is to start to
develop an alternative and in my view superior framework for a subject naturalistic
substantiation of ARTL to that Price has offered through GE. Starting from my sur-
vey of the two representationalist versus anti-representationalist debates mentioned
above, I do this by advocating two kinds of anti-representationalist position, one
from each of these areas. Though being about experience and cognition, these fit
together with ARTL’s understanding of language and thought in a mutually rein-
forcing and illuminating manner (I will be arguing). One of these positions I call
phenomenological externalism, a view that can be motivated by an assessment of
the different arguments and positions advanced in the debate about perceptual expe-
rience. The other, which I see as providing a deeper, naturalistic undergirding of
phenomenological externalism insofar as it is a position within cognitive science, is
enactivism (under a certain understanding of what this involves).
Chapter 4 will then go further into how phenomenological externalism and enac-
tivism can fit together to provide a superior subject naturalistic grounding of ARTL
than Price’s GE does. It has a lot to say, in this connection, about the ideas of
‘umwelt’, ‘the world for us’ and ‘the world in itself’, as well as, in the last section,
tying up various loose threads in relation to the discussions of Chaps. 3 and 4 as
whole – including precisely how my view contrasts and compares with Price’s GE.
The current chapter is divided into two sections, one concerning perceptual expe-
rience, the other cognitive science. Section 3.2 starts with a presentation and moti-
vation of contemporary representationalist (also called intentionalist) theories of
perceptual experience, a line that has probably become the mainstream view within
analytic philosophy over the last few years. I then present an alternative view that is
based on the idea that experiences are merely causes, not justifiers of belief. This is
a recognizably anti-representationalist line and one many supporters of ARTL (and
closely related views) subscribe to – though not all, McDowell’s representationalist
view (which I also discuss) being a notable exception. I criticize the causalist view
for failing to do justice to the widely acknowledged phenomenon known as the
transparency of experience that many representationalists see as a central datum in
support of their view. I then turn to what is more standardly referred to as ‘anti-
representationalism about perceptual experience’ in the current literature, a view
also known as naïve realism or relationalism. I argue that though phenomenologi-
cally more tenable than the standard ARTL line on experience, and also arguably
superior, overall, to representationalism, this view also suffers from decisive
3.2 Representationalism Versus Anti-Representationalism About Perceptual… 53
weaknesses – apart from being in any case, its alleged ‘anti-representationalism’

about experience notwithstanding, not in fact compatible with ARTL. Finally, I out-
line phenomenal externalism, which is the view that our experience, though not
representational in character, and though constituted (at least in part) by external
objects and qualities as relationalism holds, is conversant about a world for us, dis-
tinct from the world in itself. I explain both how situating phenomenological exter-
nalism within an ARTL framework can make these ideas more plausible and
palatable, as well as how they promise a substantiation of ARTL by allowing us to
appreciate a broad difference between different discourses in a manner that, though
diverging from the way Price’s GE does this in terms of e-representation, is still
recognizable as a form of subject naturalism.
Section 3.3 then turns to cognitive science. I start with an overview of different
representationalist and anti-representationalist approaches within cognitive science,
relating these to different ways in which ARTL might be assessed or substantiated
(including a recent actualization of Price’s idea of e-representation). I gradually
focus in on enactivism, arguing that a central idea of this – that in perception differ-
ent organisms are related to organism-specific worlds of experience, or umwelts –
can and should be vindicated.

About Perceptual Experience, and
Phenomenological Externalism
Philosophical thinking about how perceptual experience relates to the world around
us seems to throw us back and forth between two diametrically opposed poles. On
the one hand, we seem to be presented with things in the world and their properties
as fully objective features of it, independent of our access to them. The cup I see on
the table appears as something that would remain there were I to look away, and to
be available for others who might look at it. Its properties of being round and white
belong to it, not to me, at the same time as they are also integral to what makes my
experience of it the experience it is. On the other hand, a little reflection can seem
to suggest that what I see is necessarily bounded precisely by my subjective experi-
ences. I do not see the cup from nowhere but from a particular point in space and
time that dictates and delimits the nature of my experience of it and its properties.
I see only the facing side of the cup, and it looks different from different angles and
under different lighting conditions. I am also susceptible to illusions and perhaps
even hallucinations, where things appear radically other than the way they actually
are. Moreover, at least since the time of the scientific revolution, it has generally
been assumed that the world as it is in itself is devoid of so-called secondary quali-
ties like colours and sounds, these being therefore understood as subjective reac-
tions we have to things out there that are projected back out onto a reality that is in
itself colourless, noiseless etc. Modern developments in physics have suggested that
this might even apply to the classical primary qualities, such as shape, size and
motion, insofar as the fundamental nature of reality is insubstantial or field-like
(Eddington 1928; Rovelli 2021).
The first set of intuitions here corresponds to what is often termed a realist (or
naïve realist) view, on which there is a world pretty much as we experience it out
there that perception simply puts us in touch with. On this line perceiving correctly
is like opening a curtain or cleaning a pane of glass to reveal the view (Campbell
2002a, 119). The second set of intuitions challenges this conception, and leads in
the direction of idealism, whereby what we perceive is ‘pushed back into the head’
(Campbell and Cassam 2014, 3), or at least the mind. For Berkeley, the mind-
independent world as we naively think of it is in fact just the world perceived by
God; for Kant, it is a kind of intersubjective construction, with absolute reality
restricted to something we must posit as lying behind this. But such thoughts are
also difficult to accept or even make coherent sense of.
This is of course a familiar dialectic to anyone versed in modern philosophy, and
there have been innumerable attempts to offer positions between naïve realism and
idealism, as well as to show that these lines are not as absurd as many have thought.
In contemporary philosophy of perception (or, as I think we should call this area, the
philosophy of perceptual experience),1 a number of positions are standardly
advanced, ranging from sense data theory and adverbialism through intentionalism
and representationalism to belief-acquisition theories, disjunctivism and naïve real-
ism (see e.g. Fish 2010; Crane and French 2021). I will not here present my own
version of this kind of survey (though will touch on most of the views mentioned),
but rather focus on what has arguably become the central debate in the most recent
literature, one that has taken a ‘representationalism versus anti-representationalism’
form (Locatelli and Wilson 2017). Having sketched this, how the battle lines shape
up between the opposing views, and how ARTL relates to both, I will then suggest
a further anti-representationalist view I call ‘phenomenological externalism’ – one
that can also find plausibility as what I called in the last chapter a subject naturalist
substantiation of ARTL. (Note that phenomenological externalism is not an extant
position in the literature, but, at least in relation to the debate in this area of philoso-
phy, a new generic view that goes both between and beyond the current standard
options.)2
1
Perception more generally is standardly understood as involving more than what we experience
and has also been the object of much work in cognitive science, whereas the ideas we are consider-
ing in this section, though not divorced from considerations in cognitive science, tend to have a
more purely philosophical (i.e. ‘from-the-armchair’) origin.
2
This is not to say that it is very original in the wider scheme of things. The basic thought behind
it goes back to Kant, and similar ideas can be found in several contemporary thinkers whose work
borders on the contemporary analytic debate about perceptual experience. In particular, as we shall
see, Alva Noë has characterized his own theory of perceptual experience in terms that echo phe-
nomenological externalism. The phrase ‘phenomenological externalism’ is also used by several
other authors. One is Dan Zahavi (2008), who employs it as far as I can see in a sense very similar
to that I will be assuming here. Thus for him it is a variety of externalism which, whilst stressing
the constitutive dependence of experience on non-mental objects also sees the latter as constitu-
Contemporary representationalism about perceptual experience (henceforth

RPE) is the idea that perceptual experiences are, though not beliefs themselves,
belief-like intentional states with a representational content.3 Experiences present
the world to us as being certain ways (‘there is a white cup’, ‘there is a round plate’,
and so on, or perhaps ‘that is a white cup’); in virtue of such contents they can be
true or false, or at least accurate or inaccurate about their possessor’s environment.
The same content – along, possibly, with how it is presented to the subject (‘aspect’
or ‘mode of presentation’) and how it relates functionally to other aspects of the
subject’s psychology – constitute or explain the total phenomenal character of
experience.4 RPE is motivated in part by the idea that our experience seems to jus-
tify many of our beliefs about the world: my visual experience of the white cup in
front of me can, it would seem, justify my belief that there is such a cup there. If the
experience does something like saying ‘there is a white cup’ or at least ‘there is
something white and round’ we seem to have some kind of explanation of this.
Relatedly, RPE captures the sense in which our experiences seem to be about the
external world, whilst also accommodating the fact they can also be illusory or hal-
lucinatory: their content specifies a condition in the world, but one that might fail to
obtain, just like a belief’s content.
In this way RPE seems to have distinct advantages over more traditional ‘repre-
sentationalist’ theories of perceptual experience, i.e. empiricist and sense data theo-
ries, which, in their attempt to explain illusion and hallucination, claim that what we
are directly aware of in experience are not material objects but purely sensory items
(ideas or white- or cup-shaped ‘patches’).5 RPE also opens up for a naturalistic
tively dependent on subjectivity. Zahavi also argues that the notion is applicable to all the main
thinkers of the phenomenological tradition, their disagreements otherwise notwithstanding. Max
Velmans’ also uses the expression – see his (2017, 147) – again in a way that is similar to mine,
though his focus is specifically the scientific explanation of consciousness and he posits a plurality
of subjective worlds rather than one more inclusive ‘world for us’. A different use of the term is
Gregory McCullouch’s in his The Mind and its World (McCulloch 1995), where it designates sim-
ply a kind externalism about experience, to the effect that the latter constitutively depends on
material objects (this is more usually termed ‘phenomenal externalism’ in the contemporary ana-
lytic literature on perceptual experience).
3
The view is also often referred to as ‘intentionalism’, but I prefer ‘representationalism’ for rea-
sons that will become apparent. The overview I will provide of this and the other views I discuss
does not attempt a thoroughgoing survey of all the different options one might take in relation to
them, or all the different caveats one might mention – something that is beyond the scope of the
present work, which rather has as its overarching aim to situate the discussion about representa-
tionalism versus anti-representationalism about perceptual experience (and in cognitive science, in
the following section) in relation to ARTL. I will, however, take up some specific issues along the
way that I see as most relevant to motivating phenomenological externalism. The aim is to present
a plausible dialectic that while abstracting away from many details hopefully does not fatally com-
promise the lessons I draw from it.
4
For an overview and discussion of different positions and options here, see e.g. Seager (2016),
Siegel (2021).
5
As well as certain kinds of qualia theories, which are also non- or anti-representational. More on
these and the idea of ‘transparency’ will follow shortly.
understanding of perceptual experience insofar as notions of intentionality and con-

tent are often thought to be naturalistically tractable, at least in principle – while
positing ideas or sense data would appear to court some kind of non-naturalistic
dualism. Cognitive science has made us familiar with the idea that cognition should
be understood as information processing over states (or events) that are said to rep-
resent the world. However, it is also important to bear in mind that RPE concerns
the conscious experience of a subject, not (directly at least) just information or
neural processing. While many supporters of RPE would want to see their view as
continuous with representationalist conceptions of perception from cognitive sci-
ence, the commitment to representation at the two levels is distinct.
Connectedly, a central motivation behind at least many versions of RPE is phe-
nomenological: perceptual experience presents itself to us as being about a mind-
independent, public, material world, not an internal realm of mental objects or their
properties. Here is Gilbert Harman’s oft-cited expression of this so-called transpar-
ency intuition:
When you see a tree, you do not experience any features as intrinsic features of your experi-
ence. Look at a tree and try to turn your attention to intrinsic features of your visual experi-
ence. I predict you will find that the only features there to turn your attention to will be
features of the presented tree. (Harman 1990: 667)
RPE seems to fit with this in the sense that your experiences (according to it) are
about trees, cups and so on, not sense data or the experiences themselves or features
of them (purely phenomenal properties or qualia). Broadly similar points are found
in many philosophical texts, such as G.E. Moore’s discussion of experience as
diaphanous (Moore 1903) and several of those of the phenomenologists (see e.g.
Smith 2002, 105 on Heidegger).
Exactly what the transparency intuition or ‘datum’ amounts to or implies is a
much-debated theme in the contemporary literature.6 For RPE it strengthens the
idea that experience is to be understood as a kind of representational state. On the
other hand, Harman’s very characterization seems to allow that we might be or can
become aware of intrinsic features of experiences in unusual cases. An oft-used
everyday example of this is the kind of blurry vision one can experience with certain
sight defects: it is (it is claimed anyway) one’s experience itself that is blurry, not
(say) the written words out there, or how they are represented as being. There
are also more intricate and partly empirical arguments for the idea that there must
be in this way qualia or what Ned Block calls ‘mental paint’, i.e. intrinsic phenom-
enal aspects of experience beyond what is constituted by representational or inten-
tional features (cf. Block 2003, 2010). Another point of contention concerns whether
transparency suggests experiences are literally constituted, in part at least, by what
6
Sometimes the idea of transparency and Moore’s of diaphaneity are distinguished, the latter being
rather the idea that the phenomenal character of experience is exhausted by the object of the expe-
rience (cf. e.g. French 2018). Diaphaneity is thus also consonant with a sense datum theory insofar
as the latter are objects of experience. I will be focusing here on transparency, understood as the
general idea that our experiences present themselves as being about a public, material world, at
least first and foremost.
they are about in the world. While some would argue they are (e.g. Lycan 2001),
others have wanted to draw a distinction between what our experience ‘feels like’
and how it in fact is, such that phenomenologically transparent experiences, though
‘about’ the external world, are themselves fully ‘in the head’ (see e.g. Gow
2016, 2019).
In my view, though there are many issues one might address here, transparency
is such a pervasive aspect of our experience that it needs to be centrally reflected in
any viable general theory of perceptual experience – as I take it in some sense all
philosophical theories aim to be. Considering our conscious experience as a whole,
this is surely, first and foremost, something that is conversant about an external
world of material objects and their properties, including our own, subjectively aware
bodies, and other subjects experiencing these same things in similar ways.7 Such a
view would also seem to have broad naturalistic appeal insofar as it doesn’t posit
mysterious mental entities like qualia or sense data. At the same time, if we assume
a non-reductive naturalistic framework (in accord with ARTL’s orientation), there
would seem no justification for not seeing such phenomenological data as relevant
to determining what experiences are like ‘metaphysically’, as it were – that is, as
suggesting that they are themselves, at least in part, constituted by the external
objects and qualities they concern (pace Gow).8 For fans of transparency there are
7
In putting the idea of transparency this way I also mean to accommodate the idea of pre-reflective
(or implicit) self-consciousness that many phenomenologists stress as accompanying any con-
scious experience. Such self-consciousness is not cognitively sophisticated, and does not involve a
separate, higher-order mental state but merely the essentially subjective and perspectival nature of
all experience (see Gallagher and Zahavi 2008, ch. 3). Having said this, I do not want to commit to
what Zahavi calls the ‘minimal self’ as a kind of entity constitutively independent of social interac-
tion (see e.g. Zahavi 2010, and for critique of this idea, Kyselo 2018).
I should also add that, though my focus here is perceptual experience, what I have to say is
meant to suggest a view of conscious experience more broadly. In stressing transparency to the
extent I am, I am suggesting that experience generally is first and foremost the experience of a
material world, including myself as a subject of experience of this world and other such subjects.
In being at the same time an experience implicitly bounded by subjectivity, this view also aims to
encpompass aspects of our mental lives that might seem more private, such as thought, memory
and imagination. I would want to argue, along lines which can be identified in the phenomenolo-
gists as well as philosophers like Gilbert Ryle and Wittgenstein in the analytic tradition (and,
where relevant, in empirical science; cf. Dennett 1991), that such aspects of our psychology are in
fact not hidden in some kind of private realm, and that the very idea of such a realm is deeply
mistaken. Obviously there are many issues of detail to be considered here, but I take it that the
overall view is sufficiently acknowledged to make my general position not unfamiliar or totally
implausible.
8
Here I should point out that my understanding of the philosophical discipline known as ‘phenom-
enology’, here and throughout this chapter, is in the first instance a (non-reductive) naturalistic
one, seeing phenomenological study as, in a broad sense, a ‘theoretical’ one concerning a particu-
lar ‘phenomenon’ (viz. experience, again in a broad sense), and as at least potentially responsive to
and in engagement with studies from neuroscience, experimental psychology and so on – rather
than as a transcendental, a priori study of the conditions of meaningful thought and enquiry (see
e.g. Gallagher and Zahavi 2008; Thompson 2007; Reynolds, 2020 for discussion and defence of
this approach). At the same time, given the implications I see as flowing from an adequate under-
standing of experience from such a phenomenological naturalistic perspective in terms of the idea
certainly phenomena that need explaining (or explaining away), but I see these as
puzzles, not as a call to provide a radically different kind of theory of experience
that does away with it – and risks obscurity with notions like qualia.
Stressing transparency makes problems not only for sense datum and qualia (and
closely related adverbialist) theories, however; it is also in tension I believe with a
kind of anti-representationalist view of perceptual experience that many supporters
of ARTL, or at least closely related positions, hold. This kind of view is standardly
motivated by Sellars’ classic discussion of ‘the given’ (Sellars 1956). In light of the
ancient regress problem of justifying belief, perception has often been seen as pro-
viding an epistemological foundation of belief in something outside our beliefs. But
how is it so much as possible for something outside what Sellars calls ‘the logical
space of reasons’ – the realm of conceptually articulated thought that belief is – to
have a bearing on the epistemic status of such thought? I look at the cup and perhaps
cannot help but come to believe it is white, on the table, and so on; but justifying and
causing belong to two different modes of explanation, the former involving general
concepts, ineluctably opening up for the possibility of rational challenge. Failure to
appreciate this leads to what Sellars called ‘the myth of the given’: the idea, inco-
herent according to Sellars, of an occurrence in experiential consciousness that can
in and of itself justify a belief about our surroundings.
We have already seen in Chap. 1 that ARTL rejects the idea of perceptual ‘given-
ness’, understood more generally as the idea that experience gives us a thoroughly
independent conceptual and epistemological basis for the rest of our knowledge. In
view of this, ARTL would also most likely want to distance itself from RPE. For
contemporary RPE typically understands the perceptual contents it posits as a dis-
tinct, non-conceptual grounds for conceptual belief (see e.g. Peacocke 1998; Tye
1995; Burge 2010), and such a view seems tantamount to accepting Sellars’ version
of the myth (see McDowell 1994).9
Now John McDowell has claimed we can hang on to the idea of perceptual expe-
rience as representational and conceptual; I will say more about his view presently.
For the moment however I want to consider the more standard way defenders of
ARTL, such as Rorty (see e.g. Rorty 1998, ch. 7), as well other somewhat
of an experience-relative ‘world for us’, this kind of naturalism also accommodates a ‘descendant’,
as one might put it, of the ‘transcendental’ idea that all human cognitive activity takes place in the
arena of experience (cp. Thompson 2007, 87). This thought will hopefully emerge clearer in what
follows, especially in Chap. 3.
9
I do not mean to imply that the position of RPE in and of itself entails givenness – even putting
aside McDowell’s conceptualist version of this that I will consider below. Several of the arguments
for RPE, including some of those we charted above, have nothing to do with epistemology; there
are also non-epistemological arguments for believing in non-conceptual experiential content, such
as the idea that in experience we can perceive things at a level of grain that outstrips what we can
conceptualise (see e.g. Evans 1982; Peacocke 1992). Nevertheless, I think it is fair to say that RPE
is typically taken to involve the kind of thing ‘givenness’ is meant to be, and that proponents of this
view then rather take this to not in fact be problematic. What I have to say here will not depend on
taking a stand on these issues, though the broad clash between ARTL and RPE is in my view real
and hence significant.
like-minded ‘pragmatists’, have sought to understand perception in view of their

rejection of the given, which is as a mere causing of belief. Rorty takes over
Davidson’s view that ‘only a belief can justify another belief’; experience, on the
other hand, causes us to have beliefs but does not justify these (Davidson 1986).
Some supporters of this line have tried to make sense of how perceptual contact
with the world can be seen as justifying belief by building on the idea that these
causal processes may be reliable indicators of things out there (see e.g. Brandom
2002). Without taking a stand on these further issues, let us call this kind of theory
‘the causal view of perceptual experience’, or ‘the causal view’ for short.10
In my view, the causal view is deeply unsatisfactory, at least insofar as it aims to
tells us everything we want to know about perceptual experience. In particular, to
say experience causes our beliefs does no justice to the peculiar phenomenology of
such experience – arguably to it having any phenomenology at all, but at least not to
the peculiar kind of transparent character it possesses.11 As noted above, such phe-
nomenological considerations might by some be seen as irrelevant to so-called
‘metaphysical’ concerns about what experience most fundamentally is. Indeed, the
kind of physicalism that Rorty, Davidson and no doubt many other ARTL-
sympathisers typically cleave to – a physicalism that is not meant to enunciate com-
mitment to the nature of ‘absolute reality’ but does, nevertheless, fundamentally
shape how they think about how world, experience and belief relate – might be seen
as precisely an assumption that would legitimate such an idea. However, in light of
the merely broad, anti-reductive naturalism ARTL in fact espouses, neither this
physicalism nor what it might support by way of assessing the relevance of phenom-
enology would seem justified (cp. Tartaglia 2020, who similarly critiques Rorty’s
physicalism as inconsistent with his pluralism). Of course, gaining an overall best
fit of (philosophical) theory to data may involve discarding many apparent ‘manifest
truths’, but surely one should start by considering whether such a manifest truth as
I take transparency to be could be integrated into what one otherwise accepts –
something I am not aware of typical ARTLists having done. Perhaps this is because
they see it as inevitably involving the myth of the given, but as we shall see, I do not
believe this has to be the case.
McDowell’s rejection of the given (see his 1994, 2009), in retaining the idea of
distinctively perceptual representation, does seek to do justice to transparency. For
him, we can moreover talk about such representation without falling afoul of the
myth by acknowledging a distinction between passive perceptual ‘receptivity’, on
10
In terms of the standard taxonomy in philosophy of perception mentioned above the causal the-
ory is plausibly a form of belief-acquisiton theory (though I will not go into the details of this kind
of theory as such here). For discussion of different reactions to the myth of the given within what
has come to be called by some the ‘Pittsburgh school’ (Sellars, Brandom, McDowell), see
Maher (2012).
11
Again, there are different attitudes to the very idea of ‘experience’ among those who cleave to
this view. For Sellars sensations do and must have an experiential nature (cf. his 1956), but it is not
made clear how this can be so given they are ultimately meant to be just physical things (cf. the
problem of qualia above). Brandom renounces all talk of ‘experience’ as obscurantist. What nei-
ther do is consider let alone take seriously transparency.
the one hand, and ‘spontaneous’, discursive thought, on the other, in the manner of
Kant. The former is on this view not a separate component in grounding our objec-
tive thought from without the realm of such thought, but a distinctive modus of our
overall cognitive functioning in which conceptual capacities are actualised, just as
in the realm of spontaneity. There is thus no ‘outer boundary’ to the conceptual, i.e.
there is no non-conceptual experience or ‘reality in itself’ to come into cognitive
contact with in perception.
In this way, and insofar, McDowell seems to be working within ARTL’s central
tenets as I have outlined them. Some might see this as a slightly odd consequence,
insofar as McDowell is not generally seen as a pragmatist, at least of the Rorty/Price
kind, and defends a form of RPE. Nevertheless, anti-representationalism about
thought and language – ARTL – is one view, anti-representationalism about percep-
tual experience another, and though I do aim ultimately to offer a package that is
recognizably anti-representationalist at both levels, there is no logical connection
between the two views. In light of the need to do justice to transparency, we should
thus, as ARTLists, be open to the kind of view McDowell espouses. On the other
hand, McDowell’s main motivation for his view lies not in phenomenology or cog-
nitive science but in transcendental philosophy: the requirement to explain how
objective thought and knowledge are so much as possible. This is in some tension
with ARTL’s naturalism as I outlined this in Chap. 1. From the perspective of such
a naturalism, McDowell’s claim that we just have to see perceptual experience as
representational (and conceptual) to explain how thought and knowledge are pos-
sible can look problematic.12 In a somewhat similar vein, Rorty argues that, even if
one can consistently understand perception along the lines McDowell outlines, this
isn’t something pragmatists (i.e., for us, ARTLists) need to or should do (Rorty
1986). It remains the case however that insofar as Rorty’s own view of perceptual
experience is inadequate,13 as I have argued it is, we should be open for coherent
alternatives; and McDowell’s view, whatever its merits or demerits overall, would
seem to be among those.
McDowell has recently modified his view of perceptual content, in two indepen-
dent ways (McDowell 2009), both of which can be seen as attempts to fill out in
more detail the nature of perceptual content beyond what follows from the require-
ments of transcendental philosophy, though in a way that still seeks to respect these.
Firstly he has restricted the kinds of property that can be perceptually represented to
things like colours and shapes and perhaps certain basic substantial kinds (e.g. bird),
rather than just any property we might recognize through perceiving the world (such
as cardinal, to use his own example). Secondly, he no longer views the content of
12
This might be compounded by scepticism towards the kind of epistemological disjunctivism that
McDowell sees as tightly connected to this view – the view that there can be infallible grounds for
perceptual belief, even though perception is not a fool-proof capacity (cf. McDowell 2011).
13
On phenomenological and methodological grounds, though not necessarily epistemological.
I thus stress that I want to remain neutral here on whether perceptual experience does provide any
distinctive form of justification of our beliefs (beyond the coherentism-consistent fact that the
beliefs we form on its basis are things we generally agree on).
perceptual experience as propositional, that is, as ‘saying’ anything; it rather simply

presents the objects we experience as objects of certain kinds, exemplifying certain
properties and so on. He admits that this change is influenced by the views of
Charles Travis, a naïve realist or relationalist (see below) who has promoted
J. L. Austin’s idea that the senses are ‘silent’, and argued that the idea that they
involve claims, as enshrined in standard RPE, involves a deeply faulty picture both
of perceptual phenomenology and justification (cf. Travis 2004). McDowell remains
committed, however, to the idea that experiences have content insofar as these are
seen as Kantian intuitions, which involve, he tells us, a conceptual function that is
identical to that we find in the understanding (2009, 264). Moreover, he sees this
view as essential to avoiding the myth of the given, which he sees Travis’ relational-
ist view as committed to.
I will not comment on the first of these changes in McDowell’s position (for
discussion and critique, see Gersel et al. 2017). The second is an intriguing proposal
though one that is somewhat difficult to get a firm grip on. Understanding percep-
tual representation in terms of saying something about the how the world is or looks
would appear to give a fairly intuitive grip on the idea; but if perception just presents
the objects, where exactly is the representation? Saying that concepts are still
involved in perceptual experience though not such that they amount to a kind of
judgment might seem to imply the new view is that we perceive concepts – which
sounds (and surely is) absurd. On the other hand, if the conceptual capacities actu-
alised in perception function ‘identically’ to how they do in judgement, as McDowell
insists, how can they avoid constituting a proposition?
He offers some guidance here. For example:
Though they are not discursive, intuitions have content of a sort that embodies an immedi-
ate potential for explaining that same content in knowledgeable judgements. Intuitions
immediately reveal things to be the way they would be judged to be in those judgements.
(2009, 267)
Whilst this makes sense, the apparently teleological dependence of perceptual con-
tent on judgement might again raise naturalistic rankles. Perhaps in the context of a
broader discussion of perception a more naturalistic case for the view can be made.14
In my opinion, McDowell’s move away from a propositionalist view of perceptual
experience is an advance, insofar as it embraces an important aspect of relationalism
(see below).15 Though I also find the new view slightly obscure, it should be on the
14
For example Anders Nes (2019) defends McDowell’s new conception of perceptual content as a
way of understanding what attention delivers, thus synthesizing his conceptualism with ideas from
John Campbell’s discussions that have usually been seen as supporting relationalism.
15
In relation to this we can also note that are other thinkers who, though still subscribing to the idea
that perceptual experiences have content have distanced themselves from a propositional attitude
model for this. A prominent example is Tim Crane (2009a), who sees the contents of these as more
like pictures with a non-conceptual content that more or less accurately depicts the experiencer’s
surroundings (cf. Peacocke’s scenario content, Peacocke 1992). Crane lays a lot of emphasis on
illusions and hallucinations in motivating his view: given these, experiences cannot involve a rela-
tion to real things in the world, he thinks. Otherwise his view can also I believe, like McDowell’s,
table as a possible bed partner for ARTL (I will refer to it at relevant junctures in the
rest of this section and return to it in Sect. 4.3).
Moving on, we must now record that RPE, however much its stress on transpar-
ency is to be applauded, is not the only theory of perceptual experience that seeks to
respect this basic phenomenological datum. Having been largely abandoned for
much of the twentieth century, naïve realism has recently made a comeback, and it
too sees our experiences as being (directly) about the external world, but does not
understand this phenomenon in representational terms. Rather, perceptual experi-
ence involves subjects simply being presented with or aware of the material things
we ordinarily take to be out there and their qualities. We do of course say things like,
‘I see that the cup is white’, or ‘I hear that the river is gurgling’ in describing our
experience; but though these kinds of statement can be accepted, RPE does not fol-
low. We can easily make sense of the idea of perceptual experience as somehow or
at some level involving a propositional content insofar as we often form beliefs
about the very things we perceive; but that doesn’t need to mean that the experi-
ences themselves can or should be seen as belief-like states, making ‘claims’ assess-
able for correctness. According to naïve realists, this conceives perception as
involving a ‘generalist’ phenomenology, whereas in fact it seems the nature of expe-
rience is essentially particularist. To start with, the phenomenology of seeing the
white cup in front of me plausibly involves there actually being something there that
is white (a feature of experience Howard Robinson, 1994, calls ‘the phenomenal
principle’ and Mike Martin, 2002, ‘actuality’). Whereas this idea was often used to
support sense data theories, if applied on the assumption that what we see are mate-
rial objects it supports naïve realism over RPE insofar as the latter position sees
experience, implausibly on the current line, in terms of conditions that the world has
to satisfy, rather than just the particular objects and property instances themselves
(Martin op. cit.). Another aspect of this particularism is that perceptual phenome-
nology plausibly does not involve a categorization of objects (Travis 2004; Brewer
2011). We see the cup and eo ipso its whiteness, hear the river and eo ipso its gur-
gling, and so on; experience does not predicate something of these things. Peter
Strawson’s phenomenological characterisation of experience seems apt: ‘I see the
red light of the setting sun filtering through the black and thickly clustered branches
of the elms; I see the dappled deer grazing in groups on the vivid green grass’
(Strawson 1979). There is no mention of propositional content here; experiences do
not say anything.16
be seen as a move away from RPE in line with what (as we soon will see) fundamentally motivates
naïve realism/relationalism.
16
These phenomenological arguments for naïve realism and against RPE have been challenged:
Raleigh (2009) points out that the phenomenological ‘data’ I have cited are not clearly that, whilst
Giananti (2020) criticizes Brewer’s and Travis’ arguments against RPE on the basis of experi-
ences’ non-general phenomenal character, which they understand as leaving open to a large extent
the way things look. I should stress that even if one accepts that perception has a non-general or
non-predicative content – does not say of things that they are thus and so – it does not follow that
they do not look quite determinate ways, as most supporters of RPE think they do but some rela-
tionalists, like Travis and perhaps Brewer, do not. However, the former idea is enough, as I see
A similar kind of view, known as the relational view or relationalism, has been
characterized by John Campbell as follows:
On a Relational View, the phenomenal character of your experience, as you look around the
room, is constituted by the actual layout of the room itself: which particular objects are
there, their intrinsic properties, such as colour and shape, and how they are arranged in rela-
tion to one another and to you. On this Relational View, two ordinary observers standing in
roughly the same place, looking at the same scene, are bound to have experience with the
same phenomenal character. For the phenomenal character of the experiences is constituted
by the layout and characteristics of the very same external objects. (Campbell 2002a, b, 116)
Our experiences on this line are thus not to be understood in terms of representa-
tions or contents, but the very things themselves around us – that is, at least, as
experienced form a certain viewpoint or, more generally, perspective (cf. Campbell
and Cassam 2014, 27). There is, it appears, a lot that can be packed into this latter
idea (ibid., Chap. 3), including things like the sensory mode of presentation of the
objects, the effects of idiosyncratic background experience, the way our experience
varies with how we move about (Noë 2004; Campbell 2008) and so on. In this way,
relationalism can be seen as a kind of intentionalism about experience (cf. Knowles
2019b, 178, and for the idea of intentionalism, Crane 2009b): it involves a subject
being in an intentional relation to the world. It is just that this directedness does not
involve representational content, as on most standard forms of intentionalism.
Moreover, at the heart of relationalism is the idea that what we experience is, at least
to a large extent, simply given by what is there to be perceived, in mind-independent
reality. It is in this way an externalist position about phenomenal character ipso
facto.17 (In what follows I will treat the set of ideas outlined in this and the previous
paragraph as articulating a single, unitary kind of view that I will refer to as ‘rela-
tionalism’ abstracting away from differences across particular views.18).
Some might wonder how, if perception doesn’t ‘say’ anything, an experience of
a white cup can justify me believing there is a white cup in front of me. But in fact
relationalism can offer at least the start of an answer here. For example, my experi-
ence of the white cup before me might justify my corresponding belief insofar as the
very existence of the experience – which embraces the cup and its whiteness –
entails that the belief is true (cf. e.g. Kennedy 2010). The relationalist might also
add that perceptual justification is not in any case intuitively like justification by
testimony (Travis op. cit.). There are many further issues that might be addressed
here, for example concerning the possible role acquaintance plays in perceptual
justification (more on this below). But for present purposes it suffices that relation-
alists are not without resources to answer this first question.
things, to undermine RPE at least insofar as this is understood as the idea that perceptual experi-
ence essentially ‘makes claims’.
17
‘Ipso facto’ since some though not all versions of RPE are also externalist.
18
The view I will present is closest to that defended by Campbell. Some so-called ‘naïve realists’
seem more concerned to deny representationalist views of various kinds as confused than with
positing a substantive theory of perceptual experience in its place (Martin and Travis often seem to
fit this description) but I will not focus on this kind of view, or this understanding of the view, here.
An apparently larger challenge for relationalism is how to make sense of phe-

nomena like illusion and hallucination, where we seem to enjoy an experience of an
object and/or an object’s being a certain way, but where the object is not there in the
world or is not the way we perceive it to be. How can we understand such phenom-
ena, given we reject sense data, other than in terms of experience precisely ‘saying’
something or at least presenting things as being certain ways – that in the case of
illusion and hallucination are then not the case? There is no general way relational-
ists have responded to this problem, different thinkers rather offering different kinds
of account. Generally, they have distinguished the problem of hallucination and the
problem of illusion.19 As regards the former, the most common response is what is
known as (metaphysical) disjunctivism (see e.g. Martin 2004) which treats a veridi-
cal experience and a subjectively indistinguishable hallucinatory experience as in
fact fundamentally different kinds of state. In hallucination one cannot know by
introspection that one is not perceiving, but it doesn’t follow that the phenomenal
characters are type-identical.20 In relation to illusions – as when an oar looks bent in
water or the famous Müller-Lyer drawing – it has been claimed that we are, in such
experiences, just related to the object and its actual qualities, and falsely judge that
the object is other than it is (bent rather than straight, say) on the basis of the object’s
appearing similar to what bent things typically look like in the current context
(Brewer 2011). This raises the issue of what ‘appearings’ amount to, if they are not
to be understood in terms of representational states. Thus another line that relation-
alists have adopted is a dialectical one, asking followers of RPE to specify how
perceptual experiential representation is to be understood independently of cases
like illusion; appealing to it just to refute relationalism is seen as question-begging.
A stick in water often looks bent, though not exactly like a bent stick out of water.
Things don’t, for sure, always look exactly the way they are, but why should they
(cf. Austin 1962, 29)?21 Meanwhile, relationalism’s phenomenological virtues are
meant to leave it in place as our default view of experience. It deserves to be added
that insofar as RPE wants to avoid implying some kind of sceptical position –
whereby we can never know if we perceive mind-independent things or not – it can
also seem pushed in a more externalist direction that involves seeing external objects
as individuative of content and hence experience. This can arguably create similar
problems for it in accounting for illusions and hallucinations.
19
Fish (2009) is an exception, who goes metaphysically disjunctivist (see below) about both hal-
lucination and illusion.
20
Another example that is often seen as problematic for relationalism are switching cases, where a
qualitatively identical object is unnoticeably substituted for the one presently perceived. From the
perspective of the subject, nothing changes, but it seems relationalism is committed to saying the
subject has a different kind of experience after the switch as there is then a new particular. The
response to this from relationalists is similar to that given to hallucinations, namely, that there is a
change in phenomenal character even if it is one the subject cannot detect.
21
‘What is wrong, what is even faintly surprising, in the idea of stick’s being straight but looking
bent sometimes? Does anyone suppose that if something is straight, it jolly well has to look straight
at all times and in all circumstances?’
Campbell has employed a broader epistemological argument to argue for rela-

tionalism’s preferability over RPE. According to this, relationalism can, but RPE
cannot, explain the way in which conscious perceptual experience would seem intu-
itively necessary for us to gain a conception of objective reality – a thesis Campbell
calls ‘experientialism’ (cf. Campbell and Cassam 2014, 101 ff.). If experience
involves content – a representation of the world as being thus and so – then it seems
to take for granted the capacity for thinking objective thoughts that is meant to be
explained by experience (Campbell 2002b; Campbell and Cassam 2014, ch. 2). A
natural response to this is that RPE does not do this if the content is non-conceptual;
but then (retorts Campbell) we need to understand how such a content can be made
available to a thinker: what is it to entertain a ‘non-conceptual’ thought or see it as
supporting a conceptual one? In cognitive science, the notion of representational
content is typically understood in terms of some kind of causal or natural teleologi-
cal theory, but this content is something that unconscious or sub-personal states can
possess; assuming such a theory of content as part of RPE, it again fails to do justice
to experientialism (ibid., 43). In response to this last point, it could be argued that
an experience for RPE could be understood in terms of what has come to be termed
phenomenal intentionality, whereby its intrinsic phenomenal character is under-
stood as carrying representational significance (ibid., 113). But there is also reason
to be sceptical to this if talk of intrinsic phenomenal character, or qualia, is mystery
mongering – as we suggested above it can seem to be. Campbell himself has raised
the worry as follows: given transparency, we have no intuitive grasp on the notion
of qualia, only at best a theoretical one (for what we see when we see, say, some-
thing red is just an external, public quality); whereas for phenomenal intentionalists
we are precisely meant to know intuitively or pretheoretically what it is what we are
talking about with talk of qualia, such that we can appreciate how they explain rep-
resentation (cf. ibid., 39 ff.). By contrast, in positing a primitive awareness relation
(something like acquaintance) to objects in our environment, relationalism seems at
least in a position to respect experientialism.22
There is a voluminous and ever-expanding literature on all the above aspects of
the debate between RPE and relationalism. As maybe the above summary suggests,
in my estimation there is some reason for favouring relationalism over RPE as
things stand, given the terms of the debate between them. If one accepts this – or
indeed in any case – one might wonder whether relationalism can better serve
ARTL’s purposes – that is, as a theory of perceptual experience that it can ally itself
with instead of the causal view? After all, relationalism eschews a representational
22
One might of course wonder what this relation is, or more generally what justifies relationalism’s
poisiting of a primitive conscious awareness relation to the world in view of the problem of
explaining consciousness naturalistically (see e.g. Pautz 2012). When it comes to the latter, I would
see this as being at least potentially defensible if one adopts something like the enactivist frame-
work I outline in Sect. 3.3 below. But since (as we shall see) this is not really a relationalist view,
this reply is at best of marginal relevance. Whether it is otherwise defensible, and if it is whether
RPE might be able to make use of it too, are further issues one might explore.
view of experience, whilst in embracing transparency it has phenomenological

plausibility.
Unfortunately, however, things are not so straightforward. It is important for
most relationalists that awareness of things, though not representational, neverthe-
less involves a kind of epistemic relation to them, such that we can thereby make
sense of how it provides knowledge of the mind-independent world. This is, as
noted above, supposed to be something like Russell’s notion of acquaintance, only
applied to external objects and properties (cf. e.g. Campbell 2002a, 180; also
Raleigh 2019). However, one might reasonably wonder exactly how we should
understand this idea of acquaintance ‘putting us in touch with’ things, such that we
can justify our beliefs about them and pick up on the world’s mind-independent
nature (see Campbell and Cassam 2014, ch. 7). Indeed, it is hard to see how talk of
acquaintance with things – however exactly one understands it – can avoid falling
afoul of the ‘myth of the given’ any more than talk non-conceptual experiential
content can. It thus seems that relationalism is after all, though a form of ‘anti-
representationalism’ itself, not a kind that can, at all obviously at least, be wedded
with ARTL.23
Relationalists enamoured of Russellian acquaintance will of course think their
view is more plausible than any arguments against the given.24 Though worries
about acquaintance do not just concern its status as a kind of ‘given’, it is therefore
also important, for me at any rate, that there are independent problems for relation-
alism, beyond those standardly discussed in the literature. These can be appreciated
in light of its central claim that phenomenal character is determined, centrally at
least, by what is there in the mind-independent reality to be perceived. Though, as
we have seen, there is also a ‘third parameter’, the viewpoint, in determining this,
relationalism is committed to the idea that worldly objects and their character them-
selves play a large, indeed major role in this determination; and moreover, to the
idea that there is a principled divide between this contribution and the contribution
made by the viewpoint.
Campbell’s response to the phenomenon standardly referred to as ‘the illusion of
the visual world’ illustrates this aspect of relationalism. Empirical studies show that
contrary to what many people apparently believe, we do not have ‘before our
minds’, as it were, a detailed, multi-coloured image of, say, the room one is sitting
in (as seen from where one is). We have for example no colour vision in peripheral
vision at all, and there is even evidence that one can only ever really see one colour
at a time (Huang and Pashler 2007). Campbell asks whether we can ‘rescue the idea
that our ordinary experience is usually detailed and stable in the way it seems to be’
(Campbell and Cassam 2014, 72). His answer is as follows:
23
Recalling McDowell’s newer idea that perceptual experience though conceptually contentful is
not propositional, one might wonder at this juncture whether something like this view could be
employed as a way of retaining the phenomenological plausibility of relationalism while avoiding
the myth of the given. I think this is indeed possible, as we shall see in Chap. 4.
24
Similarlry, mutatis mutandis, for RPEists who believe in the given.
The only way in which we can sustain our common sense conception of visual experience
is to be externalist about visual experience […T]he external array of objects and colours
and so on is there, detailed and stable. If we think of the external objects and colours and so
on as literally constituting the phenomenal content of visual experience, then we can take
our ordinary experience at face value. (Ibid.)
I claim, however, that this reply shows relationalism to be implausible.

One reason one might have for thinking this would be that the idea of colours
(etc.) being primitive features of reality is simply outmoded given advances in phys-
ics since the scientific revolution (Campbell and Cassam 2014, 3; Knowles 2019b,
179). However, a relationalist could reply that, insofar as a reasonable naturalism
need not endorse physicalism, and insofar as the nature of colour is still a vexed
conceptual and philosophical issue – not simply one for science to pronounce on –
this consideration in fact carries little weight. Indeed, Campbell himself has argued
for what is often termed a primitivist view of colour, by which, though our concept
of, say, red is of a property that essentially involves a certain kind of appearance to
an observer, it can still be understood as mind-independent property of things
(Campbell 1993; cp. McDowell 1985 on values) – a view which also fits naturally
with relationalism insofar as this sees phenomenal character as constituted by exter-
nal objects and qualities. In my view, the best science we have of colour vision – or
our best understanding of this science – suggests that it would be wrong to under-
stand colour properties as part of the same mind-independent reality as the posits of
fundamental physics, but since this would require a deeper exploration of the field
than I can give here, I will put this first objection to one side (for the moment any-
way; the science I am referring to is the enactivist view of colour and colour vision,
which will be taken up in Sect. 3.3 below).25
There are however two further lines of argument that create problems for rela-
tionalism. As we have seen, relationalism draws a sharp distinction between the
contribution to phenomenal character made, on the one hand, by what is there in the
world anyway to become aware of, and, on the other, by whatever goes into the
viewpoint or perspective we take on these wordly things. However, such a distinc-
tion is (arguably at least) simply phenomenologically false. The thinking of Alva
Noë on visual consciousness (in turn inspired by the phenomenologists) helps to
bring out what is problematic here (see e.g. Noë 2004, 2008, 2012). Noë’s so-called
‘sensorimotor’ account stresses the interaction between movement, sensation and a
kind of implicit understanding of how these relate as central to an account of per-
ceptual experience. The cup you see in plain view in front of you (as we ordinarily
say) is not in fact fully in view: think of the side facing away from you or the bottom
of it resting on the table. You do see it, the cup, but this is in virtue of a kind of tacit
awareness of what you would see if you or your eyes or it moved in various specifi-
able ways. Moreover, this applies however circumscribed one attempts to make
25
Though so-called ‘colour primitivism’ is arguably especially suited to and is often defended by
supporters of relationalism, I think one can in fact adopt a view of colour as real without accepting
relationalism, at least insofar as it is a real part of our human world. Thus, Allen (2016) develops a
realist line that I believe is independent of relationalism.
one’s awareness. Perceiving the colour of the cup essentially involves understand-
ing how that varies in relation to the cup’s curvature and shadowing; likewise its
shape. Nor can we resort to restricted regions of uniform colour or form at the cup’s
surface: perception is, as Noë puts it, ‘virtual all the way in’ (2004, 193), in that
whatever we can be said to perceive always involves a background of movement,
sensation and tacit awareness of how these relate, even if this is only at the level of
the saccadic movements of the eyes. This does not imply that there can’t be better
and worse conditions under (or perspectives from) which to ascertain what some-
thing is, what shape and colour things have, and so on. Nevertheless, no experience
just reveals anything to us, independently of how we are disposed to act, to move
and, as it might be, manipulate the object in question; yet it seems that relationalism
needs this idea of experience literally revealing the qualitative world if it is to make
sense of its bipartite conception of phenomenal character – which in turn is integral
to its very structure.26
These ideas can also be related to the phenomenon of ‘the illusion of the visual
world’. We saw above the Campbell thinks that in the face of the empirical data only
relationalism can save the idea that our ordinary experience is not in fact an illusion.
Now whether the idea that we do have access to such a richly detailed ‘image’ is
really an illusion or a delusion or simply a piece of unreflective folklore, it surely
doesn’t – cannot – show that we are not presented in experience with a world of
objects and their qualities around us: that we are fundamentally locked into some
private world of sensation. Insofar, I agree with Campbell. However, this is not
because the world of objects and qualities is simply there to be experienced; again,
that falsifies the phenomenology (and can indeed be experimentally refuted). Rather,
as again Noë argues, we are aware of the world in the sense that these things are
accessible to us (Noë 2004): I can glimpse the corner of the piano if I strain my
neck, see what the time is if I look up at the clock, catch the latest news on the radio
if I direct my attention to it, and so on and so forth. This dynamic relationality is
moreover intrinsic to the nature of all experience. For the relationalist, as indeed for
supporters of RPE, the paradigm of perceptual consciousness is a kind of ‘snap-
shot’ of a stationary object or scene, given to a stationary perceiver. This does not
mean that more dynamic aspects of perception are not addressed by these view; for
example, as we have seen, Campbell thinks Noë’s view can be incorporated in his
‘viewpoint’ parameter. Nevertheless the snap-shot conception arguably does frame
a lot of the basic debate between of RPE and relationalism, and rejecting it at root
does, it seems to me, alter the dialectical terrain quite dramatically. If the idea of a
snap-short experience is a myth, then reflection on it cannot plausibly provide basis
for finding a foundational theory of experience.
26
Sometimes colour primitivism is associated in the literature with a thesis called ‘revelation’,
which has it that veridical experiences of colours are sufficient to reveal their full and true nature
to us. I should point out that the sense in which I am talking of ‘revealing’ in the text is somewhat
different, where it is a phenomenological point. Allen (2016) rejects revelation in the standard
sense as part of his realism about colour.
To reject the snap-shot model is not to reject transparency. On Noë’s view, trans-
parency is upheld insofar as what we perceive is an external, material world and not
something mental. But what underlies this is neither an intentional representational
state nor an acquaintance relation to mind-independent things and properties in the
world: it is rather an achievement of our organism – an enactment, as Noë would put
it, underpinned by natural capacities we have to bring meaning to a continual flux
of action and sensation.
That is the first problem for relationalism, which I have developed by way of an
introduction to Noë’s sensorimotor theory of perceptual experience. The second –
which though distinct is I think ultimately tightly related to this – concerns the fact
that it fails to do justice to the plain fact of variability in sensibilities across different
species. What is there for a sensing organism – what ‘shows up’, to use Noë’s
phrase – depends on that organism’s particular somatic, sensory and neural appa-
rata, not just on what is there in the physical world. This point is most often made in
relation to ‘secondary’ qualities like colours and smells, but it seems clear on reflec-
tion that it can apply as well to what are traditionally thought of as ‘primary’ quali-
ties like shape and motion, indeed, even to the kinds of objects there are in the world
for an organism (remember that the world of physics is itself completely unlike
anything we perceive). The perceptual world of a human being is obviously very
different from that of an ant but plausibly even from an animal much closer to us
like a chimpanzee or a dog.27 This is an old point, but nevertheless one that still
makes it difficult, I would maintain, to see the world we experience as objectively
there in the same way as – and in the same domain as – the posits of physics, which
is basically what relationalism supposes.
Now one might claim that this variability in perceptual sensibility does not entail
the mind- or organism-dependence of the perceptual world. To start with, it might
seem that, our sensory differences notwithstanding, there is nevertheless a large
overlap between what, say, humans and dogs perceive. One could also argue that
insofar as there are variations, different organisms are simply ‘experts’ or ‘authori-
ties’ in detecting what is there anyway, just in in relation to different domains: us (or
perhaps certain birds) in relation to colour, dogs in relation to high-pitched sounds
and smells, and so on (see e.g. Blackburn 1999, 240). However, these points do not
in my view undermine the need to relativise in giving an account what we perceive,
for they fail to take account of the inherently structured, interconnected and mean-
ingful character of experience. We can of course in a certain sense say that a person
and her dog see the same tree in front of them, insofar as we, humans, identity all
these things as parts of a unified framework. However, if we focus on the phenom-
enology of the situation – the lived, first-person perspective of the creatures in ques-
tion – it is not at all clear that we would want to uphold that judgement. In relation
to this, the tree for a person is quite a different thing from what it is for her dog –
assuming at least that whatever we think of as perceived has to be understood along
27
For my argumentative purposes it is in fact enough if there are some clear examples of relativity;
exactly how finely one individuates perceptual worlds is a further matter (see Sect. 3.3).
something like the lines of Noë’s sensorimotor theory. Relatedly, in our not detect-
ing, say, the sounds or the smells that a dog can, we are not plausibly failing to pick
up on something that is in principle there to be picked up on, in the same way as,
say, the colour of an object in the dark is there to be picked up on. Such features
simply do not ‘show up’ through our characteristic sensorimotor engagements; they
are not part of our perceptual world, and hence not part of what we might be answer-
able to insofar as we are concerned with matters pertaining to that world.28
Both these lines of thought point towards the idea that to properly understand
perceptual experience, we must understand it dynamically, holistically and in tighter
relation to the specific bodily, sensory and neural capacities of the perceiving organ-
ism. As noted above, the analytic philosophy literature typically focuses on atomic
experiences had by a Cartesian-like subject, such as seeing the cup on the table in
front of me, or ‘a view’, or the Müller-Lyer illusion. But such a focus plausibly
involves a wild abstraction from anything like the ongoing sensorimotor interac-
tions that characterize our real relationship with what we call the external world.
This is not to say that we cannot learn about underlying mechanisms from focusing
on particular perceptual judgements made in controlled settings. But as a way of
understanding what perceptual experience is it seems misguided.
In light of the foregoing, I would claim that neither RPE nor its current anti-
representationalist alternative, relationalism, are satisfactory as a philosophy of per-
ceptual experience, either on their own terms or as bedfellows for ARTL. Moreover,
though perhaps in need of further articulation, defence and even modification, Noë’s
sensorimotor theory (or something like it) would seem at the very least worth taking
seriously as a different and potentially more adequate account – something that, in
spite of some initial interest in Noë (see e.g. Campbell 2008; Martin 2008), has not
been done to any serious extent in the analytic literature. Again, the fine details of
Noë’s view, which we have not gone into, might need adjusting; nor need the view
we arrive at be hermetically sealed from all aspects or all versions of relationalism
or RPE. As we shall see in Sect. 4.3 it may under one understanding be compatible
with something like McDowell’s representationalist view (a version of RPE, I have
claimed); nor does it necessarily need to eschew the idea of some kind of non-
conceptual content in perceptual experience (see again Sect. 4.3). Perhaps some of
the more ‘deflationary’ moves that relationalists have made in relation to illusions,
hallucination and other ‘mismatch’ phenomena are also possible to take over into it,
though I also think there is a potential for giving somewhat different and/or more
principled explanations of these phenomena if one rejects the relationalist picture.29
28
One might again say in response that we, humans, are at least missing out on what it is like to be
a dog, or in a dogs’s world, in its totality. That is possibly true, but not relevant to the current objec-
tion to relationalism. I consider the point’s implications for my view more generally in Sect. 4.2.
29
Two examples: (1) Certain kinds of phenomena often referred to as ‘illusions’, such as when
things look different colours from what they really are in certain lighting conditions, or from cer-
tain perspectives will be reconceptualizable as ‘partial views’ of the things or properties in ques-
tion, a more adequate conception of which will be encompassable through further experiences, in
accord with the sensorimotor understanding aspect of perception. (2) Undetectable switching of
Whatever the inherent merits of the sensorimotor theory, in relation to my overall

project here the next thing that needs to be registered is that it also, unlike standard
versions of RPE and relationalism, seems to be one that is consistent with ARTL;
moreover, I believe the latter can make use of it in giving a deeper, subject natural-
istic understanding of our linguistic practices. Understanding exactly how will be
the guiding theme of the rest of this chapter and the next, but we can start with the
basic idea already canvassed above: that on the sensorimotor view of experience,
while experience concerns an external world of material objects and qualities, these
objects are nevertheless not independent of the mind – or, as I think we should rather
say, of the organism (to avoid a connotation of an inner space of purely mental hap-
penings that might be projected outward). What our experience is conversant about
is something like a world for us (a bat’s a world for bats, and so on). Though mate-
rial, this is not the reality that fundamental physics articulates – albeit we should
also acknowledge this, that is, the world in itself. Noë avows a similar such distinc-
tion as part of his view:
The perceptual world is not a world of effects produced in us in our minds by the actual
world. But the perceptual world is the world for us. We can say that the world for us is not
the physical world, in that it is not the world of items introduced and catalogued in physical
theory. But it is the natural world (and perhaps also the cultural world). […] One conse-
quence of this is that different animals inhabit different perceptual worlds, even though they
inhabit the same physical world. The sights, sounds, colours and so on that are available to
humans may be unavailable to some creatures, and likewise, there is much that we cannot
ourselves perceive. We lack the sensorimotor tuning and the understanding to encounter
these possibilities. (Noë 2004, 156)
Drawing this distinction, we can embrace transparency along with the role of both
dynamic interaction and species’ specific sensory and somatic apparata that rela-
tionalism cannot accommodate. We can also – in accord with ARTL’s attitude to
‘givenness’ – reject the idea that in experience we are acquainted with or cognitively
in contact with mind-independent reality. Nor should we think that we (that is,
humans at least) are acquainted with the world for us. The view is rather that experi-
ence and the world it subtends are not ultimately distinct quantities; the world we
are in through experience is in a certain sense one and the same thing as that experi-
ence itself.30 Of course, we don’t experience everything. The world for us goes
beyond our individual encounters with it; it is an intersubjective world. But that is,
I would argue, compatible with the constitutive role that experience plays in relation
to this world on the kind of view I am putting forward.
More needs to and will be said about these issues, and how they exactly fit in
with ARTL’s commitments. Notwithstanding, it seems to me that the view that
objects need make no difference to perceptual phenomenal character for the sensorimotor view
even though this character is determined by material objects insofar as what count as material
objects are those in the world for us, not the world in itself.
30
Having said that, a caveat can again be registered here in relation to McDowell’s view, which
might be understood as involving a kind of conceptualized acquaintance with – at least when com-
bined with the view I am presenting – things in the world for us. See again Chap. 4.
perceptual experience is (non-representationalistically) conversant about such an

organism-relative world is sufficiently unacknowledged as such and nevertheless
widespread – if not in the analytic philosophical literature on perceptual experience,
then at least in much that borders on its themes (see footnote 2) – to deserve a title.
I call it ‘phenomenological externalism’ (PE henceforth, cf. Knowles 2019b).
In spite of my arguments above, PE will no doubt strike many as flatfooted and
ad hoc, if not downright implausible, regardless of issues about how it relates to
ARTL and the problem of the given that I will discuss later. In the following section
I will try to give it further theoretical motivation by showing how it also plausibly
meshes with the research programme of enactivism in cognitive science. Even so,
before attempting that, it is important for me to outline how PE fits into the broad
problematic I left us with at the end in Chap. 2 – something which also, I hope, will
start to show how its ideas need not be quite so crass as they might initially appear.
This problematic was essentially whether and if so how ARTL might avoid the kind
of soggy pluralism that what Price calls ‘relaxed realism’ seems to threaten. As we
saw in relation to Price’s GE, one way of doing this involves the idea that whilst
certain discourses stand in covariational or causal relations to things in the environ-
ment, others do not but rather arise through expression of internal subjective reac-
tions to a world understood in purely ‘disenchanted’ terms (the ‘e-world’, as Price
calls it). I suggested we should be less than wholly content with this insofar as it
adopts a third-personal, sideways-on perspective on our linguistic practices and thus
potentially alienates us from them; in that sense, it is unclear whether Price’s GE
offers good explanations of what we are up to in going in for them. I also suggested
that they are not the only possible explanations a subject naturalist might offer in
view of more recent anti-representationalist theories in cognitive science, and also
that they are problematic if one adopts the kind of ‘secondary quality’ view of cau-
sation that Price does. Against this background, what I want to replace Price’s GE
with, at an overarching level, is precisely the idea that some discourses are conver-
sant about a human ‘world for us’ whilst others concern the ‘world in itself’. The
world for us corresponds to something like Sellars’ manifest image (Sellars 1963),
and consists of the familiar medium-sized dry goods that are coloured and move
around in time and space, make noises and so on, as well as people that act freely
and evaluate their thoughts and actions normatively and axiologically. It is in a word
a world of value, not ‘disenchanted’. It also includes the social and natural world, of
animals, plants and much else, that we experience and observe, but not as these
things are understood in science, or at least fundamental science. The world in itself
is something like Sellars’ scientific image (ibid.): the world as understood by funda-
mental mathematical physics. Now Sellars was concerned to gain a synoptic view
of reality without subordinating the one image to the other or eliminating either
entirely. My view, deriving from PE, is similar but lays less emphasis on the idea of
synopsis in the way Sellars and to an extent also Price does. There is the world for
us and there is the world in itself, and the discourses that apply to these have differ-
ent characteristics. However, this is not a distinction between terms that causally
track our environment – e-represent it – and those that do not (even taking account
of degrees). It is rather a distinction between, on the one hand, discourses which
3.3 Representationalism Versus Anti-Representationalism in Cognitive Science… 73
concern the world for us – those that presuppose and can only be understood in rela-
tion to our peculiar embodied modes of sensory interaction with the world – and
those which concern the world in itself, in that they involve taking an abstract and
third-personal or ‘sideways-on’ perspective on these processes of interaction (again,
more on this in the following section, as well as Chap. 4).
How can both these worlds be ‘real’, that is, how can the discourses about them
both be fully true in the same sense (without assuming, as we are not here, that
either reduces to the other)? Here ARTL’s rejection of the idea of ‘reality’, or ‘real-
ity as it is in itself’ is, I contend, uniquely well-placed to see how we can accept this.
If there is no such unitary ‘reality’, then both worlds can equally involve truths in
the fullest possible sense of the word. The idea of a world for us versus the world in
itself is, of course, one that Kant first bequeathed to the philosophical community.
But my understanding of it is quite different from his. For him, the world in itself,
the Ding an sich, is ultimate reality, though one we can never know or indeed per-
haps form any coherent conception of. This consequence of Kant’s system seems
bad enough in itself. But even if we accept it, since the Ding an sich is ultimate
reality, Kant’s world for us is in danger of becoming just an enormous collective
illusion, or delusion. PE is not Kantian and it needs ARTL to be plausible – at the
same time as ARTL can find substantiation in the distinction that PE involves.
I have so far drawn this distinction, between discourses about the world for us
and those about the world in itself, in very general terms, corresponding to the simi-
larly general way Price draws the distinction between e-representational discourses
which somehow track our environments and those that do not do this. Price envi-
sions scientific projects that would deepen this distinction in various ways, a central
one of which is representationalist cognitive science. What I want to do now, cor-
respondingly, is suggest how the ideas of PE and the view of experience they herald
from can be seen as featuring in a different kind of cognitive science, one that is
anti-representationalist in character. To appreciate all this, we need first some dis-
cussion of cognitive science itself.

in Cognitive Science, and Enactivism
In this section I want to work towards articulating a form of cognitive science that
can be seen as undergirding the view of experience I have just articulated, i.e. PE,
along with its mutually substantiating relationship with ARTL. This is enactivism,
understood in a particular way that combines elements of various different views
that have gone under that title recently (cf. Ward et al. 2017 for an overview). Before
that however a more general introduction to cognitive science is in order, not least
because this is another area where there has been a heated representationalism ver-
sus anti-representationalism debate in recent years (for an independent overview,
see e.g. Dolega et al. 2018).
Only three decades ago, cognitive science was still dominated if not defined by a
representationalist-cum-computationalist paradigm of explanation, something that
today goes under the label ‘classical cognitive science’ (CCS). CCS seeks to explain
intelligent behaviour by reference to a model of the brain as a computational system
that manipulates internal symbols that have meaning or content. These symbols
themselves are individuated and have causal power in virtue of their formal proper-
ties or syntax – something like their physical shape – but are possessed of semantic
content in virtue of causal relations with entities and properties in the environment
(and/or other kinds of natural property or relation, such as counterfactual covaria-
tion and biological function). This kind of view, deriving from Turing’s seminal
ideas about the very notion of a ‘computer’, is associated most famously with the
work of Jerry Fodor and his idea of an internal ‘language of thought’ (LOT), pos-
sessed of naturalistic content or a ‘psychosemantics’ (1975, 1987, 2008).31 CCS
grew to prominence in parallel with and in dialogue with classical AI, which seeks
to understand intelligence as complex internal symbol manipulation, realisable in a
variety of physical media (Newell 1980).
Heralded by Fodor as the ‘only game in town’, in recent years, many cognitive
scientists have moved away from CCS in various different ways, arguing that though
it has yielded some success in understanding restricted domains like low-level
vision and language understanding, it has failed to provide insight into many other
aspects of intelligence, or indeed what cognition most fundamentally is. Though
digital computers can certainly be used to model certain kinds of intelligent activity,
our overall cognitive functioning seems very unlike that of a digital computer; fur-
ther, CCS seems to offer little hope of or progress in understanding the subjective,
conscious dimension of mentality, whereas for many this is precisely what makes
the mind a distinctive category. In the late 1980s and early 1990s many were
attracted to connectionist theories as a way of integrating computationalism with an
allegedly more plausible picture of brain processes and the flexibility of cognition
(see e.g. Clark 1989). This development can be seen as continued today in the pre-
dictive processing paradigm, which seeks to provide a unified framework for per-
ception and action by seeing the brain as a Bayesian probability network seeking to
reduce discrepancies between incoming signals and its prior expectations about the
world (see e.g. Hohwy 2013; Clark 2013; Metzinger and Wiese 2017; see also Sect.
4.3). Concurrently, and largely independently, we have seen the rise of so-called
cognitive neuroscience, which seeks to understand cognitive function in relation to
31
I should stress that what I have sketched above is the most typical version of CCS. One possible
divergence from this schema is the idea that content is determined, not by relations to external
items, but by the functional or conceptual role of symbols in LOT (Block 1986). But this is only a
matter of determination: on this kind of view, semantic properties are still substantive, hence the
view cleaves to Price’s Representationalism, which I take it the best known versions of CCS
(including Fodor’s) also do. A more radical divergence is to deny that LOT has semantic proper-
ties, at least intrinsically (Stich 1983; Egan 1999). I shall not go into these views here except to
mention that this might also be seen as something Chomsky would be sympathetic to in relation to
understanding (natural) language (cf. the discussion of this view as a possible basis for a theory of
meaning for ARTLists in Chap. 1).
identifiable neural structures and processes (see e.g. Bickle 2019). However, though
these developments do involve significant shifts away from CCS, theories in all
three paradigms typically retain a fundamentally representationalist understanding
of cognition, as well as the idea that ‘the mind’ is (at least in all essential respects)
located within the cranium (i.e. is or is constituted by the brain).
I stress ‘typically’ since some of these ideas – most notably those behind the
predictive processing paradigm – have also been linked to a more decisive break
with CCS that has emerged over the last two decades or so. This involves the idea
that cognitive processing itself – and not just its representational content – has to be
understood as inextricably linked to its contextual embedding: in relation to the
body and the environment of the thinker, as well as what is in the head (Clark and
Chalmers 1998). There is, on this view, no reason to restrict what might reasonably
be regarded as the machinery of cognition to intracranial matter, rather than allow-
ing it also to embrace, say, the pencil and paper most people have to use to do com-
plicated arithmetic. It has also been claimed that to understand cognition we must
see it as intricately interwoven with the ongoing bodily activities of the organism,
rather than as a purely inner processing that mediates between input and output (see
e.g. Hurley 1998). This so-called ‘4E’ (‘embodied, embedded, extended, enacted’)
movement in cognitive science has often been accompanied by the employment of
dynamic systems theory (DST) as a mathematical tool of explanation instead of
computationalist models. Dynamicist approaches seek to understand cognition by
viewing the organism, its brain, and its environment as a holistic, non-linear, self-
organizing system (a linear one being more like a classical computer whose overall
function can be understood and predicted on the basis of the operation of its parts).
Observed behaviour is not explained by internal representational states on this view,
but by way of differential equations, defined over various parameters or variables,
that specify how the system as a whole moves in and out of states of equilibrium
(van Gelder 1995; Chemero 2009).
An important early influence on 4E cognitive science (‘4ECS’) was situated
robotics (Brooks 1991), a research programme that seeks to build devices capable
of intelligent behaviour of rudimentary kinds without engaging in complex internal
symbol manipulation. Behind this movement lies the idea that intelligence is funda-
mentally a matter of becoming and remaining bodily attuned to one’s environment
rather internally representing it – an idea that is also present in James Gibson’s
(1979) theory of perception and Hubert Dreyfus’ Heidegger- and Merleau-Ponty-
inspired theory of our basic interactions with the world (see e.g. Dreyfus and
Wrathall 2014). For Gibson, visual perception is not a matter of building up an
internal picture of the world from impoverished input, but through experience pick-
ing up on information available in the ambient array of light that is relevant to our
practical goals. We perceive affordances (a chair’s sit-upon-ability, a knife’s capac-
ity to cut etc.) and respond accordingly (in appropriate circumstances); our funda-
mental modus operandi is that of resonating with our environment in smooth
sensorimotor cycles, not representing it. For (Dreyfus’) Heidegger and Merleau-
Ponty this is also our most fundamental way of ‘being in the world’. Many of the
writings of the classical phenomenologists, perhaps especially those of
Merleau-Ponty, can be seen as early contributions to 4ECS, where careful first per-
sonal description of the structures of lived experience serve to illuminate empirical
case studies of various kinds. Though understanding exactly how more purely phe-
nomenological philosophy bears on cognitive science is a complex and ongoing
task (see e.g. Gallagher 1997; Reynolds 2020), the idea that it can and should play
a role in constraining, inspiring and perhaps even constituting scientific theories of
the mind, without a requirement of being reductively explained, is one that many if
not most supporters of 4ECS cleave to.
That these developments compromise CCS is something all agree on, but whereas
some want to retain the idea that some identifiable parts of an extended, embodied
system can and should still be seen as representing an outside world (e.g. Clark
1997, 2013; Wheeler 2005), others want to go a step further and do without the idea
of representations completely – at least as discrete functional components, and/or as
a fundamental explanatory concept in cognitive science. Enactivism is the most
prominent theory today within this latter, anti-representationalist camp (or is per-
haps identical with it, depending on exactly how one understands ‘enactivism’); it
builds on most if not all of the strands of 4ECS mentioned above, but adds more too.
Our focus will very shortly turn to enactivism, but as with the representational-
ism versus anti-representationalism debate about perceptual experience, it can first
be illuminating to assess more generally how ARTL might relate or has been seen
as relating to various different ideas in cognitive science. Understood in a suffi-
ciently idealised way – as applying to the mind in its entirety, in something like the
way perhaps suggested by Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works (Pinker 1995) –
CCS would seem to bring (a naturalistic form of) metaphysical realism and
Representationalism in its wake: thought mirrors, represents, at certain levels at
least, a mind-independent reality, while also being part of that very reality. Much
contemporary discussion in the philosophy of thought and language has also come
to assume something like a language of thought model for framing the kinds of
theories about naturalistic content and reference that anti-metaphysical realists like
Price and Putnam have criticized. Thus, if anything like a vindication of CCS of this
idealised form (or in either of these forms) were on the horizon, ARTL would seem
to be on collision course with science in a way that would conflict with its natural-
istic aspirations. Fortunately for it (and our project here), then, this vindication is
nowhere in sight. Indeed, even Fodor himself came to gravely doubt the adequacy
of CCS’s explanatory resources to give a full theory of mind, stressing the differ-
ences between encapsulated capacities like vision and language processing and full-
blown intelligent behaviour (Fodor 1983, 2001 – the latter ironically entitled The
Mind Doesn’t Work That Way). A further reason to doubt the feasibility of the ide-
alised form of CCS lies in what Dan Hutto and Eric Myin have recently dubbed ‘the
hard problem of content’ (Hutto and Myin 2013). If CCS is going to yield MR via
Representationalism the latter will plausibly have to be understood in relation to a
privileged set of underlying naturalistic properties. As Fodor once put it ‘if about-
ness is real, it must be really something else’ (Fodor 1987, 97). But after decades of
attempts of various kinds the reductive project of naturalising intentional content
seems to have stagnated (cf. Hutto and Myin 2013). From the perspective of ARTL
of course there are also more principled reasons why it must so stagnate, linked to
the arguments against Representationalism mentioned in Chap. 1. But the current
point about the naturalised content movement is that simply as a (quasi-)empirical
research programme, which is presumably how it has seen itself, it seems to be
going nowhere.
That said, CCS is not necessarily defunct if conceived of in a less idealised man-
ner. It can seem reasonable to understand the notion of representation (and content)
at play in CCS as being of a more technical, instrumental or, as it might be, purely
‘sub-personal’ variety, definable in terms of mechanisms that underlie our thought
processes, but without broaching claims about how these relate to more fundamen-
tal questions about the conscious mind and its relation to reality. This was pretty
much how Rorty viewed the language of thought hypothesis; that is, not as reinstat-
ing the classical notion of representation ad empirical means, but merely appropri-
ating the term for scientific explanatory purposes (Rorty 1979, ch. 5). In what can
seem like a similar vein, Tyler Burge (2010) argues that much talk of representation
in cognitive science concerns only what he calls a ‘deflationary’ notion: internal
states that stand (or are said to have ‘content’ by standing) in some kind of causal-
covariance, informational, and/or natural teleological relation to objects and proper-
ties in the world. Burge argues that admitting this kind of state or content is a far cry
from acknowledging that properly intentional, person/organism level states can be
understood in terms of them – that they can construct these latter phenomena, or
even that they are of the right kind of state to do so. Burge argues that they are not,
but what I want to register here is first and foremost just that it is far from clear that
they are. Now Burge also goes on to aver that there is a distinct notion of representa-
tion in cognitive science, in particular, in the science of perception, that is not defla-
tionary and that does amount to a person/organism level state – one that moreover
can explain, as he puts it, ‘the origins of objectivity’ in our thought.. This suggestion
points to a more foundational role for representational cognitive science (broadly
speaking, CCS), of a kind that looks incompatible with ARTL’s commitments.
Having said that, Burge’s claims about representation and the origins of objective
thought are by no means universally accepted; in particular, it is not clear that per-
ception science does operate with the non-deflationary notion of representation
Burge claims it does.32
But even if we assume CCS is restricted to a deflationary conception of represen-
tation, it doesn’t follow that it is irrelevant to ARTL, as Rorty in effect claims. As we
have seen in our discussion of GE and e-representation in Chap. 2, for Price it is
precisely something like this notion that we can appeal to in order to explain and
demarcate an important functional divide in our various discourses – without it
reconstructing or even partially reconstructing a full notion of intentional content.
32
Thus, if something like a structure-preserving or isomorphic mapping is what is fundamentally
at play in vision science, à là Gallistel (1990), then it is not at all clear that it too does not use what
Burge would call a deflationary notion (see also below for further discussion of this idea of
representation).
Carl Sachs (2018) has recently elaborated on this suggestion in relation to

Sellars’ idea of picturing, which he claims – as Price himself does (2017) – can be
fruitfully understood in terms of the notion of e-representation (see Chap. 2). Sachs
sees this as substantiated in a particular notion of representation from contemporary
cognitive neuroscience: one ‘of iconic representations as second-order resemblance
relations between neurophysiological structures and features of the environment’
(Sachs 2018, 674). This general idea of structural isomorphism between representa-
tional vehicle and environmental feature as naturalistically grounding the represen-
tational relation is distinct from earlier ones that see this as based on causation,
covariation and/or teleological function (at least alone), and is becoming increas-
ingly popular (see e.g. Shea 2018; Gładziejewski 2016). However, it remains intui-
tively a deflationary notion in Burge’s sense; from the perspective of ARTL, it must
in any case do so, fitting in with the latter in something like the way Price envisages
(for an argument that this understanding of it is warranted, which relates the point
to a pragmatic understanding of content along Brandom’s lines, see Williams 2018a).
Some form of CCS might, then, provide a substantiation of ARTL, most obvi-
ously in the form of GE. However, I have also argued GE is not the only form of
ARTL one could adopt, nor obviously the best. My contention, further, is that if we
look to anti-representationalist cognitive science, we can in fact find grounds for a
different kind of substantiation of ARTL than Price’s GE, one that is moreover bet-
ter than this at least insofar as it does not neglect the first-personal aspect of our
discourses. Rather than dividing things up in relation to what e-represents and what
doesn’t, this kind of cognitive science allows us, I will be arguing, to divide our
vocabularies along the fault line of what concerns the world for us and what con-
cerns the world in itself, in accord with what was sketched in the previous sec-
tion on PE.
We have already presented the main ideas behind anti-representationalist cogni-
tive science. There are many in-depth discussions in the contemporary literature of
what this amounts to (see e.g. Chemero 2009; Hutto and Myin 2013, 2017; Shapiro
2019; Thompson 2007), but what I want to focus on here is (a certain understanding
of) enactivism. As noted above, enactivism is probably the dominant paradigm
within the anti-representationalist cognitive science camp today, though in being a
broad movement, it embraces a somewhat variegated set of ideas and precepts.
Though there will be qualifications and caveats to record along the way, the view
that I wish to promote is firmly anchored in the text in which ‘enactivism’ (or ‘the
enactive approach’) was first introduced, namely, Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson
and Eleanor Rosch’s The Embodied Mind, from 1991, as well as the updated and
more systematic treatment of these ideas in Thompson’s Mind in Life (op. cit.).33 As
the latter title suggests, a central idea behind at least this kind of enactivism is that
mind and cognition are continuous with, perhaps even essentially the same phenom-
enon, as life. The biological theory of autopoiesis (Maturana and Varela 1980) has
33
For the record, I do not here consider the relationship between enactivism and Buddhism, which
figures centrally in Varela et al. but not Thompson’s book.
been a central plank in this position and it is thus often termed autopoietic enactiv-
ism. As such, it is taken to contrast with other kinds of enactivism: Noë’s (and oth-
ers’) sensorimotor enactivism (O’Regan and Noë 2001, Noë 2004), and more
recently the radical enactivism of Hutto and Myin (2013, 2017) (the terminology is
due to Ward et al. 2017).
Noë’s understanding of perception, which we have already canvassed, is to a
large extent intended to be continuous with the ideas of autopoietic enactivism, and
I will in any case understand it as such here.34 The ideas of Hutto and Myin, on the
other hand, deliberately diverge from autopoietic enactivism (and Noë’s) in several
respects, the two most important of which are as follows. Firstly, they reject all
content-involving explanations of what they call ‘basic cognition’. What we should
preserve from Varela et al., they argue, is the idea that cognition emerges from
dynamic, self-organizing activities that spread beyond the boundaries of the organ-
ism; what we must turn our back on is their continued talk of meaning or content –
though, importantly, only when it comes to basic cognition, for we should by
contrast accept content-involving explanations within the realm of the kind of lin-
guistically mediated cognition characteristic of mature human beings (i.e. that of
‘non-basic’ cognition). The second divergence is that they distance themselves
(albeit do not explicitly reject) the autopoietic enactivists’ idealistic leanings, that is,
anything along the lines that the world of experience has to be understood relative
to an organism’s possibilities for interaction with it (cf. e.g. Hutto and Myin 2013,
5). Seemingly relatedly, their conception of cognition also involves an assumption
that it involves relations to some kind of mind- or brain-external reality: we have to
posit non-contentful but nevertheless intentional – ‘ur-intentional’ – relations
between the brain and things in the mind-independent environment. As far as I can
see, these two divergences are independent of one another. In what follows I will
present a version of enactivism that strongly upholds the autopoietic enactivist line
in relation to the question of whether cognition relates us to an organism-relative
world of experience; I will also try to make this idea as clear and plausible as pos-
sible (a task continued in the next chapter). The ideas behind Hutto and Myin’s first
divergence, though not something I directly subscribe to, are nevertheless relevant
I believe to understanding how enactivism’s ideas relate to ARTL. In what follows
I will in any case mean by ‘enactivism’ autopoietic enactivism except in respect of
any qualifications that are explicitly made (I will return to Hutto and Myin in
Chap. 4).
A compact statement of enactivism’s foundational idea is the following:
[C]ognition is not the representation of a pregiven world by a pregiven mind but is rather
the enactment of the world and a mind on the basis of a history of the variety of actions that
a being in the world performs. (Varela et al. 1991, 9).
Exactly how more precisely to characterize enactivism is a complex and ongoing

task, one that many different authors have contributed to and continue to do so.
34
Kevin O’Regan’s version of the sensorimotor theory of perception has gone in a somewhat dif-
ferent direction (see e.g. O’Regan 2011).
Cutting through much detail, I think one can instructively understand it as embrac-
ing, on the one hand, the main ideas of the 4ECS movement – a view of cognizers
as emergent, self-organizing systems spanning brain, body and world, and suscep-
tible to illumination through dynamicist models – together, on the other, with a
particular emphasis on cognition as the creation and maintenance of a living sys-
tem’s identity and autonomy – something in turn that is linked to accepting a central
role for phenomenological, first-personal methods in cognitive science. Enactivism
is thus not just an empirical research programme but also a foundational theory of
what cognition is and of how it can be understood and studied as a natural phenom-
enon; one that illuminates and directs empirical research, attempting to make it
unmysterious that we and other higher animals can be subjects with a conscious
perspective on the world, without reducing such a perspective to something physi-
cal. Understanding the nervous system is certainly an important part of this task, but
to solve the mysteries of the mind, one must also understand this and relevant
empirical research generally against the backdrop of a living system aiming to sur-
vive – to maintain self-identity – in a hostile world.
The idea of autonomy, following from that of identity, is that cognitive systems
are not mechanical input-output devices, however elaborately overlaid and con-
structed, but irreducibly active, seeking to maintain their own identity and existence
over time. Though Kant is an important inspiration for this idea, the autonomy in
question here is not that of a transcendental, personalised subject. In us and other
higher animals it is grounded in the activity of the nervous system, which is itself
inherently dynamic, endogenously generating patterns of activity that are perturbed
but not determined by physical stimulation it receives from the external environ-
ment. This nervous system is in turn part of a body, and thereby relates to the envi-
ronment through continual sensorimotor interaction, in ways that are essential to
understanding its proper functioning.35
The theory of autopoiesis (Maturana and Verela 1980) is an attempt to under-
stand how even very simple, physically transparent life forms, such as a eukaryotic
cell, might instantiate a basic autonomous agent – thereby providing a kind of
bridge between physical processes and the emergence of cognition (without reduc-
ing the latter to physics). A eukaryotic cell has a boundary that is produced and
maintained from an internal network of processes within the system that also re-
generate these processes and its components. This boundary is semipermeable in
that commerce with the environment is thermodynamically open but operationally
closed in relation to the organism’s own activity: interactions with the environment
provide the occasion for but do not determine the operations the organism carries
out. Along with the process of establishing and maintaining (self-)identity that this
structure affords, the system must thus interact with what is not part of itself; for
example, sucrose molecules to provide nourishment. The very idea of a living
35
In stressing the idea of the brain or nervous system as active, enactivism is nevertheless in sym-
pathy with ideas from the above-mentioned predictive processing paradigm, usually understood as
a form of representationlism. Connections between the ideas of enactivism and this paradigm are
taken up in Sect. 4.3.
organism thus involves a notion of something exterior whose significance is never-

theless relative to the organism, and thus emerges alongside the establishment of the
organism’s own interiority. Insofar, we can make sense of the idea of a perspective
on the world – a rudimentary form of consciousness – at the same time as this is a
world other than that described by physics. It is rather, precisely, a world of features
that are significant to the system, given its peculiar sensory-somatic nature; indeed,
they are the features they are in virtue of this very significance. They can be related
to properties of the physics of the underlying system – we can allow perhaps that
they supervene on them – but they do not reduce to them, rather, the system emerges
holistically and modulates the parts that constitute it.36
A cognitive agent in a fuller sense of the term is also an autonomous system
albeit one of much greater complexity, at the very least. Here sensorimotor activity
becomes important; it is through sensorimotor interactions with the environment
that an ant, a dog or human being establishes itself as subject related to a world of
significance for it. Whether such sensorimotor activity is ultimately to be seen as
simply a form of autopoietic structure, albeit highly complex, or involves a qualita-
tively different kind of structure is a complex issue that enactivists are somewhat
divided on. For Esequiel Di Paulo, autopoietic identity, in being based purely on
metabolism, does not suffice for cognition proper, which requires in addition dispo-
sitions to regulate basic metabolic processes, amounting to what he calls adaptiv-
ity – something he argues is necessary and sufficient for a perspective on a world (Di
Paolo 2005; cp. Hutto and Myin 2013, 35). It has also been argued that intersubjec-
tive interaction is also essential to understanding at least human subjectivity in the
full sense (see e.g. De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007). There are certainly many issues
to address here, but all enactivists in the tradition of Varela et al. are united in the
belief that autonomy and maintenance of identity is essential to cognitive activity,
that this is grounded in the phenomenon of life itself, and that it can be understood
in system-theoretic terms.
There is thus much more one could say about enactivism, both in terms of explor-
ing the ideas above, and in terms of what kinds of empirical programmes they sup-
port or suggest. One might, of course, also be generally sceptical and favour more
representationalist or even classical approaches. Here I am assuming that enactiv-
ism, at least of some stripe or other, is a movement that commands at least some
ground-level respect in the cognitive science community as a whole and thus is
reasonable to take seriously in consideration of how it relates to other, wider philo-
sophical ideas. Given this background, what I am most concerned with is how it
relates to the central ideas of PE (phenomenological externalism), and thereby, ulti-
mately, ARTL. We saw in Sect. 3.2 how Noë’s theory of experience naturally leads
36
Traditional metaphysical issues concerning how we should understand emergence might obvi-
ously be considered here. My basic take on these is roughly that we should take emergence seri-
ously – in a way many metaphysicians of mind don’t – insofar as one takes enactivism seriously,
since it is part and parcel of that paradigm. But nor would I, nor I think do I need to, exclude the
possibility of substantive metaphysical debates about these issues from an ARTL perspective (for
more on metaphysics, see Chap. 7).
to a view of experience as correlative with an organism-dependent world, and we

have now seen that enactivism more generally involves a similar thought. But I also
suggested that enactivism can be seen as giving something like a more naturalistic
vindication this idea, and it can be instructive to understand what this involves.
Much of the earlier work done under the banner of enactivism focused on the
science of colour perception. The idea that the colours we see are dependent on the
particular sensory apparatus we possess is an old one, and already discussed above
in Sect 3.2. Enactivists in the Varela et al. tradition go a step further, using data and
ideas from ecological psychology to argue that what we see is a species relative
world, insofar as identifying colour is integral to identifying the very surfaces and
thereby objects we perceive as ‘out there’ (see Varela et al. 1991, 157–171, also
Thompson 1995; Varela and Thompson 1990). Colour and colour vision must also
be understood in relation to their ecological role as providing useful information or
serving useful functions, often in ways involving other species – bees’ ability to
perceive colour and flowers being coloured is not mere happenstance, for example –
and hence as having evolved as parts of whole (multiple) organism-environment
systems.
It is partly against the background of such studies that Varela et al. aver that cog-
nitive science in general must question ‘that the world is independent of the knower’
(op cit., 139). They write that ‘the inevitable conclusion [of the considerations they
have adduced] is that knower and known, mind and world, stand in relation to each
other through mutual specification or dependent co-origination’ (150); and that we
must steer ‘a middle path between the Scylla of cognition as the recovery of a pre-
given outer world (realism) and the Charybdis of cognition as the projection of a
pregiven inner world (idealism)’ (172).
This work on colour vision is certainly broadly conducive to the central ideas of
PE. At the same time one might feel that in concerning only vision and (a particular
interpretation of) vision science its significance in vindicating PE is somewhat lim-
ited. What we rather need to understand is how the idea of a ‘world for us’ can be
grounded in central theoretical concepts and commitments of enactivism in a more
principled way.
There are it seems to me three central and co-dependent ideas from enactivism
that can be made use of here. The first is closely related to the theory of autopoiesis:
life generally is not a mere mechanical phenomenon, but is rather, as attested by the
very observable facts we can ascertain about it, a striving to survive that entails
meaningful encounters with the world. In a word, the world can never be a neutral
domain for a biological organism. The second is that such living systems must be
understood in terms of dynamic coupling with their surroundings: an organism and
its environment are internally related, in that the entire system they are part of can-
not be decomposed into several self-standing entities. This applies at several differ-
ent levels, including isolable activities, like playing chess or hunting with
conspecifics, of learning over time, but also at the level of the whole species and
their biological niche. This is in line with ideas within recent approaches to evolu-
tion such as evolutionary-devolopmental biology (Roberts 2008) and especially
developmental systems theory (Levins and Lewontin 1985), according to which we
cannot meaningfully decompose a natural system into a pregiven organism, or spe-

cies, on the one hand, and its environment, on the other, in the way traditional
Darwinian explanations do (cf. Varela et al. 1991, ch. 9; Thompson 2007, ch. 7).
Finally, there is the phenomenological idea of the first-personal, experiential per-
spective as something both irreducible, and essential to understanding living,
minded beings. Without a phenomenological perspective, biological beings in
dynamic coupling with their environment, while no doubt possible to register as
features of objective nature, could only ever appear arbitrary or bizarre. With it, they
can be appreciated as instantiating an organism consciously related to a reality sub-
tended by its own activities – an umwelt, to use von Uexküll’s term, something that
was precisely meant to be a phenomenal world in something like Kant’s sense (cf.
Feiton 2020). At the same time, we come to appreciate this phenomenological first-
personal perspective that we ‘breath into’ these encounters is itself inextricably
bound up with being a striving living being dynamically coupled with its environ-
ment. We can recognize our own subjectivity as having a natural ground, at the same
time as that natural ground has to be seen as imbued with subjectivity to make any
sense. It is this interconnected ‘core’ of ideas that I believe gives us our best under-
standing of enactivism as a naturalistic theory of consciousness. It is arguably
summed up in Hans Jonas’ dictum that ‘life can only be known by life’ (Jonas 1966,
91; cf. Thompson 2018, 163).
It also seems clear to me that these ideas, if taken seriously and their implications
followed through, do provide something like a vindication of the idea of the organ-
ism dependent worlds that PE involves. There is still more philosophical work to be
done in understanding exactly how this thought relates to ARTL, but before turning
to that (in the next chapter), as a way of underlining the conclusion just reached
I want to discuss a recent paper by Edward Baggs and Anthony Chemero (2020)
concerning the question of umwelts and mind-dependence in 4ECS. As I have
already mentioned (in discussing Hutto & Myin’s radical enactivism), the idea that
anti-representationalist cognitive science or even enactivism itself ushers in any
compromise with realism is not universally accepted, and the paper I have chosen to
focus on develops a view of this kind (Chemero has also written on this on previous
occasions, oscillating somewhat on the issue, as we shall see in Sect. 4.3). Although
Baggs & Chemero provide a very useful analysis, the motivation for their resistance
is one, I believe, that pales when the ideas they oppose are understood in an appro-
priate context (something that, again, requires understanding them in relation to
ARTL). At the same time, it is also important to see that, even on its own terms, their
line is problematic.
Baggs & Chemero’s article involves a comparison of the attitudes of ecological
psychologists (the followers of Gibson), who have traditionally sought to uphold a
kind of objectivist view of the objects of perception, with those of enactivists, and
an attempt at reconciliation. For Gibson, it was important that affordances are there
in the environment whether anyone or anything perceives them or not. At the same,
he also problematized a fully objectivist view of perceptual reality:
An important fact about the affordances of the environment is that they are in a sense objec-
tive, real, and physical, unlike values and meanings, which are often supposed to be subjec-
tive, phenomenal, and mental. But, actually, an affordance is neither an objective property
nor a subjective property; or it is both if you like. An affordance cuts across the dichotomy
of subjective-objective and helps us to understand its inadequacy. It is equally a fact of the
environment and a fact of behavior. It is both physical and psychical, yet neither. An affor-
dance points both ways, to the environment and to the observer. (1979, 129, cited by Baggs
and Chemero 2021, S2177).
This perhaps rather cryptic passage notwithstanding, Gibson’s followers have,

Baggs & Chemero tell us, generally wanted to resist any compromise with an objec-
tivist view. Enactivists have on the other hand returned the favour and distanced
themselves from Gibsoneans, who, they claim:
treat perception in largely optical (albeit ecological) terms and so attempt to build up the
theory of perception almost entirely from the environment. Our approach, however,
proceeds by specifying the sensorimotor patterns that enable action to be perceptually
guided, and so we build up the theory of perception from the structural coupling of the
animal. (Varela et al. 1991, 204, cited by Baggs and Chemero 2021, S2176)
In view of Gibson’s scepticism towards the ‘subjective-objective’ divide, one might

wonder whether this implied contrast can be as large as either side suggests. In any
case, there is evidently some scope for clarification here, which Baggs and Chemero
duly attempt to provide.
What they argue is that this disagreement between enactivism and ecological
psychology, while a sociological feature of the respective research environments, is
not rationally ineluctable. To effect a rapprochement, they urge ecological psychol-
ogists to accept a three-way distinction between what they call the purely physical
surroundings of the organism or species, the habitat of the species, and the umwelt
of the individual organism. Baggs and Chemero claim that the latter two notions
have been merged by Gibsoneans under the label ‘environment’, but that they need
to be carefully distinguished, though also without assimilating either to the physical
surroundings. Their suggestion is that we understand the habitat as what is available
in the world to be experienced by an idealized member of the species, while the
umwelt is the surroundings that are meaningful for an individual member of the
species, given its specific background of experience and skill set. The habitat can be
understood as a ‘slice’ of the total physical, objective world: it is indeed this world,
just at certain restricted time and distance scales, as determined by the somatic and
sensory capabilities of the species and the kind of ontology that is commensurate
with these. As such, the habitat contains objective information there to be used,
although this is also inherently meaningful: the physical features that contain infor-
mation afford specific actions, relative to whatever capabilities the species has.
The umwelt by contrast is the habitat in relation to a particular individual mem-
ber of the species, that is, the habitat as considered from this individual’s point of
view and how it experiences it. It is however not a ‘given’, insofar as perception
always involves action; what we see, even in our umwelt, is always an achievement
or ‘enactment’ (here Baggs and Chemero refer approvingly to Noë). Nevertheless,
the umwelt is subjective in a way the habitat is not. By making this distinction,
Baggs and Chemero argue, we can do justice to the thoughts of both enactivists and
Gibsoneans, but also without sliding into any kind of idealism or solipsism.
Baggs and Chemero nevertheless worry that an acknowledgement of umwelts is
a potentially destabilizing factor:
[H]ow do we incorporate first-person experience into cognitive science without sliding into
a solipsistic view of the mind? The concern is that we are each trapped inside our own
umwelt: we perceive the world only in terms that are meaningful to us, and moreover we
cannot even comprehend that there might be more to the world than what we have person-
ally experienced. (Op. cit., S2187)
Their reply is that ‘our umwelt comes to have the meaning it does only because it is
shaped by the presence of other actors’ (ibid.). We are not trapped in our umwelts,
rather, they open naturally to the umwelts of others, our habitat (in the sense defined
above) and, ultimately, the physical world as it is in itself.
This discussion is very helpful; however, as I see things, the points Baggs and
Chemero raise can in fact also point to a different and, I think, better ‘rapproche-
ment’ between the two schools of thought, one that can also serve to clarify and
make plausible the kinds of statement Varela et al. make about the world being
organism-dependent. To start with, as Baggs and Chemero stress, the realm of
Gibsonean affordances, though certainly objective in the sense of being standing
opportunities available to different organisms across time, nevertheless are quite
distinct from the physical world in being inherently meaningful. Following many
others (including Gibson himself), they gloss this idea in terms of things being
found meaningful by organisms. But unless we accept the idea that perceptual expe-
rience (or cognition more generally) involves (internal) mental meaning or ideas
that are projected onto a meaningless world, we do surely need to talk in terms of
something like an external world of meaningful things; which must moreover then
be, not the physical world, but a world for the organism (or species) in question.
Something having meaning is, after all, necessarily meaning for a subject; it can’t
be understood purely in terms of relations between items in a thoroughly objective
world. Since the mentalist/projectionist picture would be quite at odds with both
enactivism’s and ecological psychology’s commitment to anti-representationalism,
it seems the habitat itself has to be seen as, in a certain sense, a subjective world.
However, I also believe we can accept this without the position collapsing into
solipsism or idealism. The solution lies in the proper appreciation of two further
points. The first is that the very notion of a ‘world for an organism’ is necessarily
something that involves a subjective point of view. In involving this point of view, it
is distinct from the world of physics – the world in itself. But this does not mean, on
pain of begging the question against the very idea, that it is merely a figment of the
imagination or something mental or internal. It is, precisely, a world, albeit for a
subject (or set of subjects).
The second point is something that Baggs and Chemero themselves stress,
though I understand its significance in a rather different way from them. As they say,
the umwelt of an individual is itself not a given, but depends on relevant activities
of that individual. Further, the umwelt of an individual is typically not private, but
opens up to that of other conspecifics by way of social interaction. The idea that
humans are social beings from the outset, empathetically learning language in inter-
action with caregivers and shared spaces of attention, is of course widely accepted
today (see e.g. Tomassello 1999). But many other, if not all species are also social
to some extent, and enactivists are generally concerned to understand theoretically
how social interaction extends cognitive systems’ behavioural domains and hence
meaningful interactions between them and their environments (see De Jaegher and
Di Paolo 2007).
The overall picture this suggests, I contend, is thus as follows. On closer inspec-
tion, there is in fact no sharp distinction between the habitat and the umwelt, as
Baggs and Chemero understand these things (contrary to what they intend, though
their analysis is useful in coming to see this). It is true that an individual at any given
time has a restricted access to the wider world around it insofar as it doesn’t experi-
ence everything. At the same time, what it does have access to is, in any case, some-
thing that has to be enacted through its behaviour, which has to be understood
dynamically; and in virtue of this fact, its experience also opens up to experience of
the wider world, something that is further augmented and modulated through social
interaction. On the other hand, this wider world (the habitat, if one likes), in being
intrinsically meaningful, cannot be viewed as simply a ‘slice’ of the world of phys-
ics (even if it is in some sense also that). It is to be sure ‘out there’, relative to each
individual’s limited purview. There is, plausibly, an overarching human world that
we each have individual perspective on. But at the same time this environment is
inherently subtended by subjective activities, insofar as it is meaningful.
This notion of a world for us – more generally, a world for an organism or spe-
cies – that we have arrived at is, in my view, theoretically motivated and makes good
intuitive sense, even if it is not fully or formally defined. We could call it an ‘umwelt’,
something that would be appropriate in that von Uexküll himself did not, as we have
seen, understand this as referring to a mere ‘slice’ of the physical world but to a
genuinely subjective, phenomenal world, in the sense of Kant. It deserves underlin-
ing however that umwelts, though irreducibly subjective, are not solipsistic (or at
least need not be). I noted above that ideas about niche construction from develop-
mental systems theory and ‘evodevo’ approaches in biology have also been impor-
tant in the enactivist literature, and I believe that this can underline the sense in
which umwelts are not merely mental or ‘virtual’ realities. Corresponding to, say,
the human umwelt there is plausibly also something in the world in itself, embrac-
ing things outside the cranium and whose physical structure to some degree at least
can reasonably be thought to mirror that of world for the organism. In this way, the
idea of umwelts is in my view precisely a middle road between realism and ideal-
ism, in pretty much the way Varela et al. claim; and we could no doubt also say it is
a notion of something both subjective and objective, echoing Gibson’s words.
I don’t pretend to have settled this issue once and for all. Thus one might still
reasonably object, say, that the notion of the world for an organism or a species is
still implausible insofar as it is monolithic, in not opening up or adequately account-
ing for idiosyncratic experiences, at various different levels: individual, cultural,
temporal etc. One might conversely argue that the umwelts of different species are
not plausibly neatly disjoint in the way my suggestion involves. These are, I agree,
complicating factors that deserve more discussion than I can give them here. My
reply would be that these can be seen as largley empirical issues, subordinate to the
general idea of an organism-specific world that I have been trying to articulate here
and that I think, in one form or other, one ultimately simply has to accept. (Relatedly,
as I shall explain more fully in Sect. 4.2, I seee umwelts as a kind of theoretical posit
that earn their keep as part of a viable scientific research programme in cognitive
science.) My proposal is thus compatible with the possibility that we will need to
divide things up in a more fine-grained – or perhaps less fine-grained – manner than
a world for pigeons, a world for dogs, for ants etc., or perhaps even postulate a hier-
archy of ‘worlds’ with some being contained within others. Perhaps we humans
share some general world with dogs, but not a more specific one; a similar relation
might perhaps be true of human kind in general and particular cultures. What world
a species inhabits might also in principle change over time; indeed, perhaps we must
in any case see them as inherently dynamic at the get-go. The non-negotiable point,
at least for enactivism of the kind I am concerned with, is that in understanding
experience we must posit organism-relative worlds as the correlate of organisms’
perception and cognition. Moreover, insofar as we and organisms generally are
inherently social, and also are embedded in an objective physical world, these will
not be solipsistic. The coherence and plausibility of the very idea of such a world is
something which, in light in part of enactivism’s central ideas, I believe we can and
should endorse.
Having said all this, I should also add, finally, that the distinction between the
human world and that of any other organism’s umwelt is, given my background
commitment to ARTL, necessarily more principled in view of our capacity to use
language. Mere animals cannot be part of the (or a) human world, in my view, inso-
far as the latter involves linguistic articulation. I will have more to say about this in
Sect. 4.2.
This chapter nearing its end. Enactivism’s most general empirical aim to is to
bring to bear an understanding of the nervous system as something in dynamic
interaction with the body and wider environment together with careful phenomeno-
logical analyses of relevant lived phenomena in order to give explanations of vari-
ous cognitive phenomena. Whether this kind of modelling, theorizing and general
approach will bear fruit is itself ultimately an empirical question. But my aim here
has first and foremost been to precisify and make coherent the shape of a theoretical
option consequent on this approach in relation to the question of how ARTL might
be substantiated. The idea of the ‘world for an organism’ or umwelt is a fairly
abstract one, but it does seem clearly part of the paradigm of enactivism – at least in
Kuhn’s sense of a ‘metaphysical assumption’ (Kuhn 1970), that is, a central orga-
nizing principle for the research conducted within it. However, to see more clearly
how it can relate to ARTL, there is still a good more that remains to be said.
Chapter 4
The World for Us and the World in Itself
Abstract This chapter picks up where the previous one left off. I first explore in
more detail how the notion of the umwelt from enactivism can undergird the distinc-
tion between the world for us and the world in itself that informs PE, such that these
ideas can provide a cogent alternative subject naturalistic grounding for ARTL to
GE. I then take up various matters arising from the various discussions of Chap. 3
and Sect. 4.2. Firstly, I explain how two varieties of (non-classical) representational-
ist cognitive can also be seen as conducive to or compatible with PE, taking up
amongst other things the recently popular predictive processing model of cognition.
Secondly, I give an overview of various outstanding issues concerning the notions
of content, information, concepts and knowledge, and the role they can play in my
enactivist-based version of ARTL. Lastly, I clarify in what way and to what extent
my version of ARTL differs from Price’s, amongst other things focussing on his
concept of e-representation.
4.1 Introduction
This chapter picks up where the previous one left off. (In some ways it is a series of
footnotes to it – but they are very important footnotes!) It is divided into two
sections.
The first goes into more detail about how exactly the notion of the umwelt from
enactivism can be made use of by ARTL by way of the ideas of the world for us and
the world in itself that inform phenomenological externalism (PE). This is to a large
extent exploratory and speculative work that raises many issues, not least from the
philosophy of science, and my aim is not to resolve all these, but to outline a view
(or range of views) that is I hope, given the dialectical framing of ARTL, at least not
completely implausible.
Section 4.3 takes up various matters arising (as I see things) from the discussions
of Chap. 3 and Sect. 4.2, in three subsections. In the first, I explain how two varieties
of (non-classical) representationalist cognitive can also be seen as conducive to or
compatible with phenomenal externalism. This discussion takes up amongst other

Switzerland AG 2023
473, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26924-0_4
90 4 The World for Us and the World in Itself
things the recently popular predictive processing model of cognition and different
interpretations of this in the current literature. In the second, I give an overview of
various outstanding issues concerning the notions of content, information, concepts
and knowledge, and the role they can play in my enactivist-based version of
ARTL. In the last, I clarify in what way and to what extent my version of ARTL
differs from Price’s, amongst other things revisiting the concept of
e-representation.
4.2 Umwelts, the World for Us, and the World in Itself
Section 3.3 attempted an explication and vindication of the idea of the world for an
organism/species within the framework of enactivist cognitive science – of umwelts,
as I shall simply henceforth say. However, a good deal more needs to be said if we
are to cogently see our way to understanding how an enactivism incorporating it can
provide the kind of substantiation of ARTL I am envisaging it providing via the
ideas behind PE.
A first issue that needs to be addressed is that, even if we think it is plausible to
acknowledge a plurality of organism-specific umwelts, this might seem to sit
uncomfortably with certain commitments of ARTL. For, assuming animals don’t
possess concepts, don’t these then constitute a kind of non-conceptualised reality,
and isn’t that something ARTL eschews in rejecting the given and metaphysical
realism? Perhaps one thinks animals unlike us do or could possess concepts (as e.g.
Noë does, at least in a certain sense; see Noë 2004, ch. 6, 2015; cf. also McDowell’s
thought experiment about sapient i.e. concept-using but ‘sentiently alien’ Martians,
McDowell 1994, 123 fn). But even if one held this, the realities in question would
still be quite unlike ours and surely in a deep way inaccessible to us. A response here
might be that this is not MR as traditionally understood, for the realities in question
are in any case ‘subjective’. Nevertheless, the facts in question would seem neces-
sarily to outstrip our conceptual powers and constitute in that way – for us at any
rate – unknowable and inconceivable things in themselves. How can we make sense
of such facts, at least within the parameters of ARTL? Indeed, how can we make
sense of the idea that such facts might even exist – at least consistently with denying
Kant the possibility of doing the same in relation to his Ding an sich, as I have
argued we should?
As we shall see, I think ARTL can give some kind of answer to the first question
here (understood in a certain way). But nor is it totally clear, I think, that it needs to
give an answer in order to make sense of the idea of such facts existing (i.e. to
answer the second). If we assume the framework of enactivism, a (theoretical) com-
mitment to umwelts follows. It follows from this in turn – let us assume, for the sake
of argument – that there are facts we have no access to. But is that a problem for
ARTL? Certainly in some sense these would constitute a kind of unknowable or
even inconceivable Ding an sich, but the motivation for accepting this would be
very different from Kant’s. Moreover it would not be a commitment, like his, that
4.2 Umwelts, the World for Us, and the World in Itself 91
brings with it a reasonable charge that each world is a kind of collective illusion or
delusion in relation to real reality – this notion, by ARTL, having been discarded.1
As noted, I think a less concessive line is also feasible.2 To start with, we need to
remember the processual, dynamic nature of sensorimotor interactions. Insofar as it
is fundamentally such patterns of interactions that individuate different umwelts, an
organism’s relation to one will therefore not (in general or without further ado) be
understandable in terms of anything like beliefs about it that might be true or false,
or even more generally things and their properties, insofar as postulating such will
involve a kind of hypostasizing of processes that are primarily dynamic. For enac-
tivists, there is a normative relation between the organism and its world; ways of
behaving that are more or less optimal. Hence also (for some anyway) a notion of
content can be preserved.3 But this is not a content of the kind that underlines the
normativity of the attitude of belief and the realm of concepts we language-using
creatures inhabit.
In the human case, these modes of interaction do precisely come to expression in
human thought and language that we can then give a truth-theoretic semantics for.
Now, as many have argued, it is also plausible that human language-use itself condi-
tions these interactions. We live today in a world saturated with symbols and sym-
bolic culture, something that presumably has arisen through eons of cultural
evolution (Clark 2008; Dennett 2018). Nevertheless, this thought is not inconsistent
with – indeed, I would see it as naturally meshing with – the idea that we can under-
stand some of our discourses as expressing or articulating4 different basic modes of
sensorimotor interaction that define the peculiarly human umwelt, articulating
thereby different parts or aspects of a world for us. At the same time, our world, as
thinkers like Heidegger and Gadamer have stressed, is different from that of animals
precisely in being a world, rather than, as Gadamer puts it, an environment – a mere
umwelt – that an animal inhabits (cf. McDowell 1994, 115). The former can be
thought of as there as a totality for the animal, but its reactions are exhaustively
entrained to this, in ever-ongoing cycles. But our world is also something we can
step back from, make claims about and reason with one another about using con-
cepts and language.
What is it like to be a bat? Thomas Nagel famously asked, and concluded that,
though there is something it is like, we can never know what this is (Nagel 1983).
Well, perhaps. However, as Daniel Dennett has persuasively argued, we surely can
start to give an answer by constructing the bat’s umwelt theoretically, on the basis
of what we know about its sensory apparatus, biological needs and its behavioural
capacities (Dennett 1991, ch. 14, cf. also Akins 1993). For example, we can learn
about the spatial extent of its echolocalia and how the sounds and echoes it
1
I do not mean to endorse this line of thought, and in any case it only gestures at a larger discus-
sion. I will have more to say about these kinds of issues in a broader context in Chap. 6.
2
In what follows I will be assuming that non-language-using animals are not sapient and so not
conceptally endowed, pace Noë’s suggestions to the contrary.
3
I will have more to say about the issue of content in Sect. 4.3.
4
I will also have more to say about this distinction in Sect. 4.3.
generates in performing this are integrated with other sounds it perceives. Dennett
calls this the bat’s heterophenomenological world, and for him is no more than a
useful theoretical fiction. In my view, we should rather simply say that such things
are a theoretical posit or construct of enactivism aimed at articulating something
that is just as real as anything else science posits.5 Given enactivism takes engaged,
first-personal perspectives seriously – unlike Dennett, at least under standard inter-
pretations – any such theoretical description could never exhaustively capture the
bat’s umwelt, for it precisely says nothing about such perspectives. But it is also
important that, though very different from bats, we are like them at least in being
living, experiencing creatures. Hans Jonas’ words ‘Life can only be known by life’
are again useful to recall here, and though they are often taken to point up something
negative – that a disembodied, analytic perspective is insufficient to understand liv-
ing phenomena – they can also be seen as emphasizing the positive thought that
living things like us humans, that can also understand, can understand (or at least
seek to understand) other living things in a way that builds on precisely this com-
monality between us. In this way we can hope to achieve a kind of understanding of
bats’ experience in relation to the heterophenomenological world we theoretically
construct. Insofar as their sensorimotor capacities are very different from ours, there
will be a further restriction on the extent to which we can appreciate their worlds, or
environment – from the inside, as it were. However, as Dennett would I take it agree,
this is ultimately only a contingent limitation. If someone could, miraculously,
metamorphize into a bat, acquiring a bat’s sensorimotor capabilities, she would then
presumably be able to understand the bat’s umwelt fully (maybe correcting the the-
oretician’s conception of it). Nagel might say that she would still not experience it
and understand it as a bat does. But that, though not exactly untrue, would be mis-
leading: a bat doesn’t (plausibly) understand its world at all, it only lives in and
through it.
The issues here are delicate, but the above does I think make it reasonable to say
that positing umwelts does not entail that there is anything necessarily hidden – any-
thing that necessarily eludes our conceptual grasp in talk of different organisms
inhabiting different worlds. I wouldn’t pretend that understanding how animals can
themselves have a world of experience, however exactly construed, is not a difficult
philosophical issue. However, I do also believe it is a more general problem that
many others who also want to see our linguistic and conceptual practices as some-
how (partially) defining our being must wrestle with. McDowell’s view of percep-
tual content as something conceptual is a case in point, since this seems to rule out
5
Sellars also exploits the notion of a ‘theoretical posit’ in his account of experience to avoid the
problem of givenness (see Sellars 1956). For Sellars what are posited are sensations, understood as
causal, experiential intermediaries between the world and thought. As should be clear from the
previous chapter, I would see this account as problematic on two fronts: firstly, in its substantive
conception of what perceptual experience is like (in view of transparency), and, secondly, in its
assumption that some such account in any case should be constitutively involved in understanding
properly intentional thought. But that doesn’t mean that the idea of theoretical posits has no role to
play in a subject naturalistic substantiation of our thought, as I (and I believe Price) understand this.
the idea that perceptual experience can be had as such by non-language using crea-
tures. McDowell also tries to finesse this, in part using Gadamer’s distinction
between world and environment, in ways that I see as consistent with what I have
suggested, but I haven’t space to go into this further here (I will however return to
McDowell’s view on perceptual experience in Sect. 4.3 below).
So much for the world for us; what about the world in itself? I said in Sect.
3.3 that the (or at least my) idea of an umwelt steers the promised course between
realism and idealism that enactivists have wanted to secure. However, even allowing
the world for us is not something solipsistic, it might be unclear how coopting enac-
tivism doesn’t nevertheless entail a more general idealism or anti-realism: surely if
our understanding generally depends on sensorimotor experience then so presum-
ably does our most refined theoretical physics? (Of course, if one embraces MR,
things might look different, but that is precisely not an option for ARTL.) This
consequence would be problematic for a supporter of a subject naturalistic form of
ARTL because it would undermine or at least seriously weaken the way in which
enactivist cognitive science is meant to provide a basis for offering different kinds
of explanation for different kinds of vocabulary. A further worry is that it might
seem to compromise the sense in which ARTL is a common sense realist philoso-
phy, for it involves the idea that the only world that exists is the world for us, and
that sounds like a form of idealism that contradicts common sense.
The issue of realism will be taken up more generally in Chap. 6 (largely indepen-
dently of the considerations I am discussing here though hopefully consistently with
them). Here I want to argue that we can in any case make sense of the idea of a
world in itself for use in the way I want, in particular in a way that is consistent with
rejecting MR and Representationalism. Note first that the very explanatory structure
of enactivism presupposes that there is some common, underlying backdrop on the
basis of which particular organisms and their umwelts are understood as emerging:
autopoiesis is described from a third-personal point of view. It may be that our
understanding of this backdrop at any time is itself is conditioned by some other of
our basic modes of human sensorimotor understanding, but that doesn’t take away
the structural point: the idea of understanding any ‘for us’ always presupposes a
(relative) ‘not-for us’ to understand it, as such. This point might seem to fall short
of establishing any idea of a completely ‘in itself’, but in fact I think that something
like this idea can be secured in an immanent way, so to speak – i.e. without having
to lapse into MR. To start with, without the idea of a world in itself, the idea of a not
merely subjective but intersubjective world – a world for us – looks more difficult
to make sense of (though perhaps not impossible; see Sect. 4.3 below on predictive
processing). Moreover, this explanatory structure – of explaining the ‘for us’ in
‘not-for us’ terms – is not just omnipresent but arguably pushes us towards ever
more abstract conceptions of the ‘not-for us’. In light of this, it seems, finally, reasa-
onable to suggest that the kind of picture that would fill the role of the absolutely ‘in
itself’ – that is, absolutely in contradistinction from anything ‘for-us’ – is today
within sight, namely that provided by the models and theories of contemporary
fundamental physics. These grew out of groundbreaking ideas of the scientific revo-
lution and exist today in the form of Einstein’s relativity theory, quantum mechanics
and, as is hoped for the future, some kind synthesis of these two pillars of modern
physics (together, possibly, with help from so-called ‘naturalised metaphysics’).6
This is, intuitively, an understanding that could be available to creatures who did not
in any way share our particular somatic or sensorimotor constitution, for it explicitly
abrogates the intuitive dimension of our understanding in favour of one that builds
on abstract mathematical thinking. As Danielle Macbeth has argued (2012), it
embodies a kind of understanding that is wholly different from that we have in vir-
tue of our biological, life-sustaining practices and that we can recognize as being, as
she puts it, ‘valid for all rational beings’ (i.e., I take it, all those capable of the appro-
priate abstract mathematical and logical thinking).
One might still object to this that even fundamental science is necessarily carried
out by humans (or at least embodied creatures of some kind). Experimentation,
modelling, testing and the rest are all part of the human world, hence are ‘coloured’
by embodied human understanding. How can we hope to make any kind of progress
towards a conception of a ‘world in itself’ given this? But this objection is miscon-
ceived given an ARTL perspective. What we produce as knowledge – the claims we
accept as true – must be distinguished from how we produce it. I am committed to
saying that we live our lives wholly in the world for us, as does any rational being
insofar as it is alive; but the claims we (or they) make on that basis can have a con-
tent that need not concern that world. ARTL does not seek to reduce content proper-
ties to anything else, even if it takes a form in which naturalistic enquiry can cast
light on different kinds of content à là Price’s idea of subject naturalism. If we
contemplate claims with a certain kind of content and they are ones that apparently
do not concern our lives as embodied creatures, then, even if our having them is
contingent on certain sensorimotor abilities or occupying a certain stage in intel-
lectual history, we should respect what they appear to be saying. That doesn’t mean
either that we can’t relate this content to some further distinct kind of capacity we
have – a mathematical capacity, say, that is itself not reducible to either linguistic
understanding or embodied understanding (for more on this idea, see Sect. 7.4).7
A further point is that the objection arguably presupposes a picture of the rela-
tionship between the world for us and the world in itself that ARTL rejects: one on
which, in living in the world for us, we are somehow trapped in our own parochial
reality, struggling to reach the real one. For ARTL (on my subject naturalistic sub-
stantiation of it) being in the world for us is not being so trapped, and the world in
itself is not the ‘real’ world. At the same time, we have – as again, I would argue, is
demonstrated by the fact of modern physics – an understanding both of our situation
6
I am alluding here to people who champion a view known as ‘ontic structural realism’ as a picture
of what modern physics provides by way of a reality (cf. e.g. Ladyman et al. 2007; French and
Ladyman 2011).
7
For Macbeth the understanding embodied in fundamental science has a historical dimension, in
having developed from early Greek mathematics and philosophy, through the advances in of the
scientific revolution and later those in the nineteenth century through to the refined forms it takes
today. This seems to introduce a kind of historical understanding of our capacity, an avenue which
might also be possible to pursue.
and that of other organisms that abstracts in a distinctive, mathematical way away
from the arena of embodied cognition. It thereby yields a world-picture that we,
before the age of modern science, could perhaps never even have dreamt of; it is
something genuinely new compared to the human world. But absent the idea that
this is reality, and the world for us thereby a kind of distortion or entrapment, what
reason is there not to take this as concerning what it appears to be: a world in itself?
Could one object that the world picture of modern physics is ultimately of merely
instrumental value, an abstraction that does not articulate a genuine world beyond
the world for us (or at least one that we might know)? I take it that precisely that
discussion – the classical question of scientific realism – is somewhat orthogonal to
the present one, which concerns whether we can so much as make sense of the idea
of a world in itself when we live our lives wholly in the world for us. In accepting
an (at least somewhat) knowable world in itself, I nail my colours to the scientific
realist mast, but I take it that is not a very controversial commitment in and of itself
(especially for a semantic deflationist, for whom all rational assertive discourses are
cognitive by default).8
Further objection might be levelled against my overall two-worlds view. I might
seem to have presented this as a dichotomoy, but it surely it is very natural to think
that the world for us and the world in itself in some way or at some level interact.
After all, physics is, for all its mathematical sophistication, an empirical science,
based on experience. Moreover, there is surely much science between the common
sense world and physics. Don’t science and common sense in these ways necessar-
ily overlap – bleed into one another in ways that are inimical to my dichotomous
way of thinking about them?
My answer to the first point here builds on something already noted, namely, that
the idea of the world in itself is integral to understanding the very idea of a world for
us. Our theory of the world in itself is thus necessarily aimed, in part, at explaining
the world for us, the world of experience; the idea of physics as an empirical science
is thus completely unthreatened. At the same time, this is not to be understood in
any kind of positivistic sense. Physics isn’t about the world of experience even
though it is in part explanatorily answerable to it. But I take it few are tempted to
think in such positivist terms today (modulo, again, questions relating to the issue of
scientific realism).
But what, the objector might continue, about the non-fundamental or ‘special’
sciences? To understand their status on my picture, we should note, to start with,
that our picture of the world in itself is not one that we are simply in possession of,
let alone one that arrived at some point in the past fully formed and articulated. The
world that we know exists and know what is like more or less for certain (at least in
broad outline), is the world for us, and even though getting clear on what this reality
amounts to – including that it is a world for us – requires us to think in terms of
things in themselves, our positive conception of what these latter things are need not
8
Though I am more inclined to take an instrumentalistic attitude to non-fundamental science;
see below.
initially extend very far beyond our common sense conceptions of things (or: our
conception of things in the common sense world). So in that sense not all science is
fundamental science. At the same time, I do not see this as compromising the idea
of a principled divide between the two worlds. The world for us is a subjective,
experiential world, necessarily. We do our natural science in this world, and seek to
understand what this uncovers as best we can, using whatever cognitive abilities we
have at our disposal (natural or acquired). Different sciences will draw on different
capacities and different modes of thinking. Nevertheless, I take it that modern phys-
ics does ultimately aim to be – conceives itself as being – a complete picture of at
least things in themselves, so that whatever we say about these things has, ulti-
mately, to be made sense of in terms of it. This needn’t involve reduction: different
sciences can also concern the spatio-temporal world at different, autonomous
spatio-temporal scales, but whatever scale we are at, there must be consistency with
fundamental physics, and the very idea of such different scales should be intelligible
on the basis of what we know from fundamental physics (cf. Ladyman et al. 2007).
Of course, there is one clear exception here, but this should come as no surprise
given what I have argued so far: enactivist (cognitive) science. In seeking to inte-
grate its naturalistic data with that of lived experiences, its foundational ideas are
not explicable on the basis of fundamental physics alone.
My view of science, though in one way disunified, is thus not massively disuni-
fied and pluralistic in the way say John Dupré’s is (see Dupré 1994), with many
different kinds of unrelated ontological entity. On my picture, there is the world of
(natural, physical) science which is ideally answerable to fundamental physics, and
there is the world (or worlds) of the living and the subjective that emerges from this.
New issues may arise here, such as whether entities posited in non-basic sciences
(viruses in biology, say) to causally explain things we experience can be seen as real
and the claims associated with them as literally true, or ultimately just useful instru-
ments – at least without some integration into the world of physics. Given my adher-
ence to a distinction between a world for us and a world in itself, where the latter is
that of fundamental physics, and given Price’s understanding of causation (see
Chap. 2), I am tempted to regard all genuine causal claims as belonging to the
human world. Exactly what this implies by way of how we should understand the
special sciences is I take it a somewhat open question, bound up with issues about
e.g. what we mean by explanation, the notion of approximate truth, instrumental-
ism, scientific metaphor and many other issues that, again, abut the scientific real-
ism question.
I also think that the essentials of the overall kind of view I want to uphold are
consistent with some kind or degree of disunification in the world in itself: for me
there needn’t perhaps be just one ‘world in itself’ so long as acknowledging a plu-
rality of such worlds or ‘realities’ is consistent with seeing these things as fully
objective and distinct from the world for us. The worry from my point of view with
accepting this would be that it threatens to blur the line between the two realms, the
‘for us’ and the ‘in itself’. The kind of pluralistic view in question here is often one
which emphasises human perspective and interaction, and hence a kind of construc-
tivist understanding of realism, even when it comes physics (see e.g. Hacking 1983;
4.3 Matters Arising 97
Chang 2022) – a view of what is ‘real’ more in line with the kind of half-way status
between objective and subjective that enactivism sees umwelts as having. But in
principle this might not be the case, and hence I leave open the door to greater plu-
ralism than my ‘official’ line would acknowledge.
Obviously a lot more could be said about all these issues. The commitments
I have incurred about these matters are a function of what I think we best can say by
way of understanding language, thought and experience, and I obviously cannot
answer every question that might arise on reflecting on them. However, I do believe,
in view of the considerations presented above, that there is nothing about them that
necessarily conflicts with a reasonable and realistic understanding of science and
how it proceeds.
To summarise my argument thus far then: Enactivist cognitive science offers the
basis for an alternative subject naturalist account of our discourses, one that under-
stands this in terms of a distinction between the world for us and the world in itself,
in line with the ideas of PE. In view of ARTL’s rejection of the ‘reality’ concept
neither of these worlds need be seen as more fundamental or ‘real’ than the other,
thus bypassing the contortions of traditional metaphysics. Moreover, I claim that
enactivist cognitive science – a recognizably anti-representationalist enterprise in
cognitive science – provides, at least potentially, a superior explanatory substantia-
tion of ARTL than representationalist cognitive science and the accompanying clas-
sical expressivist accounts that GE makes use of to explain things like ethics. This
is, in particular, because of its emphasis on the conscious, lived nature of experience
in relation to a corresponding world of significance. We are thus not alienated from
our own practices as we arguably are in the face of GE’s preferred modes of expla-
nations (classical expressivist or e-representational). Again I stress that, whether
enactivism will prevail as viable cognitive science, and to what extent, is an empiri-
cal question. Nevertheless, it can hardly today be ignored as a contender for under-
standing what cognition is that diverges markedly from the hitherto dominant
representationalist paradigms. Thus it strikes me as important to indicate how it can
fit in with an approach to language and thought that also deserves attention, and that
is also termed ‘anti-representationalism’ – ARTL – but that has hitherto, at least for
the most part, only been elaborated in relation to representationalist approaches to
cognition.
4.3 Matters Arising
In concluding this part of the book I want to make some further remarks, partly of a
clarificatory nature, partly in order to engage with some important reservations one
might have about my proposal based on the current state of the art in cognitive sci-
ence. I divide these into three subsections though the issues taken up are to
inter-related.
4.3.1 Non-classical Representationalist Cognitive Science
The enactivist paradigm I sketched in Sect. 3.3 – a highly prominent one in current
cognitive science – is also, in my view, particularly well-suited as a subject natural-
istic substantiation of ARTL, insofar as it builds in and upon the idea of embodied
autonomy, thus respecting our linguistic practices’ engaged, first-personal dimen-
sion. But of course there is far from a consensus on the idea that its framework is
optimal, even amongst those who depart from CCS. Many of these alternatives have
much in common with enactivism, whilst also significantly diverging from it. In this
section I will consider two (probably mutually compatible) such alternatives and
show how they could nevertheless be put to service in grounding PE in the way
I have argued enactivism does (albeit, in my view, not as well).
The first is the predictive processing (PP) paradigm, one that has attracted huge
attention recently as a kind of grand unifying theory of perception and action, and
of cognitive and neural function. PP is standardly seen as a variety of representa-
tionalist cognitive science in which cognition is seen as the generation of an internal
model of the world by the brain (Howhy 2013; Metzinger and Wiese 2017). Rather
than deriving this model mainly bottom-up on the basis of sensory input in which
one detects certain patterns or features – as in more traditional representationalist
conceptions of cognition – PP sees the brain as constantly predicting sensory input
on the basis of its own prior assumptions. This process occurs at several different
levels of hierarchical organization, allowing the tracking of the world at different
spatial and temporal levels, and is also sensitive to the amount of precision that is at
stake. But the flow of information is in any case primarily top down rather than bot-
tom up. There is no building up of a picture of the world from more primitive repre-
sentations as in Marr’s famous classical account of vision (Marr 1982): adjustments
are made directly to the higher level model in response to error and is as minimal as
possible, whilst the prior probabilities are fixed by endogenous assumptions about
normality that are keyed to our biological needs. PP also involves the idea of active
inference: the internal model drives action to minimize prediction error. In this way
PP is meant to provide a unified framework for understanding both action and per-
ception in terms of one fundamental kind of brain functioning.
In its stressing of the idea of the brain as part of a living thing and inherently
active, enactivism is in sympathy with ideas from PP. However, PP can nevertheless
seem to involve a quite radical divergence from enactivism, and hence from PE, in
that it maintains, or seems to maintain, the idea that the models derived are some
kind of representation of the outside world – something like hypotheses with truth
evaluable content to the effect that the organism-independent world is thus and so.
However, several further considerations can suggest a more nuanced assessment.
To start with, there is a question of whether the hypotheses the brain entertains are
in any way accurate representations of this outside world. For some supporters of
PP, such as Thomas Metzinger, it involves a view of the human brain
as a system which, even in ordinary waking states, constantly hallucinates at the world, […]
a system that constantly lets its internal autonomous simulational dynamics collide with the
ongoing flow of sensory input, vigorously dreaming at the world and thereby generating the
content of phenomenal experience. (Metzinger and Wiese 2017, 3)
On this line, PP entails that the contents of consciousness – understood as such, i.e.
as some phenomenal, subjective appearance – are a massive misrepresentation of
how things are in reality. Now some might see in this statement a recipe for a disas-
trous scepticism or idealism (e.g. Zahavi 2019). However, it seems one could rather
reinterpret this commitment as supporting PE, in turn understood in terms of the
‘non-realist’ setting ARTL provides: the experience generated by the brain is pre-
cisely (only) a world for us, but this world can still be quite on a par with the world
in itself in terms of what is real – the notion of ‘reality’ or the ‘really real’ having
been jettisoned.
I don’t think that PP, under this interpretation, would give as good a naturalistic
grounding of PE as enactivism does. The latter offers an understanding of the world
for us as something emergent from, not just the brain, but the physical world, as well
as the intersubjective interlacing of our various different sensorimotor interactions
with this world. But maybe more could be said in this regard on behalf of PP, under-
stood in the way just adumbrated. The point here in any case is that even if my
preferred anti-representationalist form of cognitive science were not to be accepted,
there are other, broadly representationalist kinds that could also vindicate PE.
Of course, Metzinger’s take on PP is only one amongst several possible, and
some of these are plausibly more at odds with the ideas behind PE. However, it is
also worth noting that other supporters of PP see it as more or less in line with enac-
tivism’s framework. A central idea behind PP developed by Karl Friston is that what
underlies processing in the brain is the so-called ‘free energy principle’, a funda-
mental law of all non-equilibrium self-organizing systems that dictates they remain
in a certain set of states characterised by low ‘free energy’, understood information-
theoretically (Friston and Stephan 2007). According to this idea, to maintain its
organization it is necessary and sufficient for an organism to remain in one of these
states in its interactions with the environment. However, instead of this entailing
that the brain is a hypothesis generator abiding by principles of Bayesian inference,
Jelle Bruineberg and colleagues have recently argued that the principle rather sup-
ports a view of the brain as, like living systems more generally, seeking to maintain
homeostasis: the survival of organism and its stable identity in its niche over time
(cf. Bruineberg et al. 2018, see also Williams 2018a). On this line, active inference,
in which sensory states are actively changed in the service of reducing free energy,
is necessarily primary, and the models that the brain generates are thus not hypoth-
eses about a mind-external reality, but have to be understood in terms of the body as
a whole seeking to maintain homeostasis in the way all biological beings do. These
sensory states are moreover species specific (we aim e.g. to maintain a body tem-
perature of 37°, other animals different temperatures and distributions, and so on).
They are also of course dependent on the ambient environment, but at its most basic
level of operation one has to understand the organism and its environment as one
coupled system in smooth interaction, and hence what is perceived in terms of
Gibsonean affordances. This is all clearly in line with enactivism’s leading ideas,
and hence with PE if what I have argued so far correct.
Whether it is totally in line is perhaps somewhat unclear insofar as it is possible

to see this kind of view as nevertheless still involving representations. For example,
Andy Clark has also nailed his colours to PP-mast, but sees it as a way of reconcil-
ing enactivist and CCS sympathies insofar as it provides a unified account of per-
ception and action that allows us to retain the idea of representation, something he
sees as independently desireable (Clark 2013, see also Clark 1997, 2008; Wheeler
2005). We might thus also consider the general idea of so-called action-oriented
representationalism as another alternative to enactivism (this kind of generic view
might also encompass theories like Ruth Millikan’s, which involves what she calls
‘push-me-pull-you’ representations as underlying cognition, cf. Millikan 1984).
One can argue about whether this view is ultimately superior or inferior to standard
enactivism, which I understand as being steadfastly anti-representationalist (see
subsections (ii) and (iii) below). What I want to argue here is that even if we were to
accept it (possibly as part of yet another kind of ‘enactivism’ that, like Hutto and
Myin’s, departs from Varela et al.’s in various specified ways) I think one could
again reasonably interpret it in ways conducive to PE understood against the back-
drop of ARTL.
To make the case for this, I want briefly to return to the debate about realism and
anti-realism in 4ECS that we looked at at the end of Sect. 3.3. Once upon a time
Chemero argued (Chemero 2009) that Clark’s view, just like Varela et al’s, leads to
a kind of anti-realism: different organisms will represent different ‘worlds’ assum-
ing that the kinds of representations posited are individuated in terms of their poten-
tial for action, for they will then vary with organisms’ different sensorimotor
capacities. Clark responded (Clark and Mandik 2002) that plurality in representa-
tional schemes does not imply anti-realism, both because there may be overlap
between them, and because, even if there is not, organisms may simply be sensitive
to different features of the one mind-independent world (cp. Blackburn’s response
to my argument that different organisms perceive different worlds in Sect. 3.2).
Now Chemero himself has also more recently disavowed the anti-realism he earlier
promulgated (Chemero 2009, ch. 9 – a view in line with that he defends together
with Baggs discussed in Sect. 3.3). To start with, he says, we can learn to transcend
our innate classificatory schemes and thereby seek to come into contact with the
world in itself. He further argues that Gibsonean affordances can be seen as real
insofar as we are (scientific) realists about theoretical posits in general. Karim
Zahidi (2014) has also commented on this debate in a similar vein. He claims that
even if we allow that representational systems have a holistic character – thus block-
ing the Blackburn-kind of response Clark employs – the kind of intermediate ‘nei-
ther realism nor anti-realism, but something in between’ position of Varela et al. still
fails to follow insofar as everything they want to say is compatible, indeed seems to
presuppose the idea of a world independent of cognizers (ibid., 266). Zahidi also
endorses Chemero’s scientific realism about affordances and further supports it by
reference to their causal independence from individual thinkers (470 ff.).
Now it is true, as we have seen, that Varela et al. often speak in terms that might
suggest a radical kind of idealism. However, as I argued, making clear what the idea
of a world for an organism or umwelt involves in the way I did allows us to see that
Varela et al.’s position and what they say about it can be given good sense without
having to deny the existence of the world in itself. That is, I can agree with what
Zahidi and Chemero (now) says about the world in itself, but I do not see this as in
any way compromising enactivism’s self-characterisation, or the idea of there being
umwelts and a world for us. I also think I can accept much of what Chemero (and
Zahidi) claim about affordances being real. But seeing affordances as theoretically
real entities does nothing to compromise, but rather, as I see things, shores up under
the utility of the idea of a plurality of umwelts, motivated more or less along the
lines of Chemero’s earlier argument against Clark (which is close to the enactivist
argument for this view I sketched in Sect. 3.3). Chemero and Zahidi give the impres-
sion that such ideas are ipso facto undesirably anti-realistic, and Zahidi argues
instead for a kind of ontologically pluralist but realist position associated with
amongst others Nancy Cartwright (1999) and John Dupre (op. cit.). I think the
framework of PE is better suited to understanding how 4ECS – representationalist
or otherwise – relates to ARTL, for reasons to do with the unity of the worlds in
question (as discussed in the previous section). In the present context, however, the
directly relevant point is that, if one accepts ARTL, there is in fact nothing anti-
realistic about also accepting the idea of a world for us, and nothing that rules out
talking of the world in itself. Thus, at least for all Chemero and Zahidi argue, a
cognitive science based on action-based representations can also be seen as a way
of substantiating PE and ARTL.
Some might argue that all of this is misunderstood. Thus for Millikan represen-
tationalism in cognitive science, even on her push-me-pull-you notion of content, is
meant to vindicate the correspondence theory of truth and metaphysical realism. To
which I reply: if so, so be it. All I want to point out is that, if action-based represen-
tationalism were to prevail in cognitive science, and if it does involve commitment
to umwelts, it does not imply any kind of anti-realism insofar as it can made use of
in a subject naturalistic substantiation of ARTL via PE.
A final issue of relevance to my overall dialectic here concerns whether the alter-
natives to enactivism I have considered above, in being in a broad sense representa-
tionalistic, would in any case render my position too close to Price’s GE to qualify
as a distinct form of subject naturalistic ARTL. I will take this issue up in subsection
(iii), below.
4.3.2 Content, Concepts, and Knowledge
I have so far been understanding enactivism as an anti-representationalist form of

cognitive science, a label that is meant to carry significance, or at least be of interest,
insofar as I am aiming to provide an ‘integrated anti-representationalist philoso-
phy’ – in contrast to Price’s view, which marries ARTL with a notion that at least is
most clearly recognizable as part of representationalist cognitive sicence (viz.
e-representation). However, it might be wondered in what way enactivism really is,
at least fully, ‘anti-representationalist’. As we will recall, Hutto and Myin have
urged a form of enactivism, different from that of Varela et al. and sensorimotor
theorists like Noë, known as ‘radical enactivism’, which seeks to dispense with all
content-involving explanations of basic, i.e. all non-linguistic cognition. By impli-
cation, they see defenders of autopoietic and sensorimotor enactivism as still wed-
ded to the idea of content as a basic explanatory notion that also applies outwith the
realm of language and language-mediated cognition. For Hutto and Myin, this
adherence forms no essential part of enactivism and should be excised from it, for
there is no way of understanding content in a naturalistic way (given ‘the hard prob-
lem of content’). They nevertheless uphold the idea of contentless informational
links between thinkers and the world, something they term ‘ur-intentionality’ (see
Sect. 3.3).
Evan Thompson has defended the idea of content against Hutto and Myin
(Thompson 2018). Thus he writes (referring to two enactivist heroes of his):
Merleau-Ponty and [Walter] Freeman[9] both argue that representationalism, according to
which cognition consists of state transitions between internal mental or neuronal represen-
tations, does not explain basic cognition at either the psychological or neurophysiological
levels. Neither theorist, however, would say that basic cognition is contentless; on the con-
trary, their concern is to describe a basic kind of intentional content that is not representa-
tional. Nor would they say that the intentional content has no satisfaction conditions, in the
sense that it is not subject to norms. Dreyfus follows suit when he argues that the immediate
response to how one is solicited by a situation has content and is subject to norms of percep-
tion and action, but the content and satisfaction conditions are not representational.
By ‘not representational’ Thompson means content that is specified neither in terms

of concepts, nor reference or truth conditions; he also seems to see such content as
something that it makes no sense to attribute to identifiable internal states of an
organism (or indeed, identifiable parts of a whole organism-environment system).
But insofar as a system is intentional at all, it must nevertheless make sense to attri-
bute it content insofar as cognition is a normative phenomenon. Indeed, for
Thompson, it is Hutto and Myin who need to ‘recitfy’10 their own view by acknowl-
edging that any notion of ‘ur-intentionality’ willy-nilly brings with it a notion of
content.
Is enactivism then after all committed to content? And if so, is that problematic
for my project here? If so, I take it this would not be because the idea of it being
‘anti-representational’ might be compromised, if only because there is a clear sense
in which it is still precisely not a representationalist view. However, at a more sub-
stantive level one might worry that it inevitably brings with it a commitment to
some kind of ‘given’ and that this must contravene the strictures of ARTL. If our
conceptual thought is somehow to be made sense of in terms of non-conceptual
9
Founder of the so-called neurophenomenological school of thought, see e.g. Thompson (2007, ch.
11) for more details.
10
This is what Hutto and Myin think needs to be done with forms of enactivism other than their
own, playing on their acronym ‘REC’ standing for ‘radical embodied/enactivist account of
cognition’.
content, aren’t we back in an explanatory framework that ARTL precisely seeks

to reject?
I think the answer to this question is ‘no’. As I see things any notion of content
involved in enactivism can be seen as a kind of theoretical notion, postulated by a
scientific theory to explain certain kinds of phenomena, not as constitutively
involved in the classical philosophical project of understanding the possibility of
knowledge and thought about the world. The issue is closely related to that taken up
in Sect. 4.2 above. There the problem was that of understanding how umwelts might
be seen as shedding light on our linguistic practices without constituting some kind
of non-conceptual reality. And again the answer was that, ultimately, umwelts are a
theoretical, technical posit, albeit ones whose point springs from the first-personal
perspective we take all living things, including ourselves, to have on their environ-
ments. Insofar, I am tempted to regard the disagreement between Hutto and Myin
and Thompson as something of a verbal one, or at least one that is less important
than they think it is. There are undoubtedly normative aspects to cognition which
need to be respected and accounted for. For example, there are experienced pres-
sures to adopt more or less optimal vantage points for perceiving things (as Merleau-
Ponty stressed). Further we can no doubt make sense of the idea of information in
various ways, for example as what is made available to the organism in virtue of
complex, dynamical relations between it and the environment (in the manner of
Gibson; cf. Chemero 2009, 107 ff.; Thompson 1995, 57–8). The point I want to
stress here is that however exactly one understands these notions, it does not seem
they need to enunciate anything novel in relation to those autopoietic enactivism
already endorses, namely, the idea of cognition as the sense-making activities of an
organism, yielding the idea of a coupled organism-environment system or umwelt –
something that at least in many higher organisms amounts to a shared, intersubjec-
tive world. As I have argued this is not tantamount to non-language using creatures
having truth-evaluable intentional states. Whether these activities or notions need in
turn to be understood in terms of some notion of content strikes me as a further
issue, of interest,11 but not one that has the kind of foundational implications that
would threaten the use of enactivism by ARTL.
I also want to say here something about concepts and knowledge in relation to the
understanding of perception. Starting with Noë, he has a view of perceptual experi-
ence as imbued not just with content but with concepts, insofar as such experience
always involves a kind of understanding (cf. Noë 2004, 2015). He also defends the
idea of a distinctive kind of knowledge, albeit of a practical, ‘knowhow’ character
as underlying our concept possession and thereby our perceptual encounters with
things in the world. However, having a concept for Noë is not tied to anything dis-
tinctively human or language-like, and hence for him animals can also possess con-
cepts as well as knowhow (if not propositional knowledge ‘that’). Now for Hutto
and Myin, these are all excrescences on the cleanly anti-representationalist fabric
11
As would the discussion of whether certain other ‘mentalistic’ notions should be embraced by
enactivism and if so how. For helpful discussion of various distinctions between the ideas of inten-
tionality, cognition and representation in relation to enactivism, see Schlicht and Starzak (2021).
that enactivism should be, and must accordingly be excised from it (see e.g. Hutto
and Myin 2013, 23 ff.; also Hutto 2005). This disagreement enunciates a large issue
that, though relevant to the issues I have been discussing so far, is dialectially dis-
tinct from these, and would involve too large a digression to go into to here. Briefly
my line on it as follows (see Knowles forthcoming) all genuine knowledge, even
practical knowledge how, is necessarily tied to conceptual capacities and only lan-
guage affords these in the literal sense. I also think, however, that Noë’s view of
perception as involving an active understanding can be divorced from any associa-
tion with ‘knowledge’ or ‘concepts’, and can be understood simply in terms of some
notion of embodied coping of the kind enactivists more generally presuppose (cf.
e.g. Dreyfus 2005). Whether this involves a notion of content is, in line with what
I said above, then a further issue.
This view of perceptual experience, though certainly going beyond anything
McDowell has proposed concerning it, is nevertheless (as I see things anyway) com-
patible with his view that, when it comes to human perception, we must accept the
Kantian idea that a distinctive kind of actualization of our conceptual capacities is
operative. For McDowell, human perceptual experience (though not that of mere
animals) involves a genuine kind of receptivity: a taking in of things as being thus
and so, allowing us to make sense of empirical justification, knowledge and indeed,
if McDowell is right, of objective thought at all. I am not personally convinced of
the need for a distinctive philosophical notion of receptivity of this kind, and have
developed my conception of how experience relates to thought without relying on
it: for my default form of ARTL, there is no distinctive ‘empirical’ kind of justifica-
tion, not even of this conceptualized kind, even though I also think we have to
understand experience as something beyond the mere causing of belief. However,
I am open to the possibility that something like McDowell’s view might prove to be
correct or in some way necessary and do not see anything I have argued for here as
ruling this out.
4.3.3 How Is My View Really (Very) Different

from Global Expressivism?
A final but important worry one might have about my proposal is that it is only
nominally, or at least uninterestingly or insignificantly different from Price’s. To
start with, it might appear that one could say that according to GE there is also a
‘world for us’, explained in terms of our perspective on the world, and a ‘world in
itself’, conceived of as what is at any time presupposed in making sense of such
perspectival world, ultimately in terms of the most abstract, mathematical parts of
physics. Corresponding to his two notions of representation, Price himself thinks
we should also operate with two distinct notions of ‘world’, the i-world and the
e-world (see Chap. 2). For Price the i-world is similar to the Tractarian world of
states of affairs: it is ‘everything that is the case’, as we see things from within our
various practices.12 The other, more substantive notion of world is the ‘e-world’:
‘the natural world’ in something like the Sellarsian sense of what science articulates
and what we causally interact with. The e-world, however, enjoys no ontological
priority for Price: indeed, the e-world is simply the i-world of science (ibid., 55),
and there are other equally ‘real’ i-worlds. Even if this isn’t exactly how I have been
presenting my own view, one might think it comes very close to it, or even that the
two views are in some way notational variants of one other.
Moreover, I have also spoken in terms of us expressing our sensorimotor modes
of interaction with the world, in a way that is presumably meant to parallel the way
in which the accounts of our psychological functioning that Price talks of feature in
his overall project. Both mine and his account, relatedly, prescind from giving con-
stitutive conditions of concept possession in different realms, on pain of introducing
a bifurcation at the i-level of representation, and involve a two-level structure of the
kind we examined in Chap. 2.
Now exactly how different an account must be in order to be an interesting alter-
native is perhaps more a matter of general philosophical temperament than some-
thing subject to a rational assessment. That said, I would maintain that my form of
ARTL is both a significantly distinct and interesting alternative to GE, and indeed
(at least potentially) superior to it.
Before saying why, however, I should stress that what I am proposing here is
meant as a largely friendly amendment to or adjustment of Price’s GE. In being a
form of ARTL, it already owes a lot to Price’s arguments, as these are central to
motivating and articulating ARTL as the generic position I take that to be. Moreover,
insofar as a central part of Price’s GE is a general stress on pluralism, and not just a
‘dualism’ (or at least gradation) between e-representational and non-e-
representational discourses, or between the e-world and i-world, I am still more or
less a faithful adherent. As noted in Chap. 2, there is plausibly a plurality of function
even at the level of i-representation. Moreover, within the world for us, at least, it
seems reasonable to think there will be differences across our different vocabularies
that can be charted as part of an anti-representationalist subject naturalist account.
Different kinds of enactment of different aspects of our environment are presumably
things that enactivist cognitive science will be able to cast light on, as indeed may
the social and human sciences. Indeed, some of these accounts might even mesh
with concrete ideas of Price’s concerning notions like causation and probability,
which he argues have to be understood in terms of our capacity to intervene in the
world (Price 1991, 2005). Exactly how this integration might proceed I leave open
for the present, but the general idea seems plausible (I will, however, have more to
say about causation below).
With that important clarification made, I turn now to what I take to be important
differences between my view and GE. A first important difference is that although
I would not reject the idea that we express our sensorimotor interactions, I have
Though of course, in line with ARTL, this expression must be understood in a deflationary, non-
12
metaphysical way, see Sect. 1.2.

argued we can also see this as something more: an articulation of a world, the world
for us. This in turn is significant insofar as the kind of cognitive science I am appeal-
ing to does not – like Price’s – alienate us from our discursive practices: it allows us
to make good sense of the idea that we are trying to get things right in, say, our
colour or ethical talk as well as that about science or middle-sized dry goods. This
also relates to the lived, experiential aspect of our discourses, as I have noted several
times. Enactivism, unlike at least CCS, builds the subjective into its very core
through the idea of autonomy. In this way, my account is, at least insofar, plausibly
superior to GE.
The different notions of ‘world’ that we operate with, though I think related, also
involves important differences. In line with what I take to be axiomatic to ARTL,
I accept the notion of the i-world as the totality of ‘facts’ (in a deflationary sense).
Insofar as we can talk of a plurality of ‘i-worlds’, corresponding to our different
discourses, one could also see my ‘world for us’ as one such i-world, or a collection
of several i-worlds perhaps, and my ‘world in itself’ as another. One might also
think the latter is close to Price’s e-world. However, for Price the e-world is the
world of what we can e-represent, and for him we can e-represent things like tables
and chairs as well as planets, cells and, it would seem, electrons and quarks, but not
values or possibilities, and we have seen this way of understanding things is prob-
lematic, even from his own perspective. My ‘world in itself’ is much more austere
than his e-world, being restricted or at least delineated in the terms of fundamental
physics, at least in the ideal. It is arguable that if pushed Price might acknowledge
that this was also what he had in mind– a kind of e-world ‘in-the-limit’. A more
significant difference is that I also hold that there is a usefully unitary notion of a
‘world for us’ that includes both things like values and middle-sized dry goods,
given in relation to our particular biological and experiential perspective, and this is
not an idea Price operates with. These points together mean furthermore there is no
distinctively e-representational vocabulary, on the one hand – for Price talk of ordi-
nary material objects and at least ‘the coastal waters’ of science13 – and no vocabu-
laries, on the other, that should be understood in terms of things like internal
reactions projected on to the e-world. It is this distinction, corresponding to the old
expressivist bifurcation between cognitive and non-cognitive discourse, that seems
to inform the explanatory heart of the lower level of GE, as I argued in Chap. 2. On
my view, by contrast, the world for us embraces colours and values as well as ordi-
nary middle-sized goods and their properties (and perhaps some of what science
concerns), whilst the world in itself is what we have to presuppose in order to make
sense of their being such a world, to be articulated in the final analysis by reference
to fundamental physics.
It is true that enactivism does not eschew the idea of information or content com-
pletely, as we have just seen in the previous subsection. Could then Price maintain
this is enough to make sense of certain vocabularies being based on the pick-up of
information and others not? No. The enactivist notion of information is of
13
Things like viruses and energies – the term is Blackburn’s (2013, 79).
something that pervades a whole organism-environment system, thereby also taking

account of sensory and somatic capabilities; it is ‘about’ the perceiver as well as the
environment. Moreover, it will concern what we label with ‘value-laden’ – ethical
or aesthetic – terms as much as things we call ‘tables’ and ‘chairs’. In this way it
seems unlikely that anything corresponding to the traditional expressivist bifurca-
tion will be forthcoming within its explanatory framework.
I have also argued, in Chap. 2, that, regardless of its theoretical credentials in
relation to cognitive science, Price’s appeal to e-representation to demarcate vocab-
ularies fits awkwardly with his view that causation itself is a notion that has to be
understood perspectivally. By contrast, this kind of view would seem to fit, as we
have noted, well with the kind of enactivist underpinning of ARTL I am proposing.
What this yields is the idea that causation is an important part of the world for us (in
general), but not the world in itself articulated by fundamental science.
Having said all this, however, I do finally want to address an important rejoinder
that someone with sympathies for Price might offer at this juncture. Though my
presentation has fronted enactivism as the form of cognitive science that deserves
consideration as an alternative to CCS today, it is probably true to say that the pre-
dictive processing paradigm (PP) is at least as strong a contender in this role. And,
notwithstanding the different interpretations of PP, discussed above, it might seem
to remain a fundamentally representationalist paradigm. There is actually a lot to
argue backwards and forwards about here (see Anderson and Chemero 2013;
Bruineberg et al. 2018 For the case againt representationalism, Gladziejewski 2016;
Williams 2018b for the case for). At the end of the day however a compelling
thought can seem to be – even if one accepts the central enactivist notion of
umwelts – that surely the brain has to be seen as in some way latching on to or being
sensitive to what is out there anyway? As Dan Williams writes: ‘It is vastly implau-
sible that brains could generate time-pressured and adaptively valuable behaviour in
hostile environments without at least partially recovering the objective structure of
such environments’ (ibid., 167). One might perhaps add that if we can in any case
make sense of the idea of world in itself, as I have claimed, that must be because we
are at some level of our cognition sensitive to it.
If we accept this line, the general structure of Price’s picture might seem to
reemerge willy-nilly. Though perhaps e-representational vocabulary does not cor-
respond to the descriptive vocabulary as this is understood by classical expressivism
(that concerning tables and chairs as well as cells and electrical currents), we can
nevertheless use the e-representational/‘projectivist’ scale as a way of understand-
ing a broad structural feature of our different vocabularies. Perhaps that is enough
for Price and all he ever really intended to be committed to.
However, I don’t think acknowledging this undermines the significance of what
I have had to say in this and the previous chapter. To start with, there is still the issue
about how one can understand the very idea of e-representation in this (quasi-)foun-
dational role for Price when causation itself falls on the projectivist side of this
distinction. If that is so I find it at least unclear how we can talk of representation at
all. Moreover, with respect to Williams’ claim above, I would retort as follows: as
long as the scientific account of how the brain and body function in the physical
world explains how the organism physically survives, I don’t really see why one
must see something in the former as representing something in the latter. As noted,
there is a lively debate about this in PP-circles. But given we are starting from enac-
tivism and the idea of (non-represented) organism worlds, the dialectical force of
Williams’ point, for all its apparent intuitiveness, is actually not that clear.
But even if we had to admit that in some sense the brain does reflect i.e. represent
(or e-represent) the external physical world, in some way and at some level, my
arguments would not have been in vain. To start with, we have arrived at a more
nuanced picture of what the e-representational/projectivist distinction amounts to.
More significantly, if enactivism and my use of it to undergird PE is accepted, this
can involve seeing the idea of world for us and a world in itself as the primary dis-
tinction between our vocabularies, rather than some gradation from e-representational
to projectivist ones. This is so, firstly, because of the need to respect the engaged,
first-personal nature of our practice. Moreover, it seems quite conceivable, if enac-
tivism is broadly correct, that the phenomenon of e-representationality might apply
at a level of our functioning that does not map onto or reflect any particular way we
talk, or feel it is important to talk. The categories of the world for us might in other
words reflect a kind of ‘blending’ of the patterns we latch onto in the objective
world and subjective responses that are not in this way objective. Somewhat less
radically, there seems no reason why there should be any neat mapping between
distinctions we make between the various different kinds of objects and properties
we discern in the world for us, on the one hand, and a scale from e-represented to
projected objects or properties, on the other. For example, it seems perfectly con-
ceivable that there are aspects of the world for us that are extremely important to
us – those attended by certain kinds of aesthetic or moral value, say – that would
score low on any notion of e-representationality, and vice versa.
I stress finally again that whether enactivism will prevail is an empirical question
that I cannot hope to give anything like a definitive answer to here. Nevertheless,
I think it does provide a picture of a very different kind from GE and thus, in a rec-
ognizable sense, a non-expressivistic grounding of ARTL that is still subject natu-
ralistic (as well as, one might add, at least when it comes to the world for us, one
that is recognizably pragmatist).
To conclude: I have attempted in this and the previous chapter to show how
ARTL, an anti-representationalist view about thought and language, can be tied to
anti-representationalist positions in cognitive science and in the philosophy of per-
ceptual experience in a (hopefully) illuminating and mutually reinforcing way.
Perhaps this congruence is first and foremost verbal, playing on different senses of
‘anti-representational’, but in view of the common provenance of the notion even
this, it strikes me, would not be wholly nugatory. The tradition of representational-
ism has many strands that have come together at various points in the history of
thinking to provide unified pictures of mind, language and reality. That we can knit
together strands of the resistance to this dominant paradigm, in the way I have
sketched, contributes to making what I have to offer a genuinely anti-
representationalist philosophy – in my opinion.
Chapter 5
Brains in Vats
Abstract This chapter is a relatively self-standing essay that takes up how we

should best understand the famous ‘brains in vats’ (BIV) thought experiment and
relates it to the ideas of Chaps. 3 and 4. Hilary Putnam, another central neo-
pragmatist philosopher, argued we cannot be brains in vats (at least, eternally so)
and used this result as part of his argument against a view he called ‘metaphysical
realism’ (MR): the idea that there an absolute reality consisting of mind-independent
objects, properties, relations, structures etc. with a wholly determinate nature which
set the ultimate standard for our cognitive practices. I have previously argued in
Chaps. 1 and 2 that MR falls along with what Price calls Representationalism, and
for similar reasons to Putnam’s so-called ‘model-theoretic’ arguments; hence I am
also broadly sympathetic with Putnam’s BIV argument, at least understood as a
reductio of MR. In this chapter I present Tim Button’s recent defence of Putnam’s
arguments against MR, but also critique how he responds to them. I then consider
and defend David Chalmers’ view that the BIV scenario (or Matrix scenario, or
simulation hypothesis) is, contra Putnam and Button, epistemically possible, but
does not threaten our everyday knowledge. I finally consider what I call, following
Hubert Dreyfus, the ‘existential phenomenological take’ on the BIV thought experi-
ment which I suggest involves an improvement on Chalmers’ view, and can be seen
as cohering with the idea behind PE that we must draw a distinction between the
experiential world for us and the world in itself.
5.1 Introduction
A central voice in the late twentieth century revival of pragmatist thinking was that
of Hilary Putnam. How do Putnam’s views fit into the kind of anti-representationalist
picture, itself arguably a form of pragmatism (or at least neo-pragmatism), that
I have so far been presenting?
Putnam’s various disputes with Rorty about the nature of truth and justification
over the years are well-known (see e.g. Rorty 1996b for discussion), but here I will

Switzerland AG 2023
473, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26924-0_5
110 5 Brains in Vats
be not concerned with these.1 Nor am I concerned with delineating Putnam’s philo-
sophical view as a whole in all its multifarious developments over the years (though
the next chapter will broaden our purview of this in discussing Putnam’s idea of
conceptual relativity). Rather what I want to do in this chapter is relate how a well-
known philosophical trope, thanks not in small part to Putnam – the thought that we
might be (and always have been) brains in vats, our experience of, as it would seem,
the external world in fact generated by a super computer feeding a virtual reality to
our brains – can be related to the anti-representationalist picture I have developed.
Now Putnam famously used this device to argue against metaphysical realism (MR),
the view that there is a wholly mind-independent reality to which our thought and
talk are ultimately responsible. Putnam argued that, contrary to what we might ini-
tially suppose, we couldn’t actually be brains in vats; and that, since MR is commit-
ted to saying we could, MR is false. In rejecting this view, he is insofar on board
with anti-representationalism about thought and language (ARTL).2 He also argued
against MR with the help of model theory, employed as providing a conception of
what MR amounts to, claiming certain mathematical results showed its notion of
reference thus construed was unsustainable. Here his arguments are reminiscent of
those Price uses to argue against Representationalism.
At the same time, David Chalmers (2005) has used the brains in vats thought
experiment – or, as it is in his version, the idea that we might be in ‘The Matrix’ – to
argue that much of what we believe about ordinary objects could remain true even
if such a scenario obtained. What we would be mistaken about would only be our
conception of the underlying physical or metaphysical nature of reality. This is sug-
gestive, if not identical with, the kind of distinction between a world for us and the
world in itself that phenomenological externalism (PE) involves.
What I want to do in this chapter is co-opt both Putnam’s and Chalmers’ use of
the brains in vats (henceforth ‘BIV’ or ‘BIVs’, depending on context) scenario to
provide a different perspective on, or, if you like, a different route to the conclusions
I have already reached. This is particularly significant insofar as these two thinkers’
views might seem inconsistent, in that one denies while the other affirms that we
might be BIVs. However, I will argue that, while Putnam’s argument employing this
idea as a presupposition of MR is correct, this allows that we might be BIVs in a
sense other than as such as presupposition, and that we can see Chalmers as articu-
lating such a sense. But furthermore, I think Chalmers’ view on BIVs itself needs
correction in the direction of the kind of enactivist anti-representationalist thinking
about experience presented in Chap. 3.
I take my point of departure in Tim Button’s recent discussion and interpretation
of Putnam’s various arguments against MR and subsequent struggles with the real-
ism question (Button 2013). Button himself thinks Putnam does effectively refute
1
In accord with my generally more rationalist and (everyday) realist construal of Rorty, I see these
differences as less significant than Putnam tended to. For supporting interpretation, see
Forster (1992).
2
Though ultimately, as I pointed out in Chap. 1 (footnote 5), he does not subscribe to ARTL but a
closely related Kantian position, at least in my opinion (see further Chap. 6).
5.2 Button on the Limits of Realism 111
MR, and he also rejects Chalmers’ alternative construal of how we might be BIVs.
On this basis, he builds his own position (not identical with any of Putnam’s own),
but he would not class as a defender of ARTL either; rather he claims to propound a
kind of media res between MR and anti-realism (perhaps one could also see it as a
media res between MR and ARTL). Insofar as Button’s view is also a way of under-
standing the significance of the BIV thought experiment which is at odds with ARTL,
I also want to address it. I will be suggesting that it is at least not obviously the best
‘take’ on the thought experiment and, further, that it is plausibly dialectically unstable.
One can see the chapter as a whole as asking how we should best view the sig-
nificance of the BIV thought experiment, and, surveying a range of answers, recom-
mends one that accords with a conclusion we have already reached (thus perhaps
providing some mutual dialectical support to both avenues of reasoning). I start, in
Sect. 5.2, with an overview of Putnam’s arguments against MR as presented by
Button, as well as Button’s ‘take’ on them; I then argue that this is not clearly either
cogent or stable. Section 5.3 argues that Chalmers’ idea that we could be brains in
vats can, pace Button’s arguments to the contrary, be upheld. Section 5.4 takes up
the question of how we should best understand the brains in vats thought experi-
ment, comparing Chalmers with Button and reflecting more fully on what it means
to say that we might be BIVs. In Sect. 5.5 I then present and defend what I call,
inspired by Hubert Dreyfus, the ‘existential phenomenological’ take on the BIV
thought experiment. I end in Sect. 5.6 with a brief postscript on what ‘realism’
amounts to in the light of this discussion in relation to recent work by Dreyfus
together with Charles Taylor on this issue.
5.2 Button on the Limits of Realism
In The Limits of Realism, Button seeks to revitalise and reassess Putnam’s arguments
against MR from the 1970s and 1980s. In the face of what has arguably become a
widely received view, he defends the so-called ‘model-theoretic arguments’ and the
BIV argument as effectively refuting metaphysical or, as he calls it, external realism
(I will stick with ‘metaphysical realism’, or MR). He thinks however that Putnam’s
own various reactions to these arguments are inadequate or unsatisfactory and must,
at least in many cases, be rejected or at least significantly adjusted. Putnam has for
example expressed doubt about the model theoretic arguments on the grounds that
they presuppose a faulty theory of perception; but he is wrong to do so according to
Button, for versions of them and the threat they pose to external realism can survive
adoption of even the kind naïve realism Putnam went over to.3 Perhaps most signifi-
cantly for Button, the arguments do not, he thinks, coherently lead to any kind of
3
I do not discuss Button’s arguments for precisely this claim in the following. As we shall see, I do
in fact think issues about the nature of perceptual experience are relevant to thinking about the
significance of the BIV scenario; however, the connections between these arguments and Button’s
discussions of perceptual experience in relation to the model theoretic argument are quite indirect.
anti-realistic position of the kinds Putnam has defended, such as his explicitly
Kantian ‘internal realism’, his pragmatist ‘justificationism’ or even Putnam’s final
and most considered reaction to MR, conceptual relativism.4 Though there are limits
to how far we can be deceived about our external environment, there is room for
quite radical deception, thinks Button. Moreover, exactly how much deception, and
hence how much realism, we may coherently assume is not something we can hope
to adjudicate once and for all; so we are left with a kind of messy, everyday realism
that defies classification by way of the usual philosophical tropes. A similar messi-
ness applies to the issue of whether metaphysical issues are substantive or not: some
are, some are not, but there is no possibility of drawing this line in a principled man-
ner. (We will return to some of these ideas below.)
Button’s Putnamian arguments against MR (which we will look at very shortly)
strike me for the most part as convincing, and in any case I am not concerned in this
book to raise objections against them (in accord with my ARTL-starting point).
I also find his rejection of explicitly anti-realist positions plausible (again, this is in
accord with ARTL; the latter’s take on the realism-anti-realism issue is the subject
of the following chapter). There is thus, from my point of view, an alluring air of
philosophical wisdom about the kind of aporetic position he ends up endorsing –
and yet it is clearly not a form of ARTL which rejects talk of ‘reality’ completely
(Button also rejects semantic deflationism; see below, also footnote 9). Perhaps this
might be seen as an intuitive advantage over ARTL. I will however be suggesting
that it is from a certain metaphilosophical perspective unstable; indeed, it is not, one
could reasonably hold, a philosophical position at all. Any cracks in the arguments
that lead up to it, however small, are thus liable to attract counterattack by the posi-
tions critiqued, whilst attempts to provide an alternative gloss on them will seem
apt. Further, I think there is plausibly a good sense – at least for all Button says – in
which we could be BIVs (or something similar), even though it is not the sense
assumed by MR. This serves to raise the question of how we should best understand
the significance of the BIV thought experiment.
Before getting to this, however, we should briefly review Putnam’s arguments
against MR, which I will do relying on Button’s presentation. He starts with a
defence of the model theoretic arguments (as he goes on to argue, there are impor-
tant interdependencies between these and the BIV argument).5 Putnam claims
that MR is characterizable by three principles that can be captured in model theory:
–– the independence principle: the world is made up (largely) of mind-independent
objects;
–– the correspondence principle: truth involves a correspondence between words
(or concepts) and external objects, and sets thereof; and
–– the Cartesian principle: even an empirically ideal theory might be radically false.
As far as I can see, nothing he claims in this connection directly impacts anything I want to
argue here.
4
See Sect. 6.4 for discussion of conceptual relativism.
5
Putnam has himself suggested that the two arguments are essentially coterminal, cf. e.g. his (2000).
Putnam then goes on to prove various problematic technical results for MR thus
understood, of which the following two are among the most striking:
–– Indeterminacy: If there is any way to make a theory true by assigning objects and
classes of objects to its term, there are many ways. (Cf. pp. 14 ff.).6
–– Infallibilism: if a theory is empirically ideal, there is way of assigning objects
(etc.) to the language it is framed in terms of such that it comes out true. (Cf.
pp. 17 ff.).
In a word, at least if the model-theoretic conception of it is appropriate, MR looks
to be infected by a crippling indeterminacy of reference which renders it prima facie
incoherent: there is no way of substantiating the Cartesian principle or more gener-
ally of making sense of assigning determinate truth values to a theory.
In response many philosophers have argued that reference can be further con-
strained by various real-world factors, most notably, on the one hand, by some or
other variety of causal and/or naturalistic constraint (causal/informational links,
proper functions and the like; cf. Fodor 1990; Millikan 1984), or, on the other, con-
siderations of ‘eliteness’ according to which certain properties or extensions are
more natural and hence appropriate ‘magnets’ for the reference relation (Lewis
1984). Button then recounts how such moves may in turn be countered by Putnam’s
‘just more theory’ manoeuvre (‘JMT’), which argues that these are impotent to solve
the problems of MR insofar as they, at least understood as empirical theories (in a
broad sense), can be shown to be infected by referential indeterminacy themselves.
Button argues, convincingly to my mind, and contrary to much popular opinion, that
JMT is actually effective against most if not all such attempts to constrain refer-
ence – at least in a way that doesn’t, as Putnam puts it, appeal to ‘magic’, i.e. by just
postulating that we are in contact with the requisite bits of reality, without explaining
how this could possibly be or how we could we have any reason to think it true.
Nor, as Button goes on to show, can the metaphysical realist throw the reference
relation into the Cartesian ‘melting pot’ of things that we might never be absolutely
certain of. For this creates what Button calls ‘Kantian angst’; and while Cartesian
angst (i.e. worrying that our beliefs about the external world might be false) is not
obviously incoherent, Kantian angst – which entails worrying about things like that
my words might not refer to what we standardly take them to do (‘cat’ to cats and
so on), or to nothing at all – certainly would seem so. For how could we then make
sense of that very worry using the language we actually have?7
What should one say by way of reaction to these problems with MR? Button
argues that various forms of anti-realism, including centrally ones defended at vari-
ous times by Putnam, are either implausible or incoherent. Moreover, one cannot,
thinks Button, undermine the model theoretic arguments with more sophisticated
theories of perception (pace Putnam himself). MR as an overall framework for think-
ing about the relationship between language and the world is – he concedes – highly
6
Unreferenced page/chapter numbers in this chapter are to Button (2013).
7
These arguments are similar to those Price employs against Representationalism; see Chap. 1.
intuitive. But if we uphold this intuition, while simultaneously acknowledging there

are apparently very good arguments against MR’s very coherence, then it looks like
we are either in a very bad philosophical predicament, or else something about these
arguments must and can be rejected after all.
Interestingly – and here I broach a first reservation about Button’s overall
approach – it seems what Button’s/Putnam’s arguments show is not in fact that MR
is completely incoherent. What would seem at least one escape route would be
something like the invocation of reference magnetism as a response to referential
indeterminacy, not as an empirical condition on reference, but rather as something
like a transcendental precondition of truth-evaluable talk and thought: given the lat-
ter exists, reference must be determinate. Even if this is in a certain sense ‘desper-
ate’ as Button calls similar responses (pp. 61–2), as well as appearing anti-naturalistic
by any reasonable standard – perhaps tantamount to appealing to magic – it is
important (a) that it is not, obviously at least, totally incoherent (b) that MR is moti-
vated by strong intuitions and (c) that Button himself does not end up with much of
a positive position of his own. Arguably, then, MR might see itself as still ‘on the
table’ even if one accepts the JMT manoeuvre. We will return to similar issues
related to the dialectical stability of Button’s position below.8
Proceeding now with Button’s overarching argument, he thinks we can get out of
the above predicament by coming to see that MR is in fact not that intuitive after all.
For whilst the independence and correspondence principles must be upheld – it
would be madness to deny them and not even any avowed anti-realist has ever done
so, claims Button (pp. 65–70)9 – the Cartesian principle can and must be rejected.
One standard way of expressing the Cartesian principle is that we might, though we
think we live in a world of tables, chairs, trees and rivers, in fact be envatted brains
fed impulses by a giant computer that simply simulates this reality. This is where the
BIV argument comes into play, which Button renders as follows (p. 118):
–– A BIV’s word ‘brain’ does not refer to brains
–– My word ‘brain’ does refer to brains.
–– So: I am not a BIV.
Briefly, Button argues for the first premise on the grounds that nothing in the world
of the BIV – ‘Brian’ – puts him in a position to think about brains, whilst the sec-
ond is secured by the fact that if we try to imagine a situation in which my word
‘brain’ does not refer to brains, it must do so anyway in order for that supposition to
8
Given ARTL’s commitment to the (broad) naturalism that is framing my overall discussion this
might not seem like a very significant reservation. However, the underlying point is that Button’s
alternative is not – in my view – much of a position at all, and thus is dialectically unstable in the
face of alternatives.
9
In fact this claim seems very debatable, and Button does little to justify it. Think for example of
something as familiar as Dummett’s anti-realism about the past (Dummett 1978). Further, it seems
that semantic deflationists, including supporters of ARTL, who see themselves neither as (meta-
physical) realists nor anti-realists, would not accept correspondence, at least in a substantive sense.
Finally, the take on the brains in vats thought experiment I end up endorsing could not be said to
accept independence in a straightforward way.
make sense. The argument is underwritten by Leibniz’s Law so the conclusion

would seem inescapable if the premises are accepted.
Button goes on to argue against various alternative positions that react to the
above by maintaining that, whilst we indeed couldn’t be a BIV, we could in some
way still be radically out of touch with the way the world is, at least in its fundamen-
tal nature – ‘sober scepticism’, ‘dead sober scepticism’, ‘bubble scepticism’ and
‘metaphysical scepticism’ to name the most prominent ones. As far as I can see the
two most significant families of view here are, on the one hand, those that stress that
though we cannot be BIVs, the possibility that we are radically out of touch with
reality remains (call this ‘deep scepticism’); and, on the other, those that allow that
though we are not and could not be of touch with reality in the sense of medium-
sized dry goods like tables and chairs we could be living in a world that is meta-
physically very different from what we take it to be – something like a computer
simulation or ‘bit’-like world rather than a concrete, material reality (call this ‘meta-
physical scepticism’, here following Button).
Deep scepticism’s central idea has been expressed by Crispin Wright as follows:
The real spectre to be exorcised concerns the idea of a thought standing behind our thought
that we are not BIVs, in just the way that our thought they are mere BIVs would stand
behind the thought… of actual BIVs that ‘We are not BIVs’. (Wright 1992, 93, quoted by
Button on p. 137)
On this line, we are not directly deluded; we are in contact with trees etc., and hence
are not BIVs. Nevertheless there remains a sense that we might be in a relevantly
analogous situation to Brian (i.e. someone who is).
According to Button, however powerfully intuitive this thought is – I will call it
in the following the deep intuition10 (that which potentially leads to deep scepti-
cism) – it fails to convince for two reasons. To start with, to make sense of it still
seems to require a magical theory of reference; for if this is required for Brian to
make sense of brains then it seems something similar must apply to us if our posi-
tion is relevantly like Brian’s. ‘For argument’s sake, however,’ says Button ‘I shall
10
In calling it this I am suggesting that, however inchoate, it does have the status of precisely that,
i.e. a very compelling intuition – something Button himself does not deny (see below in the text).
I think this is related to the fact that, though we may know we are in fact not BIVs, nothing in
Putnam’s argument shows that we might not have been BIVs, or that there is an incoherence in the
idea that there should turn out to be a community of BIVs. The deep intuition now manifests itself
as the thought if the relevant thinkers in these scenarios have the deep intuition, then they are surely
‘onto something’ – even if it is ineffable for them. And then if they can be onto something, why
can’t we? Of course, the argument that we are not BIVs turns on the fact that we can make no sense
of what it is they are on to – but I contend that that does not extinguish the intuition. As we shall
now see, Button offers a further argument against the deep intuition, but I would aver that this does
not abrogate the deep intuition’s force either – even if one does not provide what I shall call a
substantation of the intuition which shows why this further argument fails (as I think for example
metaphysical scepticism and my own phenomenological take do). In other words, I think the deep
intuition, though necessarily inchoate, just has to be acknowledged as such, and that then, from a
certain metaphilosophical perspective, it would be at least desirable to respect it – in a way Button
does not. This point will be important to my argument in Sect. 5.3.
grant that we have some grip on the required attempt to say the unsayable’ (p. 138).
He then offers a further consideration against deep scepticism due to Adrian Moore
(1994): there are only two thinkers in the BIV-scenario; us, the BIVs (Brian and his
cohort), but no-one else (p. 138). Imagine we have travelled to the land of BIVs and
are looking in on Brian. He thinks he is doing the same, but he is not actually look-
ing at a thinker at all. Given this, we cannot make sense – even in an ineffable way –
of the idea that there might be a view that stands to ours as ours does to Brian’s; for
Brian is not considering a thinker at all in as it were pitying the benighted ‘creature’
he thinks is duped; he is merely deluded. If I consider that I might be in a Brian-like
predicament, I cannot make sense of Brian being in such a predicament, for he
won’t exist.
Turning now to metaphysical scepticism, this line is similar to deep scepticism in
allowing we are not deluded about our ordinary environment but instead of suggest-
ing that we might nevertheless be deeply deluded in some way, it rather more con-
cretely construes the BIV scenario as articulating a sense in which we might be
ignorant about, in particular, the deep or underlying metaphysical nature of reality.
This is Chalmer’s line. Against this, Button only stresses the ineffability of the sup-
position, that is, how it seems to depend on a magical theory of reference; he doesn’t
deploy the ‘only two thinkers’ argument, even though as far I can see it would be
equally applicable. I will return to this in Sect. 5.3.
In these ways Button takes Putnam to have successfully refuted MR by showing
how its commitment to Cartesianism in the form of the thought that we might all be
BIVs is incoherent. However, as already noted, he does not think this licences any
substantive form of anti-realism. Moreover, as he goes on to argue, though the eter-
nal BIV scenario might indeed be incoherent, there are other sceptical scenarios that
certainly do not seem so at all. One of these is just envatment being inflicted on
some individual, or even all of us, in the very recent past: how do we know we have
not been envatted last night? If this were so, when we say ‘we are not BIVs’ we
would be referring to brains and vats, but be wrong. Of course after a while we
would stop referring to brains etc. and hence probably be right in thinking ‘we are
not BIVs’, but Button sees no hope in deriving some principles for telling us when
this would happen. Somewhat similarly (see pp. 149 ff.), while it makes no sense to
imagine the universe might have an extent of just 1 m outside of me – what would
‘1 m’ in such a scenario mean? – it seems clearly to make sense to suppose it had an
extent of (say) a 100 light years. So the question, How do we know the universe
exists beyond 100 light years? seems a meaningful one. In general, everyday real-
ism, and not any kind of anti-realism, is to be embraced, but it itself shades off into
forms of realism that are much closer to MR and hence incoherent; and where the
boundary goes, nobody knows, or could ever know.
Though there is much else of interest in Button’s book, the above outlines the
main overall structure of it and its philosophical end-point: a kind of studied aporia.
Now I wouldn’t want to deny that this is perhaps a reasonable and maybe even in
some ways attractive stance. I think nevertheless it is vulnerable in being somewhat
awry from a certain metaphilosophical point of view. Philosophy is arguably, ide-
ally at least, an enterprise with the following kind of methodological structure. It
5.3 Metaphysical Scepticism 117
starts with compelling, if sometimes rather inchoate intuitions which we in the first
instance attempt to scrutinize and precisify. Those that past muster we then seek
reconcile with one another, with the ultimate aim of giving some sort of overall
hypothesis or model or theory in which as many of them are preserved and hang
coherently together as possible. In light of this, the worry about Button’s aporetic
stance is that it demurs at the final stage of this constructive project – and hence that
it is, not bad philosophy, but not philosophy (of the relevant ideal kind at least) at
all.11 Consequently, any other position or programme that might see itself as still in
the game, however tenuously, will naturally want to re-enter the fray and try to re-
establish itself. Now, I am rather convinced by Button’s Putnam-inspired tirade
against MR, and in any case, in view of my commitment to ARTL, would not want
to go in for a resurrection of that. But might there be other ways of reconstructing
our intuitions about the possibility of being BIVs into some kind of coherent theory,
even after we have rejected MR and accepted that we cannot be BIVs in its sense?12
In the following section, I will look more closely at metaphysical scepticism with a
view to suggesting there can.
5.3 Metaphysical Scepticism
In this section I will present in more detail how Chalmers understands metaphysical
scepticism (henceforth MS) and defends it in relation to Putnam’s arguments. I will
then go through how Button might on the basis of the critique I related in the previ-
ous section respond to this defence. I will then suggest a way of understanding MS
that allows it to survive this, and discuss the significance of this understanding in
relation to Button’s project (a discussion that continues into Sect. 5.4).
Chalmers argues that the BIV or – as is his focus – matrix-hypothesis13 should not be
viewed as a sceptical hypothesis but a metaphysical hypothesis concerning the wider
nature of reality. If I am in the matrix, my beliefs about my everyday surroundings – that
there is a cup to the right, that I have hair on my head and so on – are still true; for they
are grounded in my cup-like, hair-on-head-like and so on kind of experiences, and these
in turn are correct insofar as they vary systematically with some causal structure out
there in the world – only ones whose underlying nature is rather different from what I or
at least my scientific community standardly assumes them to be. Chalmers notes the
similarity to Putnam’s view; like him, Putnam also allows that a BIV/matrix-dweller
11
I do not mean by this to be denigrating Button’s work from a purely professional point of view
of course! And I take it of course he would disagree with my metaphilosophical claim.
12
That is, accepted Button’s construal of Putnam’s argument against MR as based on the model-
theoretic arguments backed up by the BIV-argument. This leaves room I believe, as we shall see,
for a different kind of envatment hypothesis.
13
Note I am abstracting away from any assumptions about external agency (malign or otherwise)
being involved in this. Though Chalmers operates with the idea of a ‘creator’ as far as I can see
nothing hinges on this.
might have largely true beliefs. However, Chalmers rejects Putnam’s argument that we
could not be in the matrix. While Putnam’s argument for this may work for specific
metaphysical hypotheses involving terms like ‘brain’ (a natural kind term) or ‘The
Matrix’ (a proper name for a film) it cannot rule out the generic idea of being envatted,
where ‘this simply says that I have a cognitive system that receives input from and sends
outputs to a computer simulation of a world.’ (Chalmers 1996, 160–1). More generally,
his argument, Chalmers claims, does not rely on claims in the theory of reference, such
as semantic externalism (which Putnam of course independently championed), and sug-
gests that we should rather let our thoughts on the latter be led by our thoughts on first
order or (as some might put it) ‘metaphysical’ issues (ibid.).
As we have seen, Button claims MS is just as ineffable a worry as the original
BIV worry. In addition he has the ‘just two thinkers’ argument from Moore against
deep scepticism. He does not deploy this against MS, but perhaps he should. How
would Chalmers react to these?
To start with the second, it seems that he could simply reject the idea that there
are only two kinds of thinker in the BIV scenario – or at least have to be. Given the
background assumptions in play, there seems nothing in principle problematic about
the idea of nested ‘universes’ in which Brian and his cohort themselves relate to
‘envatted’ beings, at least if we can understand these more like ‘Sim’-like characters
wholly contained within a computer simulation.14 These characters might in turn
relate to what for them are ‘envatted’ beings and so on and so forth, with bit-like
structures iteratively embedding many similar such sub-structures. If the world can
contain many levels of structure and ‘envatted’ beings in this way, these beings need
be no more benighted, given Chalmers’ reasoning and conception of experience,
than either we, or Brian, are about our respective environments.
What about the more fundamental objection that the idea of being envatted is
ineffable for the being who is in that situation? One way in which I think Chalmers
would or could respond here would be to invoke general background knowledge
from mathematics and science along the lines suggested by Nick Bostrom (2003) (a
paper which he mentions in his own on the matrix). According to Bostrom, if we
allow that some of our distant descendants will be able to run enormously powerful
computer simulations of reality, as he suggests is not implausible, we should take
seriously the idea that the ‘reality’ we think we are inhabiting is bit-like and that we
are Sim-like data structures within it. Indeed, Bostrom argues this scenario is in fact
likely, conditional on his assumption. Of course, one can argue back and forth about
the details of the technology and the probabilities here. But my point here is that
science itself suggests that it is a genuine – epistemic and, for all we know, meta-
physical – possibility that we are envatted.
One might respond to this that Putnam already acknowledged this in his argu-
ment that we cannot be brains in vats: while physics does not rule out this possibil-
ity, philosophy shows it is not genuine. However, I think this response misconstrues
14
The assumptions mentioned include (for the moment) that there is nothing in principle that
excludes such characters having conscious experiences, that is, that conscious experience is realis-
able in non-organic substrates.
5.3 Metaphysical Scepticism 119
the dialectical situation here. As we have noted, Chalmers shrugs off Putnam’s wor-
ries most fundamentally on the grounds that we should let our thinking about pos-
sibility be steered directly by first-order considerations rather than the theory of
reference in arguing that we could be envatted. Now without further ado this leads
at best to a kind of stand-off with Putnam and Button. So long as being envatted is
merely a remote, ‘philosophical’ possibility – something we cannot a priori rule
out – as Putnam originally conceived of it, what reason could there be to not restrict
such possibility further by way of another a priori theory, now concerning
reference?15 However, if science can provide positive reasons to think the apparently
remote possibility is much less remote than we might in the first instance think it is,
then it becomes a lot less clear that we can just roll out more a priori philosophy to
rule it out – at least if one is a naturalist.16
More radically, we might even think there could be more everyday observational
information that bore on this possibility. Consider the following cartoon17:
15
By ‘a priori’ here I mean simply relatively a priori, or not part of science, or some such, not
absolutely given.
16
Cf. Price: ‘to be a philosophical naturalist is to believe that philosophy is not simply a different
enterprise from science, and that philosophy should defer to science, where the concerns of the two
disciplines coincide’ (2004, 184).
17
URL: http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/301_999/376.html (accessed 4th
February 2021).
I don’t mean this to be taken very seriously! Nevertheless, the very idea that liv-
ing in a (non-illusory) simulation could be empirically detectable, somehow or
other, does not seem incoherent; indeed, it happens in The Matrix film. Putting the
last two points together, imagine this: Once in a very rare while people start experi-
encing strange quiverings and distortions in the physical objects around them. The
physicists and statisticians get to work and the best explanation they can get to
match the data, mindful of Bostrom’s argument, is… envatment! The basic idea
seems so compelling that it is hard to see how an a priori argument from philosophy
could rule it out.
I should also stress here that, as I am understanding Chalmers’ position here it is
not (or at least need not be) a version of MR: hence it need not reject Putnam’s argu-
ment against MR (or arguments). We can see the latter as essentially a reductio of
MR, premised on a kind of externalism about reference that MR accepts. That com-
bination of views leads to incoherence. But this does not mean, given a different
overall framework, that we couldn’t be BIVs, in the sense Chalmers argues for and
as developed above.18
Given such a background, should we conclude that we could be BIVs (or in the
matrix, or Sim-characters in a giant computer simulation)? And if so, is Button
wrong? I think he would say he is not, or at least has not been shown to be so, and
that what I have been promulgating in this section misses his point. Of course, if we
can empirically detect it or reason our way to it, then perhaps envatment is not inco-
herent; but then it is not that kind of envatment he is concerned with, but rather one
in which our theory is empirically ideal yet we still remain deceived. In that sense,
we could not be BIVs.
As I have said, I have no quarrel with this last claim. But to function as a defence
of Button’s take on the BIV thought experiment – understood simply as the idea we
might be eternally envatted brains (in the matrix etc.) – we must ask what the under-
lying significance of precisely this thought experiment is, or might be. On Button’s
understanding of it, the claim ‘we are BIVs’ is necessarily false whenever we speak
or think it; however, on MS’s understanding, the claim might be true. There would
thus seem to be a genuine issue here as to which of these ‘takes’ is philosophically
most illuminating or fecund. At the very least, if MS articulates a theoretically
interesting way of thinking about what we mean in talking of reality in the ways we
18
I am saying then that Chalmers’ understanding of the BIV thought experiment depends on reject-
ing semantic externalism? Not exactly. As I understand it, the view rather simply motivates itself
through informed reflection on what would appear to be possible and/or likely, letting the semantic
chips fall where they may. Now if the resultant picture does turn out to be in conflict with semantic
externalism, then the latter might be something one would want to reject, but the point I have been
trying make here is that such views about reference, even if otherwise well-supported, would not
in any case automatically undercut the take on the BIV thought experiment that Chalmers’ view
involves. For the record, I do not myself subscribe to semantic externalism and think it is plausibly
committed to the Representationalism/MR package (pace Putnam, who championed the former
and rejected the latter), but the reasons for that would have to spelled out more fully on another
occasion (very briefly, it seems to me that semantic externalism depends on the idea of a deeper
reality underlying our meanings that determine the latter independently of use).
5.4 Could We Really Be BIVs? 121
do, it seems clear that it involves an alternative understanding of the significance of

the BIV thought experiment to Button’s that should be considered even if one
accepts Putnam’s use of the idea to argue against MR. Indeed, from the perspective
of the metaphilosophical picture I outlined at the end of Sect. 5.2, one could argue
that it has an advantage over Button’s take by stressing the intuition of the deep
sceptic (the ‘deep intuition’): that somehow or other my plight might be relevantly
like that of Brian’s. Now insofar as one does not concretize or substantiate this
intuition in some direction or other it is probably not unreasonable to see it as rather
unstable (if not entirely toothless). But MS precisely does seek to do that, in the
manner sketched above (i.e. through the possibility of empirical detection and
Bostrom’s arguments). So an advantage of MS over Button’s take is that it does
some justice to the deep intuition, inchoate though it may be, and does not just toss
it aside.
In sum, the idea that we might be envatted can survive Putnam’s argument that
we cannot be BIVs, in the sense MR assumes is possible. And the idea that we live
in a world that in its deep nature is radically different from what we take it to be, or
have taken it to be, can live on. The question then is: If this line gives us some kind
of philosophical insight (or peace), then why shouldn’t we stress it as the real lesson
of the BIV thought experiment?
5.4 Could We Really Be BIVs?
I think the discussions of the previous section are helpful in suggesting how we
might ‘re-gestalt’ the BIV scenario in a way that would help us to arrive at a more
satisfactory end-point then Button provides in understanding its significance.
Nevertheless, the antecedent of the question above is perhaps still dubious – some-
thing I am sure Button at least would feel. From his point of view, however coherent
or significant MS might be on its own terms, it does not speak to his concerns: in
particular, his arguments that while the original BIV scenario (that we might be
eternally envatted) does not make sense, various less radical but still distinctively
sceptical scenarios do. That is, even if we grant that MS or something like it is via-
ble understood as an abstract hypothesis of science, since it involves a sense of
envatment different from that (or those) Button is operating with, how can it go very
far towards displacing Button’s thinking otherwise and his aporetic conclusions?
One reason is that if Button’s take is not really a philosophical view at all, in a
certain sense – as I suggested above – but MS is, then the latter is insofar a better
lesson to draw from the BIV thought experiment. That of course is not decisive,
though I don’t think it counts for nothing. I will also suggest shortly that a supporter
of MS concerned to promote her own take over Button’s might raise an independent
and more substantive problem with the way the latter is motivated. But before doing
that I want to bring another point into play.
I have hitherto been writing as if we, or at least beings relevantly like us could,
in some real, substantive, ‘metaphysical’ sense, be or (in our case) have been BIVs,
or in the matrix or Sim-like characters or whatever.19 However, ultimately I take it

that no-one has ever adduced any convincing reason to think that this is true. Rather,
assuming it is – at least prima facie – philosophers have theorised on what allegedly
follows. Now, as I have indicated, I think the kinds of intuitions these thought exper-
iments generate should be considered – that doing so is part of what it is to do phi-
losophy. But can we, while still taking account of these intuitions, make the lessons
we draw from them less beholden to commitment to the actual possibility (however
remote) of the various scenarios?
I think we can do this, but not on the two understandings of the significance of
the BIV thought experiment so far considered; and that this counts against them.
I must clarify what I mean by suggesting that it might not (actually) be possible that
we or similar beings could have been/be BIVs, or more generally envatted. One
might, in view of the position on experience and cognitive science I promulgated in
the previous chapter, think I would hold something rather stronger than this: that it
is positively not possible that BIVs could exist. As the enactivists Evan Thompson
and Diego Cosmelli have argued, ‘any adequately functional “vat” would be a suro-
gate body, that is, [...] the so-called vat would be no vat at all, but rather an embod-
ied agent in the world’ (Thompson and Corelli 2011, 172). In view of the endogenous
activity of the brain,
[w]hatever life-sustaining system we construct, the functioning of its every part, as well as
its overall coordinated activity, must be kept within a certain range by the nervous system
itself in order for the brain to work properly. Hence the external control perspective is not
generally valid. Instead, our life-sustaining system and the brain must be seen as recipro-
cally coupled and mutually regulating systems. (Ibid., 170)
I agree with this; however, I think it would not for that reason be appropriate to
conclude that envatment is impossible. Thompson and Cosmelli precisify, after their
remark about the vat being a surrogate body, that they ‘don’t mean a body like ours
in its material composition, but one sufficiently like ours in its functional organiza-
tion’ (ibid.). In view of this, as well as the possibility of exchanging the BIV with
the matrix or Sims characters scenarios, it seems to me that the idea of envatment
can survive in a recognizable sense. We could, for all Thompson and Cosmelli say,
be like Brian (in a suitably functional vat), Neo (from The Matrix) or something like
a Sims character, blissfully ignorant about the underlying nature of the world.
Whether that would be anything to be very concerned about is another matter, but
for the moment it is the sheer metaphysical possibility we are concerned with.
A further point worth stressing is that the issue here is not a question of whether
our experience supervenes on the brain, or on the brain plus the body/environment.
Allowing that we could be BIVs is fully consistent with thinking that, if this were
the case, the brain would have to be in quite different states over time to sustain the
same kind of experience we have in the un-envatted condition.
To be clear: though Putnam aims to show we couldn’t be BIVs, he doesn’t argue that beings like
19
Brian couldn’t exist, or that we could not, counterfactually, have been in Brian’s situation.
5.4 Could We Really Be BIVs? 123
Finally, though I do agree with Thompson and Cormelli, the reasons for this are
in a broad sense empirical: they derive from our best science of the nature of experi-
ence. And here there is of course room for dissent, for arguing that consciousness
does supervene on the brain for whatever reasons (see e.g. Clark 2009), and hence
that we could in a significant sense be BIVs (a fortiori, since we would then, argu-
ably, just be our brains). These may not be good reasons (as Thompson and Cormelli
argue, see pp. 176 f.), but the issue is not clear cut.
In light of all this, I would not rule out that we could have been envatted, or that
there could be/have been envatted beings phenomenally like us. On the other hand,
it nevertheless strikes me that it is not clear either that envatment in these senses is
(actually) possible: that we could reproduce the rich kind of experience that we
enjoy in an envatted brain or similar. Some might argue that if physical reality is
computable, then in essence we just are something like Sims characters anyway
(this seems to be Chalmers’ view). But, again, the antecedent is uncertain, not
something we know to be the case.
Others might claim that all that is at stake here is something like conceivability.
Any of the ways in which I have allowed that envatment might be possible is at least
conceivable, and it is only that sense of possible that we need to acknowledge. So
we know, in the relevant sense, that envatment is possible.
Being conceivable is not trivial. As Thompson and Cormelli argue, it is plausibly
not even conceivable that a completely disembodied brain might continue to operate
in the way it does and give rise to our experience at an instant, as in something like
the famous Boltzman thought experiment,20 for this mode of operation is too inti-
mately related to things going on around the brain and across time to make such an
isolation meaningful.21 However, there is still it seems to me a clear distinction
between what is conceivable and what is genuinely metaphysically possible – what
might actually obtain or could have obtained (as judged relative to our knowledge).
It is surely not just conceivable but possible that the earth should never have existed;
we know this. But whilst it is conceivable that pigs might fly (given certain anatomi-
cal and physiological changes), we would surely not want to claim it is really pos-
sible: perhaps it is, but perhaps it isn’t. Let us admit that envatment is possible in
that it is conceivable, just as it is conceivable that pigs might fly. It doesn’t follow
that either is really, actually possible.22
It seems clear, however, that Chalmers’ MS is committed to the actual or real
possibility of envatment. If it were not, if it were merely an idle speculation,
20
See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain for an explanation of this.
21
Similarly, one can argue that philosophical zombies are, in spite of first appearances, not really
conceivable (cf. Dennett 1991).
22
Am I just saying that it is not clear that it is nomologically possible? No, for as I see things that
way of framing the issue presupposes the distinguishability of the nomological from the meta-
physical in a way that I would not necessarily want to sign up to. I want to leave the sense of
‘(metaphysically, actually) possible’ as intuitive as possible here; it strikes me that this is reason-
able, and that the distinction I have drawn is defensible without going into further questions about
what we mean by it.
− merely something conceivable – then the idea, seemingly motivated by science in

a broad sense, that underlying reality might, for all we know (i.e. epistemically), be
otherwise than we take it to be will just not seem very compelling. This might sound
like good news for Button’s take on the BIV thought experiment, vis à vis MS, inso-
far as it does not need to think eternal envatment is actually possible (it functions for
him merely as a presupposition of MR). However, as we have seen, Button’s take
goes a lot further than just saying this. And here I claim that Button also needs to
assume the real possibility of the various thought experiments he uses in motivating
his view. If I am to worry that I might have been envatted last night, for example,
I should have reason to think that is a real – however remote – possibility. Similarly,
if I am to worry the universe might be only 100 light years wide, this needs to be a
genuine possibility. These thought experiments seem in this respect on a par with
Chalmers’ (and Bostrom’s) reflections on envatment: reality, or certain parts of it,
really could be or could have been thus and so, contrary to how we standardly take
it or them to be, and we can’t be totally sure they are not so.
So both Button and MS need to operate with the idea of the genuine possibility of
at least some of the scenarios they consider, and hence neither can be seen as having
an advantage over the other on this score. I think this is problematic for both, but let us
assume for the moment that the scenarios are in this way possible. A further question
is how these scenarios might function in motivating the respective views. In answering
this I think we can see how the supporter of the MS take may have a retort to the riposte
I put in Button’s mouth at the start of this section. Thus, consider the popular move-
ment in contemporary epistemology known as ‘neo-Mooreanism’ (cf. e.g. Pritchard
2012), which builds on G.E. Moore’s idea that we can refute sceptical hypotheses,
such as that there is no external world by affirming some everyday proposition like
‘I have hands’, and inferring thereupon that the sceptical hypothesis is false. The idea
behind neo-Mooreanism is that this can only work where the sceptical scenario being
proposed is not independently motivated in some way. Now, at least as supplemented
by Bostrom’s thought and what I said in Sect. 5.3, it seems reasonable to think that
neo-Moorean reasoning will be ineffective against MS.23 However, in relation to
Button’s less radical thought experiments, such as that I might recently have been
envatted or that the universe ends 100 lights years away, it seems such reasoning would
be effective (in the second case being based, presumably, on well-established physical
and astrophysical principles). As we have noted, in Putnam’s original argument, the
supposition that we are BIVs is not itself susceptible to Moorean refutation, as it does
not have anything to do with questions about actual possibility or knowledge, relating
rather to the very conceptual presuppositions of MR. However, if I merely whimsically
reflect that I might, as a matter of some remote if admittedly real possibility, have been
envatted yesterday, plausibly all that is required to reject that thought is that I know
I have hands, and infer thereupon that I was not envatted yesterday.
23
Exactly what the Moorean proposition here would be, given MS does not entail we don’t have
hands, is somewhat less clear, but something like ‘physical reality is substantially solid and mate-
rial’ might serve the purpose.
5.5 The Existential Phenomenological Take 125
In sum, Button cannot demur at the significance of the MS take on the grounds
that it considers something to be genuinely possible that we have really no reason to
take to be so, for his own position is dependent on similar assumptions himself.
Moreover, there is a plausible epistemological theory that threatens to show many
of his own scenarios are mere whims, in a way the MS scenario is not (in principle
anyway). Button could of course object to neo-Mooreanism; and if successful, his
concerns would remain viable even while admitting the central thesis of MS – and
perhaps thereby also constitute a deeper philosophical position and perhaps the best
take on the BIV thought experiment. But what I have said here at least suggests that,
in a debate with MS on this score, Button cannot be so insouciant as the riposte sug-
gested he might be.
That is one thing I want to establish. But I also want to go a step further and ask
what would remain of the BIV thought experiment if we did indeed – as I think we
probably should – drop the assumption that the various scenarios under consider-
ation are really or actually possible. If one does not assume such possibility, can one
nevertheless motivate an interesting ‘take’ on the BIV thought experiment (or envat-
ment more generally), viewed merely as something conceivable? This would aim to
do justice to the intuition of the deep sceptic that reality might, for all we know, at
some level be very different from what we standardly take it to be (‘the deep intu-
ition’), providing a stable understanding of this. I suggested above that MS is one
way of achieving such a stable understanding, and insofar was preferable to Button’s
view. But whatever one makes of the clash between those two ‘takes’ on the BIV
thought experiment, is there a way of making use of the deep intuition that does not
assume envatment is actually possible?
I think there is at least one. If we can make this out as coherent, then a good case
will have been made for its consideration as another take on the BIV thought experi-
ment, insofar as it certainly seems to be a plus to make no use of the idea of the
actual possibility of the scenarios considered. Whether it is, all things considered,
superior to the other takes is more complicated matter, related not least to what has
been said in Chaps. 3 and 4. But of course putting positions clearly on the table is
an important philosophical task in itself.
5.5 The Existential Phenomenological Take
This section will seek to elaborate what I will call the ‘existential phenomenological
take’ or simply ‘phenomenological take’ on the BIV thought experiment. According
to this, what the BIV thought experiment fundamentally points up is broadly the
same distinction between the world for us and the world in itself that I argued for in
Chaps. 3 and 4. With ARTL as our background theory of language and thought,
neither need nor indeed can be seen as constituting absolute reality, and hence there
is no threat in the thought experiment to the idea that we might be out of touch with
anything or that our everyday categories are illusory. This is similar to Chalmers’
idea. It agrees that if we were envatted, this would make no difference to the truth
of our beliefs about everyday matters. Where it differs is in explicitly construing this
in terms of a distinction between the world for us, which would remain the same
under envatment, and the world in itself, which would differ. This distinction is
independently motivated by the character of experience and enactivist cognitive sci-
ence, in turn understood in the light of ARTL. In this way, moreover, it does not rely
on the real possibility of envatment, in the way Chalmers’ does. Even in the actual
world (as it were), experience reveals its own world: it is not a matter of internal
qualia or representational states standing in relation to something outside of it. At
the same time, this world is not the world in itself.
Dreyfus has defended a view on experience very close to that defended by enac-
tivists on the basis of an interpretation of the ‘existential phenomenologists’,
Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. In an article with Stephen Dreyfus, he considers the
consequences of the possibility of envatment for this kind of view (Dreyfus and
Dreyfus 2005), concluding that:
[w]hat the phenomenologist can and should claim is that, in a Matrix world that has its
causal basis in bodies in vats outside that world, the Matrix people whose brains are getting
computer-generated inputs and responding with action outputs are directly coping with
perceived reality, and that reality isn’t inner. Even in the Matrix world, people directly cope
with chairs by sitting on them, and they need baseballs to bring out their batting skills.
(Ibid., 75–6)
Moreover, as they go on to explain, not only would our experience of things not be
inner; our whole being would be just as we take it to be: we would not be brains (or
bodies) in vats, even though this might be the physical basis of our conscious and
experienced world; we would be living, acting beings in a real (albeit matrix) world.
This strikes me as plausible. However, saying this does not require that the matrix
scenario be considered really possible, merely that it is conceivable. The thought
experiment simply gives dramatic expression to the two worlds idea I have already
defended.
Someone might object that it unclear how exactly the BIV-intuition (or envat-
ment intuition) is playing any essential role in my argument for this distinction.
After all, I am (I say) not really suggesting that, for all we know, we might be envat-
ted, as Chalmers is. In effect then all we have is what I called above ‘the deep intu-
ition’: the intuition that things might be radically different at some level from how
we standardly take them to be. This needs stabilizing, I have argued. But isn’t all
I am offering to do this just a repetition of the claim behind PE, that there are two
worlds, one the everyday world of experience, one that of fundamental physics?
That we might be envatted seems to be playing no role.
However, this rendering doesn’t seem fair to me. I am not ruling out the possibil-
ity that we might be envatted; it is conceivable. If it were the case, we would not be
BIVs, any more than if we assume we are not. So we would not need to worry about
any argument that we can make no sense of the supposition, as Button, as we have
seen, alleges is the case in relation MS. Now I argued above that MS can avoid that
charge by making envatment a kind of empirical hypothesis. I think we can retain
that idea but strengthen it under the existential phenomenological take insofar as the
latter rejects any interpretation of envatment which involves denying we are
5.6 Postscript on Dreyfus and Taylor’s Realism 127
embodied creatures in a world. But doing so is still a way of substantiating the deep
intuition. We can still reflect that we might, conceivably if not in fact, be envatted –
and that the underlying reality would then be very different from what we take it to
be. At the same time, given the two worlds idea, we can say this without worrying
that our ordinary beliefs and experience would be falsified, and without relying in
this substantiation on the idea that such envatment is really possible.24
The existential phenomenological take does then, plausibly, substantiate the
deep intuition, and does so moreover in a way that can both respect Putnam’s argu-
ments, and not assume anything about the possibilities in question being actual
ones. In this way it seems to me it has a lot going for it in relation to both Button’s
and Chalmers’ takes on the BIV thought experiment. Of course, some might think
there are other – and more compelling – reasons to reject it. The idea of there being
two worlds might seem just absurd; my discussion in Sect. 4.2 can be seen as pro-
viding something like a response to one who thinks this. It is also worth emphasiz-
ing that the phenomenological take has a distinct advantage at least over MS in its
conception of experience from the perspective of what was said in Sect. 3.2. For
Chalmers experience is ultimately a solipsistic affair: a series of inner qualita-
tive events that reflect just the structure of the world around us, so that it makes no
difference to the truth conditions of beliefs that build on this experience whether the
world is understood as material or bit-like in its underlying nature. What we are –
the mind – is still in some clear sense the brain or cognitive system that is either
envatted or (as we standardly assume) lodged in the cranium. For phenomenologists
and enactivists this is all deeply misguided. What we are is human organisms:
embodied, experiencing animals. Moreover, our experience relates directly to the
world it concerns, extends in its very phenomenal character to this world, and is not
intelligible as just something with a structure we might relate to something similar
in the physical world. The BIV thought experiment undergirds that through the idea
of a world of experience that would remain stable even if – as we can conceive – the
underlying reality were something like a giant super computer.
5.6 Postscript on Dreyfus and Taylor’s Realism
Dreyfus and Taylor’s jointly-authored book from 2012 has the title Retrieving
Realism. In it they argue against what they call ‘the mediational picture’ of modern
philosophy, which has its origins in the work of Descartes and Locke and articulates
the idea that what we first and foremost are in contact with are mental entities,
standing between us and the world. Obviously this view is closely related to what
24
For the sake of completeness I should perhaps also stress that Adrian Moore’s ‘only two thinkers
objection’ to various forms of deep scepticism would have no impact on the existential phenome-
nological take; just as with MS, we can coherently imagine worlds within worlds within worlds
and so on ad infinitum, without this making any difference to the ‘world for us’ for the various
different communities in question.
others – and I following them – have called representationalism. Dreyfus and Taylor
(henceforth ‘D&T’) note the commonalities between their view and Rorty’s, but
they see Rorty as having only incompletely divorced himself from the idea of medi-
ation in that he sees us as interfacing with a thoroughly physical reality through
linguistic statements, ones that admittedly do not represent this reality – are only
caused by it – but which nevertheless place a barrier between us and it. Further, they
think his ‘deflationary realism’ – the view that ‘[t]he only version of “realism” one
has left is the trivial, uninteresting and commonsensical one which says that all true
beliefs are true because things are as they are’ (Dreyfus and Taylor 2012, 137, citing
Rorty 1998, 94) – is inadequate and defeatist. For D&T, our primary contact with
the world is not linguistic but through experience, though experience construed not
as qualia or internal representations, but as embodied, skilful coping with a material
world. Moreover, though they accept that the reality we thereby encounter is essen-
tially an interactional one, conditioned by our sensory and somatic capabilities (in
line with enactivism and my phenomenological externalism), they think we can also
make sense of the idea of a reality in itself in terms of the boundary conditions of
our experience, such as the rigidity of a stick or the softness of a pile of leaves. An
investigation of these is essentially the project of natural science, and it means that
D&T’s realism is a ‘robust’ one in comparison with Rorty’s merely deflationary
one. But science is not the only discourse that is capable of articulating reality, they
claim. Local perspectives, be these understood in terms of our overall modes of
engagement with the world, or perspectives from times gone by (such as that in
Egypt which saw gold as something sacred), also have a kind of objective validity.
In Knowles (2019c) I critique D&T’s line, arguing that their robust realism is
either incoherent or else threatens the objectivity of more local perspectives, and
that their account of full human intentionality as something based in more primitive
forms of interaction with the world falls foul of the myth of the given. I think the
letter of my complaints stands, but on reflection, and not least in the present context,
I think the similarities between their view and mine are more significant, and that
the disagreements between us are perhaps more verbal than real. As a supporter of
ARTL, I would defend Rorty’s deflationary realism, and certainly do not see it as
putting up a barrier to the ‘real’ of any kind (that, I think, is just a misunderstand-
ing). But I agree with D&T that more needs to be said about experience than Rorty
says, and that this compromises his physicalism (as I argued in Sect. 3.2). I would
distance myself from the notion of a ‘robust realism’, and have a somewhat different
conception from them of how to demarcate between the world of experience and the
world of fundamental science. The stability of the world for us is plausibly ulti-
mately a function of our own constructive activities as much as it is the world in
itself; what we discover from physics about the latter may have little to say about
what makes something rigid or soft or even in a certain sense ‘objective’, as we
experience or understand those things. Nevertheless, the most important point is
that there is a distinction to be drawn here; how one does it is an issue that there is
room to say more about and disagree upon, consistently with allowing that neither
world uniquely articulates reality as it is in itself. In light of this, I think we would
5.6 Postscript on Dreyfus and Taylor’s Realism 129
do better to talk as ARTL does and drop ‘reality’ – in a philosophical sense – com-
pletely. Still, the similarities between my view and D&T’s are plausibly more sig-
nificant than the differences.
As I have repeated several times, dropping talk of ‘reality’ does not mean that
ARTL is an anti-realist view. It is to elaborating and clarifying preciely this point
I turn in the next chapter.
Chapter 6
Anti-Representationalism, Realism,
and Anti-Realism
Abstract ARTL rejects metaphysical realism (MR): it sees Representationalism as

integral to this idea, and since Representationalism is incoherent, so is MR. However,
ARTL does not for that reason see itself as an idealistic or anti-realistic doctrine, in
any substantive sense. In this chapter, I defend (a) the idea (rejected by Horwich,
Devitt and Searle, inter alia) that the kind of realism MR embodies depends on
Representationalism, and (b) the idea that ARTL can uphold a full-blown common
sense form of realism without MR. Task (b) involves amongst other things arguing
against Putnam’s doctrine of conceptual relativity, which I suggest is undesirable in
inevitably leading, pace Putnam’s protestations to the contrary, to a Kantian picture
on which our talk and thought falls short of an unknowable or even unthinkable
reality. While what I have to say in this chapter is meant to be consistent with what
has been argued for in Chapters 3, 4, and 5, it is also meant to stand largely indepen-
dently of those issues.
6.1 Introduction
In Chap. 1, I presented as part of the view I have been calling ‘anti-representationalism

about thought and language’ – ARTL – a rejection of both metaphysical realism
(MR) and any substantive kind of anti-realism. ARTL rejects MR in denying that
there is sense to be made of the idea of an absolute reality consisting of mind-
independent objects, properties, relations, structures etc. with a wholly determinate
nature which set the ultimate standard for our cognitive practices (those that aim at
true assertions or beliefs). It sees Representationalism as integral to this idea, and
since Representationalism is incoherent, so is MR. However, ARTL does not for
that reason see itself as becoming an idealistic or anti-realistic doctrine, in any sub-
stantive sense. In this chapter, I want to defend the idea that the kind of realism MR
embodies depends on Representationalism, and the idea that ARTL can uphold a
full-blown common sense form of realism without either. What I have to say is
meant to be consistent with what has been argued for in earlier chapters concerning
the rejection of GE and its replacement with the ideas behind phenomenological

Switzerland AG 2023
473, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26924-0_6
132 6 Anti-Representationalism, Realism, and Anti-Realism
externalism and enactivism, but it is also meant to stand largely independently of

those issues (and thus, for example, also be applicable to Price’s GE framework or
something like the more ‘relaxed realism’ of, say, Rorty).
From a certain lofty perspective on the history of philosophy, one might simply
stipulate that any view that rejects MR is ipso facto a form of idealism. But that
I take it is a purely terminological matter and leaves open the concrete form such a
historically categorised ‘idealism’ might take. Thus McDowell has recently
embraced idealism in something like this sense, but I take it the majority of contem-
porary philosophers would be in agreement with his statement that ‘any idealism
with a chance of being credible must aspire to being such that, if thought through, it
stands revealed as fully cohering with the realism of common sense’ (2009a, b,
141) – and as he goes on to add: not merely aspire, but also not abjectly fail in this
aspiration, as he thinks Kant’s transcendental idealist view does. Of perhaps greater
concern is the tricky question of how one can even make sense of a rejection of a
view that is supposed to be incoherent. To appreciate the virtues of ARTL, I believe,
one has to understand its rejection of MR, but then there must surely be some sense
in which we can understand what it would have been for MR to obtain; and so, in
rejecting MR, we are – surely? – embracing some kind of idealism. But here I think
we can take a leaf out of (the earlier) Wittgenstein and see our dialectic in terms of
kicking away a ladder once we have climbed it. Or perhaps, to take instead a leaf
from the later Wittgenstein: MR is a (metaphysical, philosophical) ‘picture’ that has
deep intuitive appeal but that holds us captive and the philosophical task is to free
ourselves from it.
Even accepting this dialectical tact, however, it is not totally clear that what we
end up with stands up to scrutiny as a form of realism. The idea of some kind of
idealism or (in a broad sense) semantic anti-realism1 is one that has appealed to
many philosophers in the contemporary era, and it has been subtly and ably moti-
vated and, to some degree at least, defended by thinkers like Michael Dummett and
Hilary Putnam. The spectre of Kant’s views, including his transcendental idealism,
also hangs over much recent pragmatism; indeed, many contemporary pragmatists
actively embrace this aspect of Kant’s legacy and see it as integral to a defensible
form of pragmatism (see e.g. Pihlström 2003). Though Dummett never espoused or
articulated a systematic anti-realist position and Putnam by the end of his life
claimed to have renounced his earlier anti-realist sympathies, it is important to make
clear how ARTL and its realism can be understood independently of anti-realist ideas.
The following discussion is divided into three further sections. In Sect. 6.2,
I consider the relation between Representationalism and MR. Many philosophers
1
By this I mean a kind of anti-realism other than a kind of view that simply denies the existence of
certain kinds of entity (like values or mental states) and thus tends to be local rather than global in
character. This is certainly one current use of the term ‘anti-realism’ (for some, the most central
and important); on the kind of line I have been developing here it has its most natural place in a
framework defined by Representationalism and the problematic of placement problems, even
though I have allowed it might coherently be held independently of that kind of view – a line that
I have already taken up in Sect. 2.3 and that I will return to in the second section of this chapter.
6.2 Semantics and Realism 133
have rejected the idea that there is a connection between these two, and more gener-
ally, that there is any (or at least much) connection between broadly semantic (or
metasemantic)2 issues and realism-anti-realism debate, in the way Dummett and
Putnam suppose. This view is defended by Michael Devitt, John Searle and Paul
Horwich, inter alia; indeed, my impression is that it enjoys wide endorsement in
analytic philosophy today. Though I agree with this position insofar as I think real-
ism can survive rejecting Representationalism, I do not accept its insistence on a
principled distinctness between semantic and metaphysical issues, and I also think
it underestimates and mischaracterises the philosophical task of vindicating realism
without Representationalism. Rejecting Representationalism does impact the real-
ism issue, even though it does not lead to any anti-realistic conclusions (remember
Wittgenstein’s ladder). It is important to be clear on this to understand in what way
ARTL is the realistic philosophical view it is.
In the following two sections, I clarify and defend my claim that ARTL does not
involve any form of anti-realism or idealism in any of the main senses that go under
that rubric in the contemporary debate. This discussion is to an extent clarificatory
and does not involve many original ideas or arguments; the overall aim is simply to
show, or make plausible at least, that ARTL can uphold a common sense realism.
Section 6.3 draws on ideas from various thinkers I see as broadly sympathetic to
ARTL, gradually focusing in on the idea that acknowledging the language-
dependence of truths – something ARTL is committed to – does not have substan-
tive anti-realistic implications. In Sect. 6.4, I focus on Putnam’s idea of conceptual
relativity, to the effect that there may be and even often are incompatible ways of
conceptualising the same portion of reality that are nevertheless in some sense
equally good (Putnam 1987). This is an idea that he does not see as compromising
common sense realism. I will argue however that, pace Putnam’s protestations to the
contrary, it is hard to see how it avoids a form of Kantian idealism whereby we must
acknowledge something like his Ding an sich – a repugnant conclusion, at least
from the perspective of ARTL. For this reason I am at least strongly motivated to
reject Putnam’s position. I will not give a knockdown argument that Putnam’s over-
all view is awry, but I will try to suggest that we reasonably can resist the illustra-
tions of ontological relativity he gives as motivation for it.
6.2 Semantics and Realism
According to a number of philosophers, the issues of realism and semantics are

essentially distinct. Devitt has perhaps been clearest and most forthright on this
matter, saying that we need to ‘put metaphysics first’ (Devitt 2010), and understand
realism as simply the view that most of the entities of the common sense and scien-
tific image exist and exist independently of the mental (ibid., cf. also Devitt 1984,
2
I will take this qualification as read in the following.
1991). Thus understood realism is something Devitt takes to be highly common

sensical and that needs to be secured against anti-realist detractors; and a crucial
part of doing this is to see it has no semantic content or presuppositions. It has an
epistemological dimension insofar as we take ourselves to operate with categories
that (for the most part) actually do refer and thus, presumably, confer some knowl-
edge. Strictly speaking, one could be what Devitt calls a mere ‘fig leaf realist’, say-
ing there is something out there independent of our mind without committing to it
being any particular way; in this way, Kant’s position on which our knowledge
ultimately relates to an unknowable or even in some sense inconceivable Ding an
sich classes as a form of realism. But the view Devitt thinks is worth fighting for is
not this but the stronger one articulated above: the important fault line goes between
those who are realists about things like tables, chairs, cells and electrons and those
who are not. It is also important to note that Devitt thinks his basic realist position
is compatible with local forms of anti-realism about certain categories, such as, say,
values (he himself defends moral realism, cf. Devitt 2002, but this does not follow
from his basic realism).
For Devitt, then, how reality is and whether it depends on minds is one thing,
how mind and language relate to such a reality – whether they represent it or cor-
respond to in some way, or not – quite another. He does admit that we can express
realism in semantic terms, as the view that ‘[m]ost common-sense, and scientific,
physical existence statements are objectively and mind-independently true’ (Devitt
1991, 46). But this holds only so long as the notion of ‘truth’ employed is a purely
deflationary and hence trivial one – one which just licenses semantic ascent and
descent across the famous Tarskian biconditionals ‘“p” is true iff p’. To characterize
realism in this way is not to embrace deflationism as a theory or at least complete
theory of truth (or reference), in the way Horwich does; indeed, Devitt himself
thinks we can make progress towards a substantive theory of reference and perhaps
thereby vindicate correspondence truth intuitions (cf. his 1993, 2010). But even if
that project were not to bear fruit, realism is the last thing we should relinquish. This
is not to say that issues about truth and reference have absolutely no bearing on the
realism issue. Devitt claims that, for example, a verificationist or epistemic theory
of truth, of the kind associated with Dummett’s work, is difficult to combine with
realism (Devitt 2013, 114). But that is decisively a problem for verificationism and
not for realism. The issues of realism and semantics are in any case distinct and we
must always start by ‘putting metaphysics first’.
Devitt’s sentiments on this matter are echoed by others. Searle claims that ‘real-
ism [is] the view that the world exists independently of our representations of it’
(Searle 1995, 153) and that, as such, ‘realism is not a theory of truth and it does not
imply any theory of truth’, such as the correspondence theory (ibid., 154). Moreover,
the correspondence theory of truth does not imply realism, since what makes our
sentences true could be mind-dependent – or indeed, there might in principle be no
appropriate reality to make our claims true at all (a point Devitt also makes, cf. his
1991, 48). Horwich has also argued that semantic deflationism has no impact on the
realism issue, indeed more strongly, that theories about truth and reference, on the
one hand, and commitments to realism or otherwise, on the other, are independent
of one another (Horwich 1996). Horwich himself of course embraces semantic

deflationism; he also rejects MR for what appear to be distinct reasons.3 Though as
I understand their views these thinkers are fairly in accord with each other on the
issue I am interested in here, in what follows I will focus mainly on Devitt’s views
and arguments, for simplicity’s sake and because it is Devitt who has been most
outspoken on the issue.
How should we understand this stance in relation to the views of Putnam, Price
and ARTL more generally? As we have seen, the position of ARTL, and I take it also
Price, is that realism can be upheld even if one rejects Representationalism (that is
the line I am trying to vindicate in this chapter as a whole). As for Putnam, though he
once espoused a kind of anti-realism on the basis of rejecting MR, he later claimed
this was a mistake, and to be a realist in the fullest coherent sense of the word.4 There
is insofar perhaps little of substance that divides ARTL or even Putnam from Devitt’s
view – or at least Horwich’s, insofar as he, unlike Devitt, is not a Representationalist.
Both parties hold that realism, at least of a common sense sort, can be upheld without
Representationalism. However, ARTL also holds that Representationalism is essen-
tially tied to a stronger form of realism, MR, something Devitt and his ilk deny.
I think this connection can be defended and, though our ultimate aim should be to put
MR and Representationalism behind us, that it is important to understand this to
appreciate what a defensible non-Representationlist realism looks like.
MR, again, is the idea that there is a completely mind-independent reality with a
determinate structure and nature that our cognitive practices are ultimately answer-
able to, as such. Representationalism is integral to that, as ARTL sees things. And
ARTL argues that, though MR is an intuitive conception of what realism involves,
it is in fact, in presupposing Representationalism, incoherent. Devitt would reject
this claimed presupposition, but he also rejects the idea that MR articulates even an
intuitive picture of what realism amounts to. Thus a further part of Devitt’s argu-
ment is that Putnam’s characterisation of MR as the idea that there is one unique
correct way of describing reality, dictated by the structure of reality itself, is mis-
taken and unnecessary for realism. According to Devitt, there is not just one correct
way to describe reality (2013, 108 ff.): there are many different categories we can
use to describe the world – such as catdog (anything that is either a cat or a dog), as
well as cat and dog and all the rest we usually use – even though only a fraction of
those will be of interest to us in our cognitive practices. Nevertheless we are free in
3
At least, he rejects a view he calls ‘metaphysical realism’ in his (1982) as well as, more recently
in his (2010), expressing grave scepticism about the idea of ‘fundamentality’ as embraced by
avowed metaphysical realists like Kite Fine. I won’t go into the hermeneutics of Horwich’s posi-
tion in any depth here; for what it’s worth I understand his view to involve (possibly inter alia) that
a) deflationism in itself does not have any consequences for the realist/anti-realist debate b) never-
theless, for other reasons, MR (in my sense) is untenable. The view is thus structurally similar to
that he maintains in opposition to Price’s argument against object naturalism, discussed in Chap. 2
(deflationism though correct doesn’t undermine ON, but ON is false or incoherent anyway). For
present purposes, what is important is a), which I oppose.
4
Notwithstanding this, there is, as we shall see in Sect. 6.4, reason to question whether he is able
to do this consistently with upholding his thesis of conceptual relativity.
principle to adopt any set of categories we wish to describe reality: the world does
not dictate one particular set as its ‘own’, so to speak. What is not up to us is whether,
given a certain category is in play, a given object can be said to fall under it or not.
Searle (op. cit., 160 ff.) plies a similar line, though while Devitt sees categories as
objectively part of reality, Searle sees them as human creations. Both thinkers nev-
ertheless take their respective view on categories as fully consistent with accepting
realism, though this realism is not MR.
Putnam has responded directly to Devitt’s critique of his view that realism
depends on semantic issues, arguing that the latter’s notion of realism is not strong
enough to engage the relevant debates (Putnam 2016, 118–119). Thus, anti-realists
about a certain domain will typically want to accept that, say, chairs exist in a mind-
independent way, at least in a certain common sensical sense of mind-independence.
It is not as if, for them, my just thinking there is a chair there makes it the case that
there is a chair there. At another level, of course, the chair is not independent of us,
but, says Putnam, that is a level that is revealed by understanding what ‘there is a
chair’ means. But then, he says, we are back with questions about semantics.
I basically agree with what Putnam says here. His response is nevertheless some-
what awry from the perspective of ARTL since it seems to open for the relevance of
semantics to the realism issue by way of opening the door to a substantive albeit
semantic anti-realism. But ARTL aims to offer a (fully) realist picture (as ultimately
did Putnam, but let us put his view to one side for the moment). I think our response
to Devitt thus needs to be somewhat different.
In the first place, I think we need to ask more precisely what is meant by ‘mind-
independence’. According to Devitt (and as we have seen Searle, and no doubt oth-
ers too), one problem with understanding realism as connected to semantic issues is
that Representationalism is fully compatible with an anti-realism that sees what we
say as made true by5 a reality that is dependent on the mind. But what exactly does
Devitt understand by a ‘mind-dependent reality’? To start with, acknowledging
something we might call this is surely completely anodyne, namely, where this is
simply the realm of the phenomena we call mental: beliefs, desires, thoughts,
dreams, sensations and so on. I take it nobody (or at least very few) sees being a
realist about such things as any kind of compromise on being a realist tout court.
Now according to some famous views referred to as ‘idealist’, such as that espoused
by Bishop Berkeley, all reality has a mental, experiential character, even though the
standard of what is real is also independent of any particular human mind (crudely,
‘reality’ is the mind of God). In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest
in this kind of view through the rise of, in particular, panpsychistic solutions to the
mind-body problem, whereby nature has a fundamentally psychic character (cf.
Goff 2022). Now, I also agree with Devitt (and Searle) that such a view of reality as
something mind-dependent is fully compatible with Representationalism. However,
that does not support the idea that semantic and realism issues are independent of
5
By which I will mean in the following ‘corresponds to’ in the sense of the correspondence theory
of truth.
one another. For embracing panpsychism or even Berkeleyean idealism is still,

surely, fully compatible with realism in a very intuitive sense of that term. There is,
for Berkeley and for panpsychists, a way the world is in and of itself that we seek to
represent in thought and language; it is just that this world turns out to be much
more mind-like and less matter-like in character than we are often inclined to think
(perhaps, in the extreme case, being wholly mind-like).
I should underline that I have very little sympathy for such panpsychistic or ide-
alist metaphysical views. They stem in my opinion from phenomenologically flawed
conceptions of mind and experience, as some kind of intrinsic qualitative being (see
Chap. 3). But for present purposes the point is just that talk of a ‘mind-dependent’
reality in that sense is fully compatible with the realism of MR and
Representationalism. So, nothing so far suggests that these ideas are not inter-
dependent. Indeed, partly in light of this point, I think we can even aver that
Representationalism if not exactly entailing MR is highly conducive to it: if lan-
guage or thought functions by relating it to some language- or thought independent
reality – even if this might be ‘mind-like’ in character – then presumably in our
cognitive practices we are also articulating the kind of thing MR takes reality to be,
i.e. a set of objects, properties, relations, and/or structures with a nature quite inde-
pendent of our describing them. (I think this is correct and that what I say below
further buttresses it. However, for the record, nothing else of what I want to estab-
lish depends on precisely this point.)
There is of course another sense of ‘mind-dependent reality’ that MR does
involve a rejection of. To understand what it is rejecting, however, it seems to me we
must resort to Representationalism. For Representationalism, the contents of the
cognitive claims we make about the world are to be understood in terms of corre-
spondence to worldly truths or facts, not just in terms of the concepts we happen to
utilize as the particular species we are and the particular historical situation we find
ourselves in. Without Representationalism, the idea of such mind-independent facts
as what we are answerable to in our cognitive practices – as MR holds we are – is
deeply obscure and plausibly not one we can give any sense to.
These reflections go some way towards undermining Devitt’s idea that realism
and semantic issues are distinct. But there is as we have seen more to his view, inso-
far as he thinks MR’s way of characterising realism is anyway flawed – in particular
its idea of there being one correct way of carving up reality. There is no doubt a lot
one could say about this issue; my contribution won’t amount to a rebuttal of
Devitt’s view from uncontroversial or shared premises. What I will instead argue is
first, somewhat ad hominem, that the view is in any case not clearly distinct from
MR; and then, more importantly, that Devitt’s view of what realism is cannot be
sustained given the kind of position he wants realism to be – at least, it cannot under
a central assumption of ARTL. It is possible to reinforce his position in ways that
can make it the kind of view he wants it to be, but these involve either accepting
Representationalism or adopting what he calls a merely ‘fig leaf’ form of realism.
As noted, Devitt thinks we have a large, indeed it seems practically unlimited
degree of freedom in choosing the categories we describe reality in terms of, but not
about whether things fall into those categories. This is meant to vindicate the idea of
the mind-independent existence (or non-existence, as the case might be) of tokens of
the relevant categories without the presuppositions of MR. A first remark about this
position is that it is unclear, to me at any rate, exactly how it diverges from MR in
regarding the categories as genuinely out there, or real. Even if Little Puss can be
classed both as a cat and as a ‘catdog’, why should this suggest that the world has
anything other than one total true fundamental description any more than the fact that
she can be classed both as a cat and a mammal does? (I am taking it as given that MR
can accommodate this latter platitude.) The description would no doubt have to be
incredibly more complex than we are pretheoretically disposed to think, but nobody
ever thought that on MR we might ever aspire to actually giving a full specification
of the world’s nature and structure. It is not clear to me exactly why Devitt adopts this
realist view of categories and not Searle’s view on which they are human construc-
tions (especially as he avows nominalism). As far as I can see, his point that we can
still be realists in spite of rejecting MR seems (at least) as equally maintainable on
the latter view as on the first. In any case, I won’t pursue this issue further here.
Instead I want to focus on the distinction between choosing categories and cate-
gorizing objects. No doubt this distinction can appear intuitively apt: By looking,
I ‘objectively’ verify that Little Puss is a cat given my understanding of that predi-
cate (smallish, cute, furry, purrs etc.), and then can infer that cats exist – even though
that category is in a way arbitrary. If I instead defined my predicate ‘cat’ such that
anything like the above is a cat unless it is also at least 50 years old, in which case
it is not, I could instead verify that Little Puss is not a cat (and no doubt reason
inductively that there are no cats). But that doesn’t alter the fact that cats exist given
my understanding of what the sentence means.
However, at least from the perspective of ARTL, this distinction, while to an
extent apt in thinking about many everyday circumstances, cannot bear the philo-
sophical weight Devitt is putting on it in using it to characterise his realism.
According to his line of thought, to identify something a as an F in an objective way
one needs to be able to check that a fulfils certain criteria or instantiates certain
features. But then of course one can ask the same about those features, e.g. G (let us
call one of them). Is that in turn to be ratified by appeal to another set of features –
and so on ad infinitum? What Devitt’s line seems to presuppose is some level of
privileged empirical criteria which are such that just by virtue of perceiving these,
I can take or believe them to obtain. But surely that is just an instance of the idea of
empirical givenness: of sense experience putting us in touch with features that
immediately justify our beliefs from outside the realm of the rational and the con-
ceptual. If we reject givenness, then we cannot see our judgements about whether
something is an F as simply given by seeing that it is so: it must always be possible
to ask if what appears to be an F indeed is an F, a question that in turn presupposes
the capacity to ask whether seeing things as Fs is the appropriate way to think about
the matter in question at all (sc. Galileo and the question Is the earth stationary?).
In short, judging that a is F cannot be seen as, in any fundamental way, logically
independent of thinking that ‘F’ is an appropriate category to be applied in the rel-
evant circumstances to a. As noted, in many ordinary contexts the kind of difference
Devitt alludes to will seem an apt characterisation of what we are doing, but without
the idea of the given, deciding on categories and categorising things cannot be seen
as enunciating a dichotomy of function in our basic cognition, but must rather be
seen as deriving from an underlying unified capacity.
Devitt might protest here that he is no epistemological foundationalist but a
Quinean confirmation holist. My evidence as a whole tells me Little Puss is a cat
given my understanding of that term, not some atomic perceptual encounter with
her. But this doesn’t solve the problem, which essentially revolves around how we
can make sense of the distinction between deciding on categories, and classifying
particular things in relation to these categories, something that in turn is crucial to
making sense of Devitt’s realism. Perhaps my concluding Little Puss is a cat is a
complex function of several sources of information, but even so, the question
remains how we then make sense of there being freedom in deciding to apply the
category but not in seeing it as instantiated. It seems to me that Devitt and others see
this as so obviously what we do that we don’t need to provide an account of it. But
the idea behind and critique of the given is a structural one that needn’t be related to
sense perception or indeed the ordinary idea of justification insofar as this concerns
the difference between different sources of this (perceptual, inferential etc.), how
much we need of each and so on. We do, quite generally, just see or understand that
this is how things are, whether it is Little Puss being a cat or murder being wrong.
Devitt wants this kind of act to be dissociable into two fundamental epistemic parts.
But when I see or understand that it is correct to describe a as F, I am accepting both
that a is F, and that a is F and not (say) G, in the very same act – at least, I must be
on pain of countenancing a ‘given’.
If we accept this, what becomes of Devitt’s realism? To start with, at least if we
are to avoid a surely disastrous kind of voluntaristic epistemic relativism, the idea
that we have the kind of unconstrained freedom in judgement that Devitt thinks we
have in choosing categories must surely be admitted to be wrong. Little puss is a cat,
and I cannot rationally deny that by using an alternative and bizarre definition of
‘cat’ such that it means something like as she is but also over 50 years old, whatever
my purposes. Thinking I can is just a philosopher’s fiction. Thus, when I have said
we are in principle just as free to affirm or withhold the predicate ‘cat’ from Little
Puss when we classify her in a certain way as we are to use that predicate or some
other in the first place, what we are talking about in both cases is not the kind of
arational, absolute freedom of the kind Devitt talks about, but more like Kant’s
notion of spontaneity: we judge rationally, and in that sense freely, but never arbi-
trarily or merely conventionally.6 This is of course a kind of view that is also meant
to fit with the rejection of empirical givenness.
6
In invoking Kant here, a question might arise as to whether my line here would also be endorsed
by McDowell, who, though aiming to reject the idea of givenness, operates with the idea of empiri-
cal receptivity as a distinct mode of actualization of conceptual capacities (see Sect. 3.2). Could
McDowell’s picture in fact be a way of upholding something like Devitt’s distinction without fall-
ing afoul of the myth, somehow or other? I think the answer to this is probably ‘no’, but since I am
in any case not committed to McDowell’s view on perception, I will not pursue this matter fur-
ther here.
Could this kind of view of judgement itself be the basis for the kind of realist
position Devitt thinks can be sustained without semantic premises? It seems
unlikely. For Devitt, realism is essentially an invidious doctrine: though it involves
our being committed to the existence of most of what common sense and science is
committed to, we are not committed to all of this just because we talk as if we are:
the real world is out there fully independently of us and it places its own constraints
on what exists. In this way his realism, though not MR itself, is nevertheless a meta-
physical kind of realism. This is also brought out by the fact Devitt subscribes to a
kind of metaphysical naturalism, that is, something like the object naturalism that
Price critiques (cf. Chap. 2, and again Devitt 1992 on moral realism). Price’s argu-
ment – a successful one, we ultimately concluded – was that to rationally motivate
the kinds of metaphysical placement problems ON tries to solve, we have to presup-
pose Representationalism. Insofar as the kind of realism Devitt is after ties in in this
way in with his naturalism, this also shows that Devitt’s realism needs
Representationalism – or at least it does assuming ARTL’s rejection of givenness.7
The upshot of all this is that to uphold the kind of realism Devitt is interested in
one does after all seem forced to accept Representationalism. If one does that, one
can see reality constraining what we take to exist in virtue of the fact that the mean-
ings of our claims are determined by substantial reference relations to it. But accept-
ing Representationalism as a presupposition of realism is precisely what Devitt
wants not to do; moreover, as we saw above, it seems reasonable to think that
Representationalism itself induces MR.
There is an alternative way to go here for Devitt, which is to understand the real-
ity we are in touch with as a kind of noumenal realm whose own nature and/or
structure (if it has any) is opaque to us but which is ‘carvable up’ in many different
ways, even though not just any old way (exactly how this would be expressed in
view of Devitt’s realism about categories is perhaps a somewhat delicate matter, but
in view of what I said above, nothing much seems to hang on resolving this). This
is obviously something like a Kantian picture in which we employ our concepts to
capture a kind of Ding an sich which acts as a kind of guarantor of certain of our
descriptions but not others, and something close to what Devitt calls ‘fig leaf’ real-
ism. But as we have also seen, it is not this kind of realism that Devitt thinks is worth
fighting for (whether it is avoidable, given one rejects Representationalism and
wants to remain a realist, is an issue we will return to).
My conclusion is that MR is not so easily dismissed by someone with aspirations
like Devitt who wants to uphold realism as the kind of position he takes it to be; nor
is it at all clearly independent of Representationalism. MR, not Devitt’s picture, is
plausibly our intuitive or default picture of realism – albeit also one that supporters
of ARTL think that we need to somehow free ourselves from. Simply denying that
the realism issue has anything to do with Representationalism and appealing to the
7
As I indicated in Sect. 2.3, one could in the manner of Quine coherently uphold a kind of meta-
physical naturalism without embracing Representationalism. However, as I pointed out there, that
line is a kind of pragmatism fundamentally, hence not I take it a kind of substantive realism of the
kind Devitt’s position aspires to be.
6.3 Realism ARTL-Style 141
picture Devitt endorses fails to engage with the relevant issues; insofar I agree with
Putnam. Of course, there are many who would both accept that we cannot have real-
ism without Representationalism and embrace these two doctrines. This is not the
way of ARTL. But given Devitt’s way isn’t ARTL’s way either, we need to ask more
precisely how ARTL thinks it can nevertheless maintain common sense realism.
6.3 Realism ARTL-Style
In this and the following section I want to spell out why ARTL is not committed to
any substantive kind of anti-realist view, in spite of rejecting MR. What I want to do
primarily is sketch a coherent and hopefully somewhat plausible picture of ARTL’s
common sense realism; there are no doubt many further issues one might consider
in relation to such a general issue as the realism versus anti-realism debate, but
I hope my discussion does go some way at least to substantiating the conclusion
I want to defend.
The first thing to underline is that ARTL’s fundamental gambit in this area of
philosophy is its rejection of MR and the Representationalism it depends on as inco-
herent. ARTL is thus not seeking to advocate any particular metaphysical view on
the realism-idealism axis, a fortiori any kind of anti-realism. ARTL, like McDowell,
operates with the idea that its substantial commitments are and should be just those
of a kind of a ‘common sense realism’, exploiting that trope to diffuse the traditional
realism-idealism issue. I think that part of this common sense, at least today, is that
there many things that are quite unlike us in their nature – i.e. not mental or experi-
ential in any way, such as the posits of physics. This was mentioned in Sect. 4.2 (and
its denial, some form of panpsychism, mentioned in the previous section); it also
has connections to how we think about experience. I will not however be taking it
up further here.
A further, arguably more centrally ensconced part of common sense is the idea
that things generally are not dependent on my or anybody else’s sensing or knowing
them. We say things like even if human beings had never existed, dinosaurs would
still have existed. There are of course anti-realist views that will also want to allow
us to say this kind of thing, but many of these place some epistemic constraints on
what can be said to exist or what is true that breaches with common sense in some
way or other, or at some level. And if they don’t do that, they operate with a notion
of underlying reality that eludes our knowledge, a posit that is not just non-common-
sensical but borders on the incoherent, in my opinion. ARTL wants to have no truck
with any of these views. But can it do so with impunity?
Semantic deflationism is an important part of the argument that it can. Classically,
many philosophers have argued for or against realism or anti-realism by arguing for
different notions of truth. Thus, realism has been seen as following from the corre-
spondence theory of truth and/or other Representationalist ideas, whilst various
forms of anti-realism see truth as relative to our practices of finding about things,
leading to famous definitions like C.S. Peirce’s on which truth is what we would
believe at the end of enquiry, or the verificationist idea that truth is tied essentially
to methods for discovering it. In embracing deflationism about truth, ARTL rejects
Representationalism (and MR) but it also avoids acknowledging any kind epistemic
or pragmatist constraint on truth or ‘reality’ – which, in spite of everything anti-
realists have argued, surely is a deeply counterintuitive result (if not indeed some-
how incoherent). ARTL can admit there is much we will never know and possibly
never could (e.g. facts outside our ‘light cone’ or so-called ‘Fitch propositions’8).
But for each of these propositions, p, it seems we can nevertheless say that it is true
iff p – and indeed should say nothing more when it comes to understanding what it
is for it to be true or how ‘reality’ must be for it to be the case.
Might embracing deflationism itself have its own distinctive kind of anti-realistic
implications? Insofar as ARTL rejects Representationalism, it owes an account of
meaning not based on the traditional semantic notions of truth and reference, and
this is standardly taken to involve some kind of inferentialist or, more generally,
use-based account. A question then might be posed as to whether such theories of
meaning entail a form of idealism or anti-realism. According to use-based theories
of meaning, what gives ‘shape’ to our truth-aimed utterances – what determines
what they mean and what we say in using them – is not a relation to something
beyond utterances, but the system of utterances itself and the patterns these encode
(including possibly their use in connection with features of our environments).9
Does it follow that our conception of what is real – the facts we countenance as
such – are therefore somehow dependent on or relative to these patterns of use?
This train of thought has been critically discussed by various ‘deflationary’
metaphysicians in recent years, including Eli Hirsch (2011) and Amie Thomasson
(2015). They espouse a broadly Carnapian picture of ontological commitment
on which the rules of our language determine the broad contours of our ontol-
ogy, such that questions about whether there exist, say, properties or endurant
material objects10 can be largely decided by conceptual investigation, along with
relevant empirical knowledge (insofar as this is a separate matter). As we have
seen, Price also sees Carnap’s view of language as broadly conducive to his
global expressivism. The views of these thinkers diverge at various points
(Hirsch, in espousing something he calls ‘quantifier variance’, is closer to
8
After Frederic Fitch. Such a proposition is ‘P and no one knows that P’. If this could be known, it
would follow that P is known and P is not known. This could not be the case, so it cannot be known.
I am not endorsing this so-called ‘paradox of knowability’ for anti-realism but just registering it as
an example of the kind of thing that might be in this way problematic for anti-realism but for
ARTL is not.
9
I will be being deliberately non-committal about what this parenthetical remark amounts in rela-
tion to the use-theoretic or inferentialist account of meaning or concept individuation. In what
follows I will also speak at times of ‘relevant empirical knowledge’, and this to be understood in a
similar non-committal way. Of course, when I say ‘non-committal’, I do exclude commitment to
an empirical given or a Representationalist account, but I take it there is nothing in the idea of such
environmental knowledge being part of language use that commits one to this.
10
As opposed to mere perdurants; for explanation of these terms and an example see the next
paragraph.
Putnam than the other two; more on this below). However, all staunchly reject
the idea that their Carnapian view involves a form of anti-realism, seeing this as
involving a use-mention fallacy. Our practices make available certain concepts
and modes of thought, but in expressing these thoughts we do not assert lan-
guage-relative truth or existence. For example, my language makes available
thoughts such as ‘that cup is white’ (in the light of relevant experience), as well
as, at least according to Thomasson, rules that allow me to infer from this that
the cup instantiates the property of whiteness and hence that properties exist;
but what I assert in saying the latter or ‘that cup is white’ is not a content that
concerns language or the mind.
Even if we accept the soundness of this move, however, it might nevertheless
seem only to provide for a minimal form of realism – indeed one that hardly deserves
the title at all. In a recent paper, James Miller (2016) argues that Hirsch’s view of
our ontologically committing discourse is of this kind. Hirsch is not just an onto-
logical deflationist but also what Miller, following Matti Eklund (2008), calls an
ontological pluralist, that is one who believes ‘there are languages with signifi-
cantly different sets of ontological expressions such that these languages are all
maximally adequate for stating all the facts about the world’ (Eklund 2008, 390).
These expressions can be expressed using the English form ‘exists’ or the other
quantificational lexemes standardly used to express ontological commitment. For
example for Hirsch the cup I see in front of me on the table can equally be seen as
one enduring thing that exists over time (as we usually think of it) or as a perduring
plurality of spatio-temporal cup slices (cf. Hawley 2020). Nothing in the world
dictates my use of ‘exists’ or ‘there is/are’ in relation to how many things are there
on the table. Hirsch nevertheless wants to say that given any particular meaning
I attach to these words, there is a perfectly univocal and objective answer to what is
on the table, how many things there are etc. As noted, it is only a use/mention con-
flation that could lead us to think otherwise.
Miller starts by claiming that this reply to the charge of anti-realism that Hirsch
(along with Thomasson and Price) embraces is not sufficient to count as realism just
because it avoids an overt idealism. Given my dialectic starting point of rejecting
MR, that complaint does not clearly cut any ice against me. But Miller has a more
substantive objection. He thinks that even if we put MR to one side (to put things in
my terms), Hirsch must embrace commitment to a ‘stuff ontology’, or what Eklund
(op. cit.) has called an ‘amorphous lump’ view of ultimate reality. This reality is
undifferentiated in itself but is something we apparently need to postulate to make
sense of the various but conflicting existentially committing practices Hirsch thinks
we can or at least might engage in. Such an ‘amorphous lump’ is of course reminis-
cent of Kant’s Ding an sich and hence we can seem to land back with something like
transcendental idealism (or ‘fig leaf’ realism). Miller, like Devitt, sees this kind of
view as hardly worthy of the epithet of realism. Moreover, it is a dubiously coherent
position for Hirsch (and other ontological deflationists) who see structure as essen-
tially a linguistic matter; denying it to a genuine mind-independent reality in itself
thus looks incoherent.
I am sympathetic to Miller’s critique of this kind of Kantian view; it is also some-

thing that ARTL very much wants to avoid, as we have seen. Nevertheless, it might
seem difficult for it to resist a slide into it. If ARTL operates with the idea that we
could have spoken ontologically committing languages that are different and
incommensurable with those we in fact speak, and we want to avoid MR, how can
we avoid acknowledging something like the Kantian picture Miller paints? Now
this point doesn’t have anything to do with Hirsch’s ontological pluralism in par-
ticular. Nevertheless, if we do accept this and/or Putnam’s related doctrine of con-
ceptual relativity – the idea that there may be and indeed often are incompatible
ways of conceptualising the same portion of reality that are nevertheless in some
sense equally good – we might seem pushed ever more inexorably to the same
conclusion.
In my view, ARTL should and need have no association with the doctrine of
conceptual relativity that Putnam holds, nor with Hirsch’s similar view. This, as
well as to what extent these views actually do lead to the Kantian picture just
sketched, will be the topic of Sect. 6.4. But putting ontological pluralism/conceptual
relativity to one side, there is in my opinion actually no threat of ARTL having to
embrace the kind of Kantian picture in the way Miller’s arguments might suggest
there is. As we saw in Sect. 1.2 from Price’s discussion of this issue (Price 2013,
54), it is very important properly to understand the implications of the use-mention
distinction here. Just because our languages might have been different does not
mean that there might have been different facts – only different fact-stating prac-
tices. The facts are what we express using the languages we actually have; the ques-
tion of what facts might be expressed by a different language is only something that
can be grasped by coming to speak that language. If we can or could do this, and can
or could make sense of the commitments thereby expressed – by either, as it were,
their opening our eyes to new truths,11 or else as being straightforwardly consistent
or inconsistent with things we already believe – then obviously no Kantian compro-
mise on a common sense realism ensues. If we cannot – if the language is untrans-
latable into or incommensurable with ours – then there is simply no substance to the
idea of different but somehow equally good sets of facts. The Kantian picture mis-
represents the envisaged situation and begs the question against ARTL: we should
not see it purely objectively in terms of different and incompatible sets of putative
facts or ‘virtual worlds’ constructed through using different languages, worlds that
are vindicated by the same underlying Ding an sich. Rather, one has to speak or use
the relevant language to make any sense of the accompanying facts. And since we
can speak only our own languages (trivially), there really are no alternative facts.
11
This idea also relates to that of McDowell’s sentiently alien Martians: rational, concept-using
beings who nevertheless live in their own perceptual world, different from ours (taken up in Sect.
4.2). Such beings articulate in their language facts that constitute a genuine alternative to ours in a
certain sense; nevertheless, though these facts may be inaccessible to us in a rather deep way, they
are not completely so. If we could, miraculously, assume the organic form of these Martians we
could presumably be able to converse with them about their world.
The dialectical situation does, I believe, change in the face of actual examples of
ontological plurality or relativity (if such exist). The point for now is that without
some concrete backing to the effect that this might actually obtain, the Kantian pic-
ture is not one ARTL needs to take seriously.
Before moving to this next stage of the argument in the following section, I want
to close this one with a discussion of a different (though I think related)12 kind of
worry one might have about ARTL’s claim to be a (common sense) realistic posi-
tion. This is that its use theory of meaning in any case seems to commit us to the
claim that if there were no humans (or other rational beings) with concepts, there
would be no truths – i.e. true thoughts, or facts. And one might think, whatever else
ARTL has to say that that in any case has a distinctively idealistic flavour and indeed
implication.
Rorty explicitly embraces the idea that truth, in being connected to language use,
does not exist independently of us: ‘[W]here there are no sentences, there is no
truth…the world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not’ (Rorty 1989,
4–5). He thinks this unproblematic since we can still say the world itself, that is, the
things in it like tables and chairs and what they are like, is independent of our
descriptions: they would have been there even if we hadn’t (at least in a certain
sense) and would be certain ways or not, regardless of what we thought – we can say
all that and it is true. Price (2013, 56) endorses Rorty’s line, though stresses that we
need to understand the distinction as obtaining within individual i-worlds, not just
in terms of that between the i-world as a whole (‘everything that is the case’) and the
e-world of science, a view that would make it more in line with Sellars’ ‘scientific
realism’ (see Sect. 2.5).
But can we really shake off the threat of idealism quite so easily? As we shall see,
though there is more I think needs to be said here, I believe we ultimately can vin-
dicate Rorty’s line.
Consider the following counterfactual claim: If we had never evolved from
whatever existed at the time of the dinosaurs, the latter would still have existed. No
adherent to common sense would want to deny that (and presumably the anteced-
ent represents a genuine metaphysical possibility, so it is not just trivially true).
Can ARTL follow suit? It will say it can by pointing out that the counterfactual
commitment is encoded in our understanding of the very concepts of the things in
question, including relevant empirical knowledge. However, since ARTL claims
that there being truths at all is dependent on there being language, then if we had
never existed there would (as far as we know anyway and I shall in any case
assume) have been no truths, and a fortiori not the truth dinosaurs exist(ed) either.
But now, an objector will claim, accepting that truth is incompatible with accepting
the first one.
12
Specfically, to Price’s point of the last but one paragraph in that it acknowledges an essentially
indexical element to our fact stating discourse. Just as our fact-stating discourse must be under-
stood as a disourse we use, an important idea in the following will be that the truths we express are
all our truths.
I believe however there is no incompatibility here on more careful reflection.

The first counterfactual says that if we had never existed, dinosaurs would still have
done so. The second counterfactual in effect says that if we had never existed there
would be no truths. The first might seem to amount to saying that, on the assump-
tion that we didn’t come into existence, dinosaurs would nevertheless have existed.
But doesn’t that imply, given the same assumption, that it would be true that they
then would have existed, hence that there would be at least one truth without lan-
guage, or without us – and doesn’t that contradict the second counterfactual? A
rendering in terms of possible worlds or situations might seem to underline the
point. In the possible world where we don’t exist, dinosaurs still do, hence ‘dino-
saurs exist’ is true there, and hence we have a truth at this world and get a contradic-
tion with our second counterfactual, at least if we also understand it in terms of
possible worlds.
My response to this is to remind that what is being envisaged in both the above
cases is precisely a counterfactual situation: it is a hypothetical situation considered
from our actual, existing one. So in fact the first does not verify that there are or could
be truths without human language, for it does not put us out of the picture. From an
ARTL-perspective, we can only accept that, if we had never existed, it would still be
true that the dinosaurs existed from our point of view, one in which we make a certain
judgement in language; if one thinks that away, there is no sense to the idea of there
still being such a truth. One can I think also put this by saying, in Brandom’s (2000)
terminology, that if we had never existed, there would still have been a true claimable
that dinosaurs existed. However, claimables are only conceivable as correlatives of
claimings, and these are things we humans actually make.13
Now this assessment might change if talk of possible worlds were interpreted
realistically, in the manner of David Lewis (Lewis 1986). A lot has been written
about Lewis’ view and I cannot hope to go into that discussion in any detail here.
Suffice it then to say that his understanding of the semantics of modal talk is con-
tested and indeed arguably not even a very ‘realistic’ rendering of it insofar as it
seeks to reduce talk of what might have been to a function of truths about just what
is the case with certain kinds of intuitively strange entity.14 My animadversions
13
Rorty is sceptical of Brandom’s notion of ‘claimables’, or at least of its motivation, arguing it
involves a back-sliding into a correspondence conception of truth (Rorty 2000). In my view, how-
ever, there is no deep disagreement here: Brandom’s claimables just articulate a conception of
deflationary truth makers for our claims, something I suggested Price also can acknowledge in
Sect. 2.2 and 2.3 (and by implication therefore ARTL more generally).
Brandom puts a lot of effort into making clear how his inferentialism can do justice to the idea
of fully objective, not merely subjective truth, without having to buy into Representationalism (see
especially his account of de re versus de dicto attitude ascriptions in his 1994, ch. 8). Though I
think this is all consistent with what I want to claim here and might buttress the kind of view I am
trying to defend as a robust form of realism, I will not go further into Brandom’s views further or
how they relate to what I have to say in this section (which of course is meant to stand at least for
the most part on its own merits).
14
A point Timothy Williamson has been at pains to point out; for his overall view of modality se
his (2013).
against Lewis’ theory do not rest on this latter consideration, nor on the idea that it
is somehow a Representationalist account (even if it might well be, though it isn’t
clear to me it ipso facto is). My objection only rests on the thought that we should
understand modality and counterfactuality for what it is, at least as far as we can. As
long as we do that then we can continue to accept that dinosaurs would have existed
without us – and our language – without being bulldozed into saying that truths
would have existed without language.
Some might still object that we need a semantics for modality of some kind or
other and that it is quite possible that that will create problems for my allegation that
the two counterfactuals are compatible. However, it is not at least at all clear on
what account that would be the case. My point is that intuitively the two counterfac-
tuals are quite compatible so long as one refrains from understanding such things in
terms of evaluating truths like ‘dinosaurs exist’ at Lewisean possible worlds.
Perhaps this will have ramifications for how we think about modality more gener-
ally but I cannot enter that larger debate here.
A distinct worry about the idea that without language there would be no truths
is that it seems to imply that there can be no truths that could not be expressed in
language, or that evade conceptual articulation. Again, I accept this implication
under a certain reading of the modal claim. Timothy Williamson has argued with
reference to McDowell’s view that the conceptual is unbounded that this unrea-
sonably a priori rules out what he calls ‘elusive objects’ (Williamson 2007a, b,
18): objects that we cannot single out in thought or form any conception of, even
though we might be able to think about them collectively as such. This way of
putting things makes certain assumptions about what it is to be able to think about
things, but here all I want to make use of is the idea that some think there might
be things necessarily beyond our ken and comprehension – and by extension
truths about them. A slightly different line might stress that there may be, indeed
most probably are truths about the physical universe too complicated or complex
for us to grasp, given our actual and/or finite conceptual powers. However, what is
plausible in these thoughts does not compromise the position I espouse. The gen-
eral dependence of truth on language and concepts does not mean we must in fact
be able to express all truths. This would perhaps follow given some kind of verifi-
cationism about truth but this is something ARTL wants no truck with. On the
other hand, the idea that there might be truths (‘facts’) that are constitutively such
that for whatever reason they could not in principle be expressed in language,
using our concepts, given enough time and resources, seems dubiously coherent.
This is a thought which many seem to take for granted in the same way as they do
MR, but, even apart from any association with the latter, I have never heard a good
answer to the following question: how can we grasp that we could not grasp such
thoughts without in some way grasping what it is in them we allegedly can-
not grasp?
Again, I wouldn’t want to suggest there isn’t more to be said here. What I do
think my discussion shows is that it is far from clear that any direct inconsistency,
incoherence or breach with an uncompromising common sense realism is entailed
by ARTL, given its rejection of MR as simply incoherent.
6.4 Conceptual Relativity
In this section I return to the idea, taken up in the previous one, that ARTL can seem
to imply a picture on which, although our ontological commitments are not
language- dependent, these commitments presuppose a fundamental underlying
reality that we do not and cannot capture in our linguistic practices (or perhaps by
any such practices). ARTL wants to avoid this kind of Kantian picture, and I argued
in the above that it can do so as long as there is no reason to think there are actual
examples of incompatible but in some sense equally valid ways of conceptualizing
the same ‘portions of reality’. Now Putnam and Hirsch also want to avoid
Kantianism, but they do think there can be such variously valid ways of conceptual-
izing things. In this section, I want to focus on this conceptual relativity view, asking
whether it has anti-realistic implications, and also whether it deserves to be upheld.
If both these things are the case, ARTL clearly faces a problem in combining its
various commitments with the idea that it is a straightforwardly common sense real-
ist view. Of course, one might think this is a price worth paying and that some kind
of Kantian variant on ARTL should be endorsed instead: (quasi-)Kantian anti-
representationalism about thought and language, as I referred to it in Chap. 1 (see
footnote 2). I think this would be unfortunate, and take it that this attitude is fairly
widespread (as witnessed not least by Putnam’s and Hirsch’s own repudiation of
this kind of view).15 This shared attitude will be important to my dialectical tack.
But I will also be arguing that there is no need to embrace the Kantian view because
conceptual relativity can be resisted: the examples of it are at least less than wholly
compelling.
My focus will be Putnam’s notion of and examples of conceptual relativity, put-
ting Hirsch and quantifier variance to one side. As far as I can see the main differ-
ence between the two is that while Putnam maintains there are actual examples of
conceptual relativity in our language as we (and philosophers, scientists and math-
ematicians) use it, Hirsch is merely concerned to point up the possibility of alterna-
tive but in some sense equally good languages to those we actually use. Also, as far
as I can see, this distinction is somewhat diffuse and unclear. In any case, for rea-
sons mainly of keeping the present discussion as surmountable as possible, it is only
(or at least for the most part only) Putnam I will consider here (without of course
prejudging the possibility that a more systematic consideration of Hirsch might
have an impact on my argument).
I start with some background. As we have seen, Putnam famously formulated
and then argued against a view he called ‘metaphysical realism’, what I have called
MR. Initially this was through an argument, or several related arguments, that MR
assumes but cannot validate, consistent with its own principles, a determinate and
substantial reference relation. Though he came to doubt the force of these
15
In Putnam’s later years at any rate. His earlier internal realist position was seen by him as pre-
cisely Kantian. There is no doubt a lot one could write by way of the hermeneutics of Putnam’s
philosophy as it unfolded over the years, but that is not my concern here.
6.4 Conceptual Relativity 149
‘model-theoretic’ arguments, and much else of detail changed in Putnam’s philoso-

phy, he remained committed to a rejection of MR throughout his life. He was par-
ticularly concerned to reject a naturalistic form of MR, i.e. something at least close
to what earlier in this book has been called metaphysical naturalism or object natu-
ralism. His motivations for this are also very consonant with those of ARTL, namely
a wish to avoid a threat to the rationality of our everyday normative and experience-
based practices, though in a way that also allows the preservation of a reasonable
naturalism and realism. In all these respects, his view is close to ARTL.
As noted, however, the reasons for his rejection of MR and how he thinks this
rejection should be understood have altered over the years. While initially this rested
on a combination of the model-theoretic arguments and the brain in the vat argu-
ment (see Chap. 5), he came to think at least the former were undermined by an
implausibly internalist view of perception they presupposed. Further, as we also
have mentioned, he moved from an explicitly anti-realist kind of view to what was
meant to be a full realism, albeit a ‘realism with a human face’ (Putnam 1987), one
that also incorporated an externalist or disjunctivist view of perception (Putnam
1994, cf. also Sect. 3.2). His denial of MR remained constant, but he came to see the
demonstration of its falsity as lying in the fact (or alleged fact) that there are in cer-
tain cases more than one way of describing reality; more than one way of saying
what exists, how many things there are and so on. There is not just one description
of reality, or a ‘God’s eye point of view’, as he also expressed MR’s commitment to
reality having its own intrinsic structure. Perhaps his most famous example of this
comes from so-called ‘mereology’ and concerns a discussion between a ‘Polish
logician’ and a ‘Carnapian’ about what exists in a certain state of affairs (call it S)
consisting (as most people would think of it) of three simple objects a, b and c,
standardly represented as blobs on a piece of paper (see e.g. Putnam 1987, 96–97).
If, with the Carnapian, one denies the validity of basic mereological principles dic-
tating that parts can freely compose new whole objects, one will say that in S there
are or exist just the 3 objects – the three blobs – most people would take there to be,
a, b and c. If one, with the Polish logician, endorses these principles, then 7 objects
exist in S: a, b, c, a + b, a + c, b + c, a + b + c. According to Putnam, both of these
are correct descriptions of S. They are nevertheless incompatible descriptions,
because they do not simply involve an equivocation over the meaning of ‘exist’ or
‘object’. Words have (relatively) stable meanings, but they can also be used to say
different things in particular contexts. A leaf painted green might be truly said to be
green in one context, not in another, without the word ‘green’ shifting meaning (an
example due to Travis 1994). Thus the Carnapian and the Polish logician are not just
talking past each other; they say in a sense conflicting things. But at the same time
there is no fact of the matter as to which is correct. It is just a matter of convention
whether we say the one thing or the other. Reality supports both but uniquely dic-
tates neither.
Putnam employs many other examples of such ‘conceptual relativity’, as he calls
it. One concerns Euclidian geometry (Putnam 1987, 97): are the points in the plane
constituents of the plane, or mere limits of different regions? Both modes of descrip-
tion can be utilized even though they implicitly contradict each other. An example
from earlier work on quantum mechanics concerns the description of the electron as
a particle, with indeterminate position, or as a wave (Putnam 1967). In metaphysics,
issues about identity, persistence and constitution, often related to the mereological
example above, also evince the phenomena (see e.g. Putnam 2004, 47 ff.). In all of
these areas, there seems nothing ‘real’ at stake between the different descriptions –
they have no differing observable or other practical consequences – and we can
devise systematic ways of translating between them. But nor are they merely nota-
tional variants of one underlying description; they say different things, posit differ-
ent and ‘incompatible’ objects.
Putnam is not just a conceptual relativist, in this sense; he says he is also a ‘con-
ceptual pluralist’ (Putnam 2004, 48 ff.) in that he thinks there is not just one funda-
mentally correct vocabulary for describing the furniture of the universe as something
like metaphysical or, in Price’s terms, object naturalism holds. Such a pluralism is
of course also something that we have seen ARTL is (at least typically) committed
to and at least, in light of Price’s arguments, should be committed to in view of the
argument against object naturalism from rejecting Representationalism. For Putnam,
conceptual pluralism is a kind of corollary or implication of conceptual relativity,
though conceptual pluralism itself can be maintained without commitment to the
latter. I stress this here because, as I understand things, ARTL is committed to con-
ceptual pluralism (or rationally should be) but, for reasons to follow, holds we
should and can reject conceptual relativity.
For Putnam what conceptual relativity (CR henceforth) shows most fundamen-
tally is that while there is a factual and a conventional element in every truth claim
we make (or at least most of them),16 it is folly to construct a philosophy that seeks
to extricate the two, with language or thought on one side and reality on the other.
This is what MR does and that is why, fundamentally, it is incoherent. CR is a mani-
festation of this necessarily interwoven fabric coming apart at the fringes, so to
speak; but the phenomenon also thereby shows that the fabric is necessarily inter-
woven. As Putnam famously put it: ‘The mind [i.e. convention] and the world jointly
make up the mind and the world’ (Putnam 1981, xi). There is a world and there are
our conventions but it is necessarily only together that they constitute the world and
our conventions. In another place he puts this as follows: ‘One might say not that we
make the world, but that we help to define the world’ (Putnam 1992, 368).
Following from this, it is important for Putnam that CR should not be seen as a
doctrine committed to some kind of ‘cookie cutter’ model of how thought relates to
reality. On this understanding, the Polish logician and the Carnapian ‘carve’ differ-
ent objects out of one underlying ontological fabric, so to speak. Such a model can
appear natural on first exposure to the kinds of examples Putnam uses, and is indeed
how the doctrine has been interpreted by many, amongst others Paul Boghossian
(2006, ch. 3). We saw also in the previous section how Miller takes this kind of
picture to be what Hirsch is committed to, and that the realism it involves is only of
16
This proviso because he also acknowledges rare kinds of analytic truths that are simply conven-
tionally stipulated (Putnam 1975). Nothing of what I have to say here or, as far as I can see, what
Putnam says about CR, depends on this view.
a Kantian kind, in which our ontological commitments are, though in some way
validated by, nevertheless are not capable of carving the joints of, real reality. But
Putnam thinks this understanding of the example is wrong-headed: it actually
undermines CR as he understands the idea (Putnam 1987, 33). If we admit an under-
lying stuff that we carve up, we can always meaningfully ask whether the underly-
ing fabric has the parts discerned by the various different discourses or not. Either
way, at most one discourse ends up being vindicated as the correct description. So
if we take the idea seriously, we must also renounce this Kantian way of under-
standing it.
As with the discussion of Putnam’s views in the previous chapter, I do not here
intend to go into minute hermeneutic detail about Putnam’s thesis of CR and how its
various parts fit together. There is obviously a lot more that might be discussed and
clarified (see e.g. Case 1997, Wrisley 2008, and McKenna 2017 for helpful com-
mentary), but I hope what I have offered does present the outlines of a set of ideas
that are at least prima facie clear and cogent enough to support critical discussion.
I should first record an important dialectical caveat, namely that the doctrine of
CR and the implications it would have if correct are things that a position like ARTL
should at least take seriously (perhaps then having to modify some of its central
ideas). I say this because, although Putnam remained a staunch opponent of what he
called ‘metaphysical realism’ to his death, he rejected the model-theoretic argu-
ments and their significance for the realism debate on the grounds that they presup-
posed a faulty, internalist view of perception (Putnam 1994). Thus in his later work
rejecting metaphysical realism often became simply coeval with embracing
CR. This might prompt the suspicion that his CR is in fact much closer to the MR
that ARTL rejects, and that seeing CR as combinable with ARTL, or a version of it,
makes little sense. Now it seems to me that the arguments Putnam gives for renounc-
ing the model theoretic arguments are not wholly convincing. They are based on his
externalist or disjunctivist view of perception, but in his survey of Putnam’s tussles
with the realism debate, Button argues, convincingly to my mind, that model theo-
retic arguments can be run against such views also (2013, ch. 10). There is also a
question of whether such disjunctivist or externalist views should be accepted:
I think that, even if there is a deal that is right about them, this element can be car-
ried over into a context in which the traditional conception of perception as provid-
ing access to ‘mind-independent reality’ has been given up (see Sect. 3.2). But if
one accepts either of these things, and hence upholds the model theoretic reductio
of MR (pace Putnam), it seems one could still be impressed by the thoughts behind
CR. In other words, there seems no strong reason to think that CR cannot be com-
bined with a view like ARTL – that is, it seems open that Putnam’s CR-view might
be the best form a ‘post’ metaphysically realist philosophy (in ARTL’s sense) should
take, and hence that ARTL should modify itself in order to incorporate CR within
its ambit.
However, I will now argue, firstly, that CR is plausibly not this best form, and
secondly that we do not need to incorporate it anyway because the phenomena
Putnam cites to illustrate it are not after all compelling.
The first point is that, in spite of what Putnam says to the contrary, I cannot see
how a kind of Kantian implication is ultimately to be avoided if one accepts CR. Think
again of the metaphor of the interwoven fabric coming apart at the fringes. We can
accept with Putnam that this reveals how fundamentally interwoven the fabric is.
Nevertheless, the very fact that convention and reality can come apart at all leaves us,
surely, with a puzzle, namely: how should we think about (to return to mereological
example) the bit of reality, S, that the Carnapian legitimately describes as containing
three objects and the Polish logician as containing 7? Putnam is right that we cannot
think of it as determinately structured or as having parts itself without begging the
question against his view. But nevertheless his view leaves us with a puzzle.
Sometimes of course begging the question is unavoidable, to no avail for the
view against which the question is begged. But in fact I think we can delve a bit
deeper than that here. It seems germane to ask why Putnam assumes that an under-
lying reality should be one about which it makes sense to ask how many parts it has?
The Ding an sich was indeed originally conceived, by Kant, as something simply
unknowable. But might we not instead rather see it as something inconceivable,
something it makes no sense even to apply our concepts to but which nevertheless,
somehow or other, can vindicate various different conceptual statements and prac-
tices (though not all)? In a paper discussing a Kantian take on contemporary prag-
matism, Sami Pihlstöm and Arto Siitonen (2005) present an interpretation of
twentieth century thinking about science from Reichenbach to contemporary think-
ers like Michael Friedman that brings out how there has been transition from ‘the
Kantian concern with the limits of knowledge (and thus with the unknowability of
the Ding an sich) into a concern with the limits of language, of the sayable […bring-
ing us] through Kuhnian philosophy of science, to a largely Wittgensteinean terri-
tory’ (p. 93). Wittgenstein famously proclaimed in the Tractatus that the limits of
language are the limits of the world, at the same time as he gestured towards that of
which ‘one cannot speak’ as a kind of rational ground for meaningful language.
This can seem something close to an inconceivable Ding an sich. Thomas Kuhn also
seems to understand his commitment to what has been called a ‘dynamic Kantianism’
(Hoyningen-Huene 1993) in something like this way. For Kuhn, scientific para-
digms do not advance towards one true description of absolute reality; however,
they do all in some sense seek to give an understanding of and respond to such a
reality, and become progressively better at so doing. At the same time, there would
seem no way of specifying what this constancy amounts to in non-paradigm-bound
terms: all language springs out of human practice and is internal to paradigms, and
hence the Ding an sich remains non-articulated, indeed, unarticulable as such –
even though it can, apparently, support articulable practices.
I admit this is heady stuff, but my point here is that the idea seems in principle
available. As far as I can see there is no greater incoherence in conceiving of Ding
an sich in such semantic terms – as that of which we cannot speak but nevertheless
validates what we can say – than in conceiving it in epistemological terms, as some-
thing simply unknowable. And even if there were a greater such coherence, it is not
clear that that difference would render the thought unavailable in the way Putnam
would want it to be such that it couldn’t be combined with CR.
So the dialectical situation is this. The idea of CR as Putnam develops it, even if
we accept it on his terms, nevertheless leaves us with a language-reality split that is
puzzling. The original Kantian notion involving a merely unknowable reality admit-
tedly seems to make Putnam’s position simply a non-starter, and hence, perhaps, to
illegitimately beg the question against it. But ideas in twentieth century philosophy
open for a kind of Kantianism that might bring some greater consistency to the view
in question. This is what I am first and foremost thinking of in talking of (quasi-)
Kantian anti-representationalism about thought and language – a view that, as men-
tioned above, has been defended more fully by some, such as Pihlström (op. cit.).
Now I would not wish to suggest that this view is itself tantamount to a non-starter.
Nevertheless, from the perspective of my ARTL, which seeks to uphold a common
sense realism and naturalism, it is unpalatable. It is mysterious and it is philosophi-
cally paradoxical. Nevertheless, if we were forced to accept the kinds of examples
Putnam gives, one might well also be forced to admit something like it.
The good news for ARTL is that I think Putnam’s examples in fact are not that
convincing. This is a large topic that again I cannot do full justice to here (for a
fuller critical discussion of Putnam’s view, see Wrisley op. cit.). Putnam sees CR
almost everywhere, and many of the examples would warrant a chapter length dis-
cussion of their own. What I want to concentrate here on are two overarching prob-
lems for Putnam’s line. The first concerns a general scepticism to the possibility of
metaphysics that his CR doctrine seems to involve. The second – almost the
reverse – concerns the idea that at least certain of his examples exploit an abstract,
generic conception of ‘object’ that a follower of ARTL simply should not
countenance.
The thought behind the first problem is that Putnam dismisses too readily the
possibility that the alternative descriptions might amount to genuinely different
facts, or putative facts: just because they might have no differing empirical conse-
quences does not imply, without further ado, that there is no fact of the matter as to
which is correct, at least without presupposing a form of verificationism that Putnam
would presumably disavow (and, along with ARTL, certainly should). One form
this worry finds is Peter van Inwagen’s claim that mereology is in fact just a false
theory (Van Inwagen 2001): simple objects do not compose to yield complex ones
except in very special circumstances – for Van Inwagen, only when the complex
object in question is a living thing. If that is the case, then the Polish logician is
simply wrong to claim there are 7 objects and the Carnapian is right. Putnam finds
this claim preposterous: surely there is no real disagreement between the two. I am
not without sympathy with this reaction, but the general point stands: two descrip-
tions having the same empirical consequences does not automatically mean they do
not delineate two different states of affairs.
(This issue is also related to that of the next chapter. There we shall see that a
prominent thinker in the vicinity of ARTL, Amie Thomasson, defends a line on
which contentious metaphysical claims should be understood, not as making
descriptive or factual claims, but implicitly seeking to change the way we use cer-
tain terms with practical aims in mind. This is not because the claims are descrip-
tively meaningless but because they are radically empirically underdetermined and
hence undecidable. This line is different from Putnam’s but my response to it will
be related in that I suggest that Thomasson undersells the possibility of genuine
metaphysics within ARTL.)
Another issue that is also relevant here is that of whether a conception of reality
as consisting of simple objects at some fundamental level and as composing to form
wholes should be so much as taken seriously as a starting point for metaphysical
thinking. This is something that has recently come to the fore in the work of the so-
called ‘naturalised metaphysicians’, most notably James Ladyman and Don Ross
(cf. Ladyman & Ross et al. 2007). According to them, this conception corresponds
to a scientifically outmoded conception of physical reality as consisting of a collec-
tion of discrete atoms that group together or not under certain conditions. But fun-
damental physics does not today operate with such a ‘thing’ ontology. This is not to
say that there are no ‘things’, like cells or trees or human beings, existing as stable
patterns at certain levels of spatio-temporal scale and that are relevant to certain
kinds of interests we have. But much traditional metaphysical work in analytic phi-
losophy – concerning issues like constitution and identity, which Putnam also sees
as a source of CR – has at the very least to be radically re-conceived if it is not to be
seen as operating with toy models and imaginary problems. Another way of under-
standing what is going on here is that given something like conceptual pluralism
(which in view of what was just said it seems clear Ladyman & Ross can be seen as
subscribing to) many of the alleged examples of CR simply lapse. I should stress
that this is not meant to suggest that there can be no meaningful debates of the kind
traditional metaphysicians have pursued, although that does clearly remain a pos-
sible outcome. What it does suggest is that metaphysical debates in analytic phi-
losophy cannot be rolled out as providing parade examples of CR.
These points (if correct) do not necessarily undermine all the examples of CR
Putnam has used. A distinct class concerns examples from mathematics, geometry
and physics where we seem to face a kind of equivalence-combined-with-alterity in
description that is difficult to see as something that could amount to a genuine meta-
physical debate or as harbouring a false presupposition. But then again, difficult is
not the same as impossible.
The second point I want to make – again not original to me, and probably related
to the first – concerns the fact that many of Putnam’s examples are framed in terms
of a generic notion of ‘object’. How many objects are there in S?, he asks. However
it is arguable that ‘object’ (and ‘thing’, ‘entity’, etc.) functions in our language not
as a genuine sortal, but merely as part of the formal vocabulary we use to construct
logical models of language (cf. Thomasson 2009, 2015, 109 ff.). How many objects
are there in the room I am currently sitting in? (This is another example Putnam has
used to illustrate and motivate CR, cf. his 1988, 111 ff.) Well, there are two arm-
chairs, two sofas, one table, three lamps, a glass on the table, a TV, and so on and so
forth…I could presumably complete the list (imagine I am going to rent out my
house fully furnished). But what about the legs of the chairs – should they count as
objects too? What about the lamp shade? And what about the motes of dust under
the radiator, are they to be included in the count (even if I didn’t want to tell anyone
about them!)? If so, how many such lumps are there? If not, how should we think of
the dust there (there will inevitably be some)? These can without doubt seem like
perplexing questions. But my contention, in line with Thomasson, would be that as
long as we start out within the language games that we actually play and the specific
sortals we actually use, there are or at least need in fact be no deep puzzles here.
Some ‘things’ are presumably just non-countable collections, such as the soil in my
plantpots. How we think of the dust under the radiator may involve individuating it
as different lumps to an extent, to an extent not. Why should that matter as long as
we know what we are talking about in any particular case? A chair is clearly made
from different, separable components, but for now they are together in one thing.
What we get to know from science about the various different ‘things’ we talk about
may also impact on what we want say about all this. Once we have made our inspec-
tion and taken account of what we feel is relevant in terms of the sortals and catego-
ries we possess, will we really owe Putnam an answer to his question? It isn’t at all
obvious to me that we will. And if so, it is not obvious that Putnam’s question is a
good one.
To be fair to Putnam, he does later on (2004, 98) suggest that this example may
only illustrate the phenomenon of conceptual pluralism, not CR. I would applaud
that move insofar as I accept the former, but as a general point my animadversions
stand, for it is precisely that kind of example and that way of thinking that Putnam
has used to motivate CR. My contrary thought is that, starting in and remaining as
true as one can to ordinary language, as well as science where relevant, seems a
much more reasonable strategy than asking abstract questions about how many
‘objects’ there are in a given situation. If one is still implicitly thinking in terms of
the kind of metaphysical realism by which one has to make sense of there being a
mind-independent reality which our language ideally captures, then perhaps these
kinds of question will appear unavoidable. If our language operates
Representationalistically, we will need in principle a clear conception of the various
bits of reality that our language latches on to, hence, reasonably, a delineation of the
number and kinds of ‘objects’ out there. But, as I have been telling the story at least,
MR should be behind us at this stage in the dialect. And if it is only its ghost that is
haunting us we should ignore it. I think indeed that Putnam, in raising the worries
he does leading to CR, is precisely haunted by this ghost. But since MR should be
already firmly removed from our thinking in approaching and assessing the impact
of the kinds of examples Putnam discusses, thinking nevertheless in terms of the
kinds of ‘objects’ it countenances in relation to the issue of how many objects there
are in a given situation should appear highly non-obligatory.
There might seem to be a certain tension between this point and the first one.
I said above that Putnam underestimates the possibility that alternative descriptions
of situations like S in the mereological case correspond to genuinely different meta-
physical states of affairs; but here I seem to be saying that the kind of plurality of
descriptions Putnam thinks can apply is only an artefact of using a concept like
‘object’ which is only a dummy sortal. Since either point would seem in principle
to be sufficient to defeat CR this needn’t be that important dialectically for me, but
I don’t think they are necessarily in tension anyway. I do not, in particular, maintain
that metaphysical puzzles never arise from reflection on ordinary language and
science; indeed, I think they probably do (e.g. in thinking about the identity of
something like a person over time, or about how to describe quantum mechanical
systems). I don’t even think it is totally ruled that some version of mereology and
the puzzles it raises might be motivated by reflection on ordinary language and sci-
ence. The point is just that, it seems to me at any rate, Putnam both unjustifiably
assumes the relevant metaphysical debates cannot be substantial, and that they nev-
ertheless are inevitably joined because of the availability of alternative descriptions
of the same situation. I would reject both of these commitments.
At lot more could still be said here. Nevertheless, I do believe that the above can
help dampen the force of the examples Putnam uses in a way that renders CR a far
from compelling phenomenon for the anti-representationalist about thought and
language to account for. Hence also any threat of a slide into a form of Kantianism
is obviated. In sum, ARTL can uphold common sense realism, even though, as
I have been at pains to argue in this chapter, it is important to understand exactly
what this realism is and how it dialectically relates to MR.
Chapter 7
Metaphysics for Anti-Representationalists?
Abstract In Chap. 2 I upheld Price’s argument that ARTL has negative repercus-
sions for the metaphysical programme that seeks to understand how various differ-
ent common sense categories can be placed in the natural world. But is there room
for other forms of metaphysics within the parameters of ARTL? This chapter focuses
on Amie Thomasson’s view that there is no defensible substantively epistemic
metaphysical project once one embraces ARTL, especially the aspect of her view
that seemingly intractable and inexorably contentious metaphysical disputes –
about, say, what a person is, or a work of art – involve metalinguistic negotiation
about the use of certain concepts with pragmatic aims in mind. Thomasson’s picture
can seem attractive for a supporter of ARTL insofar as it paints a picture of philoso-
phers, in particular metaphysicians, as engaged in meaningful and important work
in spite of not being in the business of ‘mapping out the fundamental structure of
reality’. My aim in this chapter is however to question Thomasson’s picture of what
metaphysics amounts to for ARTL, and to offer my own account of this. I will be
arguing that her understanding of metaphysics as metalinguistic negotiation is prob-
lematic both because it fails to demarcate appropriately between those debates that
plausibly are and those that aren’t contentious, and, more seriously, because it does
not afford the input philosophers might provide to these debates any special signifi-
cance beyond that which politicians, lawyers or other professional (or for that mat-
ter, non-professional) people or groups might provide. Moreover, I will suggest that
her view that there are clearly demarcated analytic claims on the one hand, and
clearly demarcated empirical claims on the other, which is central to her case, is
problematic both in itself, and in running counter to the spirit of ARTL. In place of
Thomasson’s view, and more in line with ARTL, I will suggest a view of metaphys-
ics as something perpetually ongoing – though probably also never-ending – through
our very use and reflection on language and concepts in relation to the goal of
expressing our beliefs, i.e. what we hold to be true. Finally, and more speculatively,
I draw on ideas defended earlier in the book to provide a kind of subject naturalistic
account of a more principled divide between metaphysics and science.

Switzerland AG 2023
473, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26924-0_7
158 7 Metaphysics for Anti-Representationalists?
7.1 Introduction
We have seen, in Chap. 2, that anti-representationalism about thought and language

(ARTL) does plausibly have significant repercussions for a certain metaphysical
programme, or programmes, within contemporary analytic philosophy: ones that
seek to understand how various different common sense categories can be placed in
the natural world (with ‘natural’ understood in some invidious sense). Though this
programme – object naturalism – is not exactly incoherent given we reject
Representationalism, it is plausibly deeply irrational in a certain way. Insofar,
Price’s argument is vindicated.
Is there room for other forms of metaphysics within the parameters of ARTL?
According to Price, subject naturalism survives the rejection of object naturalism.
Subject naturalism aims to understand and explain the roles different discourses
play in the lives of creatures like us, understood in a broadly naturalistic way.
Exactly what is involved in saying this last thing is a somewhat vexed matter. Price’s
official line is close that of what I have elsewhere called a ‘scientific naturalist’, i.e.
someone who sees a commitment to a broad naturalism – to the idea there are no
supernatural entities, that humans are fully part of evolved, material nature, that
philosophy should not contradict science, and so on – as entailing that all explana-
tion will be of natural scientific character, again in a sense that might be understood
more or less broadly (cf. Knowles 2006, 2010; Price 2010b). I have in this book
largely aimed to follow him in this, at least when it comes to giving a ‘lower level’
account of the differences between our different linguistic practices (cf. Chaps. 2–
4). Whether such a naturalism can apply, or even what it would mean for it to apply,
to explaining our cognitive practices as such, that is, at the i-level, is something
I have had less to say about. It is also important that ARTL, at least in Price’s or my
own form, does not see scientific knowledge as exhausting genuine truth or knowl-
edge, thus protecting categories of common sense or the ‘manifest image’ from the
threat science can seem to pose to them.
These issues are intricate and the subject of much contemporary discussion (see
e.g. the essays in De Caro and Macarthur 2004, 2010, 2022). However, just on the
basis of what ARTL in my favoured form is committed to, there would still seem to
be space for something like metaphysical enquiry: for space to ask (at least some of
the) kinds of questions that traditionally have been classed as ‘metaphysical’. Even
if we are scientific naturalists and don’t acknowledge a class of sui generis philo-
sophical questions, it by no means follows that all questions that science might feel
the need to answer can be answered by science, at least as we have it today. On
Quine’s naturalistic-holistic picture of belief (Quine 1953; Quine and Ullian 1970),
the boundaries between science and philosophy are blurred in such a way that the
latter are yoked to the former; but in doing so the picture precisely does not abrogate
them. We can still find ourselves asking or wanting to ask questions that, though
thrown up by science, are not themselves answered by it – such as how we might
understand space and time in the light of Einstein’s relativity theory, or exactly what
kind of ‘reality’ quantum mechanics describes. Naturalists of the kind Price and
7.1 Introduction 159
myself are could see a similar pattern in relation to common sense categories. We
talk in our everyday life of persons, free will, values, works of art and so on, but
questions can also arise about these things – about what they are and how we should
understand them, to an extent independently of how they might fit into the world
described by science. It is not as if ARTL thinks we should generally stop discussing
problems or puzzles that arise within our various different discourses, so why not
also those that are taken up under the rubric of ‘metaphysics’ by philosophers?
As far I am aware Price has not explicitly addressed this question. He does reject
placement metaphysics, but insofar as this would not seem to exhaust what is under-
taken in the name of ‘metaphysics’, there is plausibly scope for a more liberal atti-
tude.1 There are however also thinkers who want to forge a stronger connection
between ARTL, or at least something close to it, and a more thoroughgoing ‘anti-
metaphysicalism’ (though we will have to be careful in delineating what exactly this
label implies). A prominent figure in the recent debate who fits this bill is Amie
Thomasson. On the one hand, she espouses semantic minimalism (Thomasson
2014), endorses Price’s use/mention interpretation of Carnap’s internal/external
questions distinction (cf. Thomasson 2015, 36 ff.), sees this view this as fully com-
patible with a common sense realism (ibid., 60 ff.), and defends what she calls
‘global pragmatism’ (which is clearly meant to be at least very close to Price’s
global expressivism) against a version of Kraut’s ‘no exit problem’ for expressivism
(Thomasson 2019). On the other hand, she defends an explicitly and thoroughgo-
ingly ‘deflationary’ programme in ontology and metaphysics. Her particular version
of this she dubs ‘the easy approach’ to ontology (Thomasson 2015), according to
which ontological questions about whether things like numbers, properties or
middle-sized dry goods exist can be answered by reference to the rules of language,
or fragments thereof, that we use to express our thoughts about such things, along
with trivially valid logically inferences, plus empirical input where relevant. She has
further sought to undermine various ‘heavyweight’ approaches to issues about
modality, such as Lewis’ realism about possible worlds, by thinking of modal claims
in terms of non-descriptive, inference-licensing rules (see Thomasson 2020). She
does not see this approach as exactly anti-metaphysical in the sense that there is no
interesting work for the professional ‘metaphysician’ to do. Analysis of the rules
underlying our ontologically practices may be far from trivial (hence the scare
quotes around ‘easy’). But she does think that insofar as metaphysical or ontologi-
cal questions can receive definitive answers in principle at least, the method will
involve only conceptual analysis, plus empirical investigation where necessary;
there are no distinctively metaphysical inferences to draw, at least probative ones.
In a recent further twist, however, Thomasson has now offered what can be seen
as something of an olive branch to ‘serious’ metaphysicians, i.e. those who think
there is work that can and should be done in metaphysics beyond conceptual
analysis. This is by understanding what seem by all accounts to be more intractable
1
Indeed, much of the substantive philosophy Price engages in is hardly scientific nor purely con-
ceptual, so presumably should be understood as a form of ‘naturalised metaphysics’. See also Sect.
7.4 below.
and inexorably contentious metaphysical disputes – about, say, what a person is, or
a work of art – as involving metalinguistic negotiation about the use of certain con-
cepts, with pragmatic aims in mind (Plunkett and Sundell 2013; Thomasson 2017a,
b). The question of whether, to be a person, one has to be self-conscious, does not
seem to be the kind of thing we can determine through analyzing the concept of a
person or find out through empirical science. It seems like a quintessentially ‘meta-
physical’ question. On Thomasson’s new line, there is still no substantive, epistemi-
cally distinctive metaphysical project to undertake in answering this question, but
the question is nevertheless admitted to be important insofar as it impacts on real
world issues such as legislation about abortion. Understanding contentious meta-
physical debates as metalinguistic negotiations with practical aims in mind is meant
to do justice to this aspect of metaphysical practice. In this way her view is also
meant to subscribe to the increasingly popular view of (certain branches of) philoso-
phy as involving conceptual engineering (see Burgess et al. 2019; Cappelen 2018).
Thomasson’s picture might also seem attractive for a supporter of ARTL insofar
as it paints a picture of philosophers, in particular metaphysicians, as engaged in
meaningful and important work – work that is ‘world-directed’, as she puts it – in
spite of not being in the business of ‘mapping out the fundamental structure of real-
ity’. My aim in this chapter is however to question Thomasson’s picture of what
metaphysics amounts to for ARTL, and to offer my own account of the possibilities
for metaphysics within ARTL. I will be arguing that her understanding of metaphys-
ics as metalinguistic negotiation is problematic on two counts: first, because it fails
to demarcate appropriately between those debates that plausibly are and those that
aren’t contentious; and second, and more seriously, because it does not afford the
input philosophers might provide to these debates any special significance beyond
that which (at least suitably enlightened and reflective) politicians, lawyers or other
professional (or for that matter, non-professional) people or groups might provide.
Moreover, I will suggest that her view that there are clearly demarcated analytic
claims on the one hand, and clearly demarcated empirical claims on the other, which
is central to both her descriptive and normative conceptualism, is problematic, both
in itself, and in that it runs counter to what I think is the spirit of ARTL. I won’t be
arguing that Thomasson’s overall view is incoherent, or indeed even inconsistent
with ARTL, but I will be putting these points forward as reasons to be dissatisfied
with it and for the desirability of something else, at least if one is both committed to
ARTL and concerned to understand the significance of what philosophers who see
themselves as doing ‘metaphysics’ might be up to.
In place of Thomasson’s dichotomy between descriptive-but-easy and normative-
but-difficult conceptual projects as models for metaphysics, I will suggest an inte-
grated view of metaphysics as something perpetually ongoing through our very use
and reflection on language and concepts in relation to the goal of expressing our
beliefs. The sharp contrast that Thomasson operates with between describing and
prescribing activity is abandoned on this picture. What emerges, however, is a view
of metaphysics that can probably only be something desultory, insofar as it concerns
the conditions for the use of our concepts in the most general sense, and is therefore
not – as certain other discourses perhaps are – related to identifiable underlying
7.2 Thomasson on Metaphysics as Descriptively and Normatively Conceptual 161
functions in our overall cognitive functioning. Here I – somewhat speculatively –

draw again on the idea of subject naturalism from Price, but in the form of this
I have defended earlier in this book.
My conclusion is that, insofar as ARTL abjures the project of ‘mapping reality’,
there is no reason to think metaphysics will ever converge on some final set of
truths. At the same time, and by the same token, metaphysics doesn’t ask meaning-
less or unanswerable questions, and the human condition is most likely such that we
will never be able to stop asking these kinds of thing.
The chapter is divided into four further sections. Section 7.2 outlines Thomasson’s
overall view in a little more detail; Sect. 7.3 presents my critique of it; Sects. 7.4 and
7.5 propound and defend my own positive proposal for metaphysics for ARTL,
along with its implications and limitations.
7.2 Thomasson on Metaphysics as Descriptively

and Normatively Conceptual
Thomasson’s broad view of metaphysics is one that is simultaneously sceptical to a

traditional conception of the subject – as something aimed at uncovering the con-
stituents and nature of fundamental reality – and positive towards what one can
might call a broadly conceptualist understanding of metaphysics.2
The problems with traditional metaphysics are for her manifold (see e.g.
Thomasson 2017a, 101). To start with, it has failed despite centuries of enquiry to
reach any stable conclusions (sc. the mind-body problem, the free will debate etc.,
etc.). Secondly, it has unclear if not outright dubious epistemological credentials: it
is not an empirical subject like science, but relies on intuitions and thought experi-
ments that can seem, on reflection, to track only our peculiarly human ways of
thinking about reality, not how that reality itself is. Thirdly, it is, at least potentially,
in conflict with science, certain branches of which also aim to uncover the nature of
fundamental reality, but surely in a way that has much more epistemic warrant in so
doing than anything a philosopher might offer.3 The conclusion is that we should
simply drop the project of traditional metaphysics.
Thomasson’s alternative view of metaphysics and ontology is inspired by Carnap
(1950), and resembles that of thinkers such as Putnam (e.g. 1987) and Hirsch (2011)
who interpret Carnap’s view as the idea that ontological commitment is relative to a
choice of linguistic framework or conceptual scheme. However, unlike Putnam and
Hirsch, Thomasson thinks that there are unequivocal answers to at least many
2
Though she has not changed her mind on the central questions, her overall view has also evolved
and developed in significant ways over the years. For a sense of this, cf. and cp. Thomasson (2007,
2015, 2017a, b, 2018, 2020).
3
Another theme in her (Thomasson 2007) was the threat traditional metaphysics seems to pose to
the existence of everyday categories like ‘chair’, ‘table’, ‘human being’ etc., which can seem a
prima facie undesirable consequence.
ontological questions, given the rules of our actual language (Thomasson 2015, ch.
1; see also Sect. 6.3). Thus (to repeat an example from earlier), on establishing
empirically that an apple is green, we can, in virtue of rules of language, express
that as the claim that the apple instantiates the property of greenness – from which
it trivially follows that properties exist. This does not amount to linguistic idealism
or constructivism, whereby language creates the world. Rather our language makes
available to us thoughts and modes of reasoning that allow us to draw conclusions
that are objectively true. To think otherwise would be to confuse use with mention.
However, saying that doesn’t preclude also asking questions about the pragmatic
function of different kinds of talk, or discourses, in the lives of organisms like us. In
adopting this understanding of Carnap’s distinction between internal and external
questions Thomasson acknowledges a debt to Price (cf. Thomasson 2015, 36 ff.).
An important qualification of Thomasson’s position is that ontology and/or
metaphysics is not necessarily easy in the sense of simple or facile; it may require
subtle philosophical analysis to reveal exactly what the ontological commitments of
our language are. Nevertheless, in her most recent work Thomasson has also con-
ceded that some metaphysical issues seem not just non-trivial but also both irre-
deemably contentious and, at least in some cases, practically important. She has
therefore seen a need to consider how this aspect of the subject might be conceived,
and her answer is that a conceptualist can see (some) metaphysical debates as
(veiled) metalinguistic negotiations (Plunkett and Sundell 2013; Thomasson
2017b): we use the terms in question to make first-order statements about the world
that can be true or false, but our underlying aim is to legislate or at least attempt to
legislate for a certain usage of the terms (or, as the case might be, to introduce new
terms, or get rid of old ones). For example, in debating the nature of persons and
personal identity one can see what someone is up to in claiming, say, that (a certain
kind of) self-consciousness is necessary for personhood as at a deeper level making
a suggestion about how the word or concept ‘person’ should be used. Moreover,
rather than such claims answering to the underlying or ‘metaphysical’ nature of
persons, they can be assessed in relation to their practical implications, such as
deciding whether abortion beyond a certain point should be permitted. Metalinguistic
negotiations are plausibly common outside of metaphysics: when we ask whether
chess is a sport, or alcoholism a disease we are plausibly not seeking more factual
knowledge, but rather to make a decision based on the practical implications of
certain word usages. Thomasson’s idea is that we can use this phenomenon as a
model for understanding many metaphysical debates; indeed, the suggestion that
metaphysical debates are metalinguistic negotiations can be seen, in a boot-strapping
manner, as a move in a metalinguistic negotiation about the use of the term ‘meta-
physics’ itself (Thomasson 2017a, 108–9). In this way Thomasson thinks we can
retain the sense that metaphysical debates are inescapably contentious and world-
directed, but without seeing them as either pointless or incapable of resolution (even
if this resolution is only ever pro tem).
Thomasson provides more detail and defence of her various conceptions of meta-
physics in her writings, many of which are worthy of further study. For my purposes
here however the above should suffice to appreciate the problems I have with her view.
7.3 Problems with Thomasson’s View 163
7.3 Problems with Thomasson’s View
I will consider first an objection to Thomasson’s view that she herself takes up and
responds to. I agree with her that this is not a problem for her in and of itself, but her
response to it will provide a useful starting point for understanding what I think is
problematic in her view.
The objection is as follows:4
[T]hose who adopt a pragmatic approach to conceptual choice can indeed argue that it is
more pragmatically useful to talk in terms of mental illness than demonic possession, or in
terms of oxygen than phlogiston, or in terms of Mercury than Vulcan. But the natural way
of expressing why it is better is simply to say: that is because demonic possession, phlogis-
ton, and Vulcan turned out not to exist. But if that is so, then […] engaging in this kind of
world-constrained pragmatic approach to conceptual choice does require appeal to facts
about what does and does not exist—and accordingly we do after all need to do metaphys-
ics in order to engage in the deflationist’s pragmatic approach to conceptual choice.
(Thomasson 2017b, 376)
The ‘pragmatic approach to conceptual choice’ is Thomasson’s term for her take on
how we should understand conceptual ethics (i.e. which concepts to adopt) more
generally, and does not concern traditional metaphysical debates in particular. But
the point applies to the latter a fortiori. So what should we make of the objection,
either generally or as applied to metaphysical concepts in particular?
According to Thomasson we can firstly concede that some conceptual choices
are in a sense ‘metaphysical’, that is, do depend on what we can claim exists.
However, this is no objection to her view for when this occurs it is because there are
clear empirical grounds for such claims – as in the examples in the quote, she claims
(whether this is correct for precisely the cases she mentions is not the point at issue
here). When it comes to the specifically metaphysical or ontological issues of phi-
losophy, however, we cannot resort to this strategy, as these are quintessentially
non-empirical. Here, then, Thomasson says, her view cannot accept the claim in the
argument above applied to something like numbers – that we do or don’t talk about
numbers ultimately because we have established that numbers do or don’t exist.
However, this is no cost for her view because a) the existence or non-existence of
metaphysical categories is typically given by the rules of our language b) we can
reject moves which abrogate these rules on good pragmatic grounds. Thus, someone
who denies that numbers exist is uttering an analytically false statement, whilst the
grounds for rejecting their claim can be, not that we know as a matter of deep meta-
physical fact that the opposite is the case, but that accepting number talk is so prag-
matically fecund that we should retain it.
At this point, I think we should feel a first sense of discomfort with Thomasson’s
view. One of the motivating thoughts behind her normative conceptualist approach
is that some metaphysical issues are highly contentious. I take it that this implies
4
She calls this, following (and citing) Kraut (2016), the ‘no exit’ problem; it can be seen as a fam-
ily of such problems that can seem to infect global expressivist or pragmatist views (see also
Chap. 2).
that both sides of an issue have at least some degree of rational warrant for their
view. But the nominalist in the case we have just described seems not to be in the
running, fit only to play the role of a misguided soul whom we more enlightened
ones can rebut as conceptually confused and pragmatically ignorant.
Perhaps Thomasson could reply that it is not primarily this, or this kind, of meta-
physical debate that she envisages being reconstructed in terms of metalinguistic
negotiation. Whether numbers or properties or ordinary objects exist is a question
for ‘easy’ ontology; what their defining characteristics are might, on the other hand,
be a question of exactly what concept of these things is most appropriate for us to
employ. Indeed, it can seem from much of what Thomasson writes as if ontology
generally – the question of what kinds of thing exist – will be ‘easy’, while at least
some of what remains of metaphysics will not be. If either of these things is accepted,
however, it doesn’t quite chime with the dialectical situation as she presents it (in the
paper from which the above quote is taken), which presents it as a live option that at
least some ontological questions might also be normatively conceptual. More seri-
ously, neither answer seems to fit well with the actual practices of metaphysicians,
who, I take it, see many ontological questions, not least about numbers, as just as
contentious, and often as just as important, as questions about the natures of things.
This point is related to Tim Button’s objection to Thomasson’s easy approach to
ontology (Button 2020). Button argues that the kinds of analytic inferences that
Thomasson recommends as its basis are insufficient to ground any kind of reason-
able ontological conclusions, since they fail to tell us what precludes inferences to
objects no one would want to endorse. We say the rain put the kibosh on the cricket
match, or that I did it for her sake. Are we committed then to there being kiboshes
and sakes and many other absurd things, just because we have words that function
in certain grammatical ways (i.e. as substantives)? Surely not. Thomasson would
agree and has replies to these kinds of objections that Button also (critically) dis-
cusses. However, my point here is not that Thomasson is wrong in suggesting onto-
logical issues can be decided in the way she suggests (though I am sympathetic to
Button’s scepticism). My point here is rather that it at least maps poorly onto the
actual practice of metaphysicians, whereas capturing this practice seems to be at
least one of the desiderata behind her combined normative-and-descriptive concep-
tualist approach to metaphysics.
Another way of putting this objection then would be to present Thomasson with
a dilemma: Given certain metaphysical (including ontological) questions are meant
to be ‘easy’, and certain others not, what does this distinction really amount to? It
seems, as we have just seen, that it can’t be just a matter of actual metaphysicians
regarding them as easily resolved or not; regarding them as non-easy is not a neces-
sary condition on them being non-easy, at least. But then for any question which
someone regards as non-easy, how can we be so sure it isn’t in fact ‘easy’, i.e. sus-
ceptible to descriptive conceptual resolution given a ‘proper’ understanding of it?
This objection is not I think fatal to Thomasson’s view, for she could try to provide
some kind of informative answer, even if only in a piecemeal manner for each kind
of case. But it does I think beg the question of whether the distinction she draws is
really as sharp as she seems to think it is.
A second and I think more serious problem with Thomasson’s view lies at a more
sociological or metaphilosophical level: at the level of what kind of role philoso-
phers can be seen as having in public debate if their contribution, at least in norma-
tive matters, is conceived along the lines she suggests. Now it seems reasonable, as
Thomasson says, that many philosophical debates do have, at least potentially, prac-
tical import. How can that be if we (philosophers) are not doing metaphysics in the
traditional sense of uncovering fundamental reality? According to Thomasson, we
can instead be making suggestions about how to use terms with various pragmatic
considerations in mind. However, on the face of it, that seems to seriously down-
grade the significance of our (i.e. philosophers’) role. Take again the example of
someone who claims that a certain kind of self-consciousness, or at least the capac-
ity for such, is a necessary condition for being a person. Someone now asks this
philosopher: on what basis or grounds do you offer your statement? According to
the traditional view the answer would be that this is based on some kind insight into
what persons are – into a (putative) truth about persons. According to the pragmatic
account Thomasson recommends it could not be this, but it could be a metalinguis-
tic point, say that use of the term ‘person’ in this way will facilitate certain abortion
practices, in accord with what is (or appears) socially desirable. My problem with
this reply is not that the latter answer might lead us into a kind of circularity,
whereby we ask about what is ‘socially desirable’ and why; for one could simply
extend the sphere of reflection to other terms in a way that rendered the circle large
enough to be virtuous. The problem is rather that this seems to be the kind of reply
that many others who are party to the practical debate might offer, such as lawyers
or politicians or even ordinary citizens – people with no particular concern for or
expertise in philosophy. The question becomes, in a word, a political one (by which
I will henceforth mean one which may concern also matters of the law and demo-
cratic discussion/participation of various kinds), with no essential resort to any
question of what is true, beyond the empirical facts and what might be analytically
true. This is not to say that what one might end up with might not finally be acknowl-
edged as true, if the usage became sufficiently established in everyday language (as
would indeed happen given Thomasson’s overall deflationary view of ontology and
truth). But in the process towards any such equilibrium, appeals to insight or truth
could play no role. The problem then is that the idea that this could really mandate
philosophy as a kind of practice distinct from (reflective and enlightened) political
debate seems unconvincing.
One might reply to this that an expertise in philosophy can be understood as an
expertise with or knowledge of the use of a certain range of concepts, namely those
traditionally taught under the rubric of metaphysics in universities. We would then
need precisely philosophers as part of a fully informed political debate insofar as
getting clear on these concepts has societal impact. A first problem with this reply
is that there is presumably no guarantee that it will be understanding precisely the
traditional metaphysical concepts that will be seen as vital to solving the problems
of the modern world. But even putting that to one side the reply is unsatisfactory. An
understanding of actual usage of certain concepts is certainly an important aspect of
philosophical competence, but that has more to do with the broader project of
clarifying meanings and usages, clearing up ambiguity and as well as perhaps what
is sometimes called ‘descriptive metaphysics’ (Strawson 1959).5 Philosophers no
doubt also have a role in educating the general public about what has been thought
about certain important concepts in the past. When it comes to innovative, norma-
tive conceptual work, however, the idea that philosophers offer some distinctive
expertise about how certain concepts should be used cannot it seems to me be read-
ily based on the model Thomasson recommends, for the reasons I have given: it is
not one upon which we can see philosophy as having any special kind of epistemic
authority, something it has traditionally been seen as having and which I take it
Thomasson wants at least to some extent uphold.
There are perhaps a handful of historical cases of purely pragmatically-based
metalinguistic negotiation or conceptual engineering in metaphysics, such as
Locke’s suggestions about the forensic nature of the concept of personhood.
Thomasson also offers a few examples of contemporary metaphysical debates that
can seem to function like metalinguistic negotiations (see e.g. Thomasson 2018,
144). However, not least in view of the fact that she sees her view of metaphysics as
itself an attempt at renegotiating the meaning of ‘metaphysics’ (Thomasson 2017a,
216), it seems one cannot assume that this is something philosophers have always
done or always seen themselves as doing. If either of these things were the case, I
would perhaps have to be more concessive to Thomasson’s model (there would
probably be other ramifications for how we should understand philosophical prac-
tice too). But it isn’t, and so my complaint stands: if we were to accept that philoso-
phy’s innovative role is by and large to be understood in terms of just a kind of
conceptual engineering with practical or pragmatic goals in mind, then it is hard to
see how it could ultimately be distinct from politics.
One might feel I am here construing the pragmatism of Thomasson’s position too
narrowly. After all, isn’t something like Carnap’s project of explication, whereby we
seek to make our meanings more precise, a form of conceptual engineering; and
isn’t this something we can also see as exemplified in more recent philosophical
work that suggests replacing concepts like truth with something more logically trac-
table? (See Burgess et al. op. cit, plus Thomasson 2009, 467, herself for endorse-
ment of this Carnapian kind of project.)
A different objection to my line might be that I am assuming that conceptual
engineering can only be evaluated instrumentally in terms of its tendency to procure
goods given as such antecedently, whereas the normativity in question can be under-
stood much more broadly. This might be taken to mean that philosophers’ engage-
ment in conceptual engineering can be understood in quite different ways from that
of politicians (lawyers et al.).
I have no problems with the first conception of conceptual engineering, but I take
it that Thomasson’s ambitions for what philosophers have done and can do in the
5
I am not thereby endorsing exactly that project, as Thomasson conceives of it – as I have already
noted, I have reservations about this that coincide to a large extent with those Button adumbrates.
However, I also think that we can still see philosophers’ competence as consisting in part in an
ability for linguistic analysis that impacts metaphysical issues (see Sect. 7.4).
name of metaphysics are at least higher than simply tidying up our conceptual
scheme (or schemes). (Of course, if the latter brings with it genuine metaphysical
insight, then that would be a different matter, but here we are operating on
Thomasson’s assumption here that there is no such epistemically distinctive meta-
physical project.) As for the second line, I think it is unclear what is being suggested
as it stands. If it means to suggest that philosophers are some kind of expert in nor-
mative matters generally – how we are to lead a good life, do the right thing etc. –
then one is naturally led to ask what kind of insight that amounts to – which seems
to take us back to the problem we started with, that of understanding what philoso-
phers are up to in doing metaphysics (Thomasson is herself alive to this problem,
see e.g. her 2018: 146, fn). If all it suggests is that there is more to considering the
benefits of adopting certain concepts or usages than narrowly ‘utilitarian’ consider-
ations then I can agree, but that does not seem to require a peculiarly philosophical
competence – assuming, what I take to be the case, that professional philosophers,
at least today, do not have some designated role of being a kind of ‘guardian of
society’. That is not to say that they might not in fact have that role at some deeper
level, in virtue of something specific they do – but the question is what that might
be. Thomasson’s picture is problematic precisely because there appears to be no
such thing (of an appropriate kind at least).
Perhaps some will just shrug their shoulders at this. Maybe we (philosophers)
are all politicians or ordinary debaters after all, or should be – or perhaps ordinary
people are all philosophers – and it’s just that we professional philosophers are more
reflective, enlightened and/or cleverer than everyone else. But to my ear that does
not sound like a recipe for upholding a certain professional authority, expertise and
identity, at least over time. We might reasonably hope for a more distinctive
self-conception.
I stress again that with these two objections I do not seek to show that Thomasson’s
position is incoherent or completely unsustainable. Nevertheless it does seem to me
to be a serious weakness of her view both that it does not provide a way of recon-
structing many metaphysical debates as they actually seem to occur in current phi-
losophy, and that it does not adequately reconstruct the kind of insight it seems
philosophers would have to be understood as bringing to issues of public concern if
they were to be considered an instance of distinctive expertise in such debates.6
Finally in this section I want to turn to Thomasson’s fundamental presupposi-
tions about the relationship between language and reality. These are I think prob-
lematic in themselves but they are also, I believe, in tension with a central part of the
spirit of ARTL.
The presuppositions in question amount to what I think can reasonably be
described as a certain kind of neo-positivism: among our truth-evaluable commit-
ments we can delineate clearly those that are true in virtue of something like rules
6
Thomasson might point out that even if this were right, we still need philosophers to draw out the
analytic truths underlying our talk. But, again, though this may gesture at one important role for
philosophers, she clearly also sees a special role for philosophers in doing normative conceptual
work, not just descriptive; and that is what I am questioning she can make sense of.
of language, and hence are analytic, and those that that are true by virtue of our
experience of the world: a posteriori, or empirical statements. Contra classical posi-
tivism, Thomasson apparently does not want to rule out as meaningless claims that
do not fall on either side of this divide. Thus, as we have seen, the problems she has
with serious metaphysics concern largely its epistemic not its semantic credentials.7
Nevertheless, the divide does have an important role to play for Thomasson in
grounding both her project of easy ontology and the idea that certain claims about
reality are unproblematically justified through experience.
Starting with analytic truth, it would seem to fair to say that its status today
remains highly contested. Thomasson herself has made attempts to defend the idea
of analyticity against well-known attacks from Quine (1953) and Williamson
(2007b) (cf. respectively her 2007: ch. 2, 2015: ch. 7). In a critical discussion of her
work, Eklund (2016) argues that having seemingly appealed to what Boghossian
(1996) calls metaphysical analyticity in earlier work (roughly ‘truth in virtue of
meaning’), in later work she employs Boghossian’s epistemological notion of ana-
lyticity, whereby grasp of meaning justifies certain beliefs. But Eklund suggests that
though the latter avoids what, at least according to Boghossian, is the mere incoher-
ence of the former notion, it is unclear that it can do the work required of it in
Thomasson’s framework to the extent the warrant it provides can only be defeasible
(Eklund op. cit.: 173 ff., especially fn. 13). A related problem with analytic truth is
that, even if we allow it, it does not seem up to doing the kind of ontological work
that Thomasson’s wants from it – this is essentially Button’s (op. cit.) objection,
outlined above.8
In my view, the notion of analyticity is of questionable philosophical signifi-
cance, however exactly one conceives of it. However, pace the drift of Eklund’s
remarks, I don’t think it is clear that Thomasson, at least understood as an ARTList,
needs or should want the epistemological notion, and should not rather embrace and
seek to defend a metaphysical one. Though this is not the place to elaborate on this
at any length, it seems to me the former is what ARTL must abjure – the idea of any
kind of ‘hotline to the real’ – whilst the idea of ‘truth in virtue of meaning’ is not, at
least obviously, one that it need have any principled objection to. Boghossian’s
accusations of incoherence seem to presuppose precisely a Representationalist
backdrop, of truth as something like correspondence to reality. This wouldn’t mean
that Thomasson’s descriptive project would be in the clear, as I have indicated.
However I do think that the deeper problem with Thomasson’s neo-positivism is not
7
Having said that, her sympathies with Carnap and Price suggest strongly that she would also
oppose ‘placement metaphysics’ and insofar she may also have semantic objections to serious
metaphysics. But the kind of metaphysics I am considering here goes beyond placement issues.
8
Thomasson herself seems to accept this in saying that in addition to application conditions, one
has to establish co-application conditions for a substantival phrase in order that it be seen as some-
thing we want to acknowledge as existing (Thomasson 2015: 264 ff.). Button himself is not hostile
to this conclusion but thinks further considerations are also relevant. In any case the idea that
analyticity itself can do much real (albeit trivial!) ontological work seems questionable.
so much her embracement of analytic truth as her embracement of a distinctive

category of empirical truth.
Thomasson’s sympathy with ARTL seems to find clearest expression in her scep-
ticism towards Price’s Representationalism, that is, the idea that meaning is consti-
tuted through substantive word-world semantic relations. However, as we saw in
Chap. 1, it is very plausible to see Rorty’s (1979) plea for an overhaul of traditional
epistemology, in the direction of a coherentist and deflationary conception of justi-
fication, as an integral part of ARTL too. Only thus will it see its way clear to its
discourse pluralism and a rejection of the idea of a ‘reality’-discourse (or else
embroilment in the contortions of phenomenalism). Of course, one might push back
on this point, but I am not sure how one would do so without compromising on what
makes ARTL a genuinely distinctive position. Insofar as I have not proven this
point, my claim that Thomasson’s view is tarred with an assumption of a substantive
category of empirical knowledge might seem unfair or ad hominen. However, I do
think that it is reasonable to understand her conception of metaphysics and ontology
as a prima facie attractive one for ARTL, regardless of whether that combination
exactly captures her total view. For what it’s worth, it also strikes me, from reading
her work more generally, that Thomasson would want to avoid commitment to the
classical metaphysical issues that seem to arise in acknowledging distinctively
empirical knowledge; she seems rather to assume that this category is just some-
thing that everyone will want to and have to acknowledge. In my view, however, and
what is central to ARTL, is that without a ‘real’ to get in touch with, it is impossible
to make sense of such empirical knowledge or warrant as principledly distinct from
any other kind (that is, of a non-analytic nature – which I am taking it at least most
of our knowledge is).
Perhaps Thomasson could object here that everyday empirical claims and many
of those of science are distinct from (non-analytic) metaphysical ones in being pre-
cisely things we can and do know, in relation to standards that have nothing to do
with ideas from classical foundationalism. The claims of metaphysics are by con-
trast, according to her (and as we have noted), not meaningless, but rather lacking
in this kind of warrant. But this immanent or pragmatic kind defence of the distinc-
tion in question is not sufficient to motivate the position she defends. The question
is whether there is something principled that distinguishes the epistemic status of
things like snow is white, the adult human brain is not fully developed at age 20,
electrons orbit their nuclei, and so on – what we can (for simplicity’s sake) call
‘empirical claims’ – from metaphysical ones, the kinds that philosophers typically
discuss. Without such, one cannot say definitively that the latter are knowable, the
former not, in a way that would be required to draw up a boundary. All parties to the
debate agree that the relevant metaphysical claims are on the whole not resolved
(though maybe some have been in the past), and that it is not clear exactly how we
could resolve them, whilst many empirical claims presumably have been resolved,
or could be resolved relatively unproblematically. But why should that mean that
the former stand in some specially problematic kind of epistemic category com-
pared to the latter? And where would we draw the line between those that are and
those that are not inherently problematic?
A similar sort of point can be seen arising in relation to science and the debate
about scientific realism in the light of the recent naturalized metaphysics movement
(Ladyman & Ross op. cit.). Instrumentalists like Bas van Fraasen (see e.g. his 1980)
have long argued that scientists should (and/or do) refrain from committing to the
truth of commitments that go beyond what can be directly observed, while scientific
realists have argued by contrast that we can know statements about unobservables.
Van Fraasen sees himself in this way as an anti-metaphysical philosopher. The
recent program of naturalized metaphysics aims to avoid this metaphysical scepti-
cism by developing a metaphysics that is constrained by science in a much tighter
way than traditionally has been the case (Ladyman & Ross op. cit.). However, as
Anjan Chakravartty (2018) argues, there will always be a possibility of van Fraasian
scepticism towards any metaphysical claim however tightly constrained one’s meta-
physics is: there is no bright line once one has left the realm of the empirically
given. What I am stressing here is that then, by the same token, if one gives up the
latter – the empirically given – as part of one’s philosophical position, as ARTL
does, one has only a sliding scale from what is more to what is less secure, and
where one decides to place a line as to what can be accepted will have no principled
significance.9
Maybe Thomasson could fall back on the idea that her overall view of the role of
(non-analytic) metaphysics is all things considered an attractive one. Everyone, she
might say, has to acknowledge something like a category of accepted empirical
knowledge, however exactly this is demarcated, and everyone agrees that much of
metaphysics has made little progress over the years. The idea of the latter being
construed in terms of conceptual engineering thus emerges as attractive. But as we
have seen there are problems with the latter view, at least in the version Thomasson
develops. Moreover, it is still just not clear why difficulty in resolving certain appar-
ently factual questions should mean we should give up on them, given there is no
principled explanation of why they can’t be resolved.
Again I stress that my arguments here are not knock-down, and Thomasson
could no doubt offer response to them. What I nevertheless have tried to show – to
summarise this section as a whole – is that there are substantive problems with
Thomasson’s conception of metaphysical activity. The epistemological framework
underlying it is also plausibly problematic, and in any case diverges from the spirit
of ARTL. For these reasons, I think one might well, at least as a supporter of ARTL,
wonder if an alternative remit for metaphysics might exist for it.
9
It can be instructive at this juncture to take up an objection to traditional metaphysics of
Thomasson’s makes that I mentioned above but that I have not so far discussed, namely that tradi-
tional metaphysics is problematic in that competes with science as an account of fundamental
reality. I am not totally sure what she intends to say by this, not least because it is not clear how
many claims of metaphysics do so compete. It might allude to some of the critiques of naturalized
metaphysics, which I will take up in Sect. 7.4. However, in referring to the idea of ‘reality’ she also
arguably again reveals tendency at odds with the spirit of ARTL, as I understand it.
7.4 Metaphysics for ARTL 171
7.4 Metaphysics for ARTL
How can we understand what metaphysics might be for ARTL – if it can be any-
thing at all – if we renounce Thomasson’s model? I should say that I think Thomasson
is right in seeing many traditional metaphysical questions as having practical sig-
nificance, and thus philosophers as still having something important to contribute to
public debate. In my view, there are also issues in metaphysics that are not so
directly practically relevant but that are nevertheless important. But in any case,
I have argued that we need to see metaphysical debates that have practical signifi-
cance as other than purely pragmatically-driven metalinguistic negotiations if we
are to uphold the idea of a distinctive kind of philosophical input to them.
I would stress purely in the last sentence because I do think that many metaphysi-
cal debates can usefully be framed in metalinguistic terms, at least at the outset – in
part because this will serve to bring out important semantic issues behind the con-
cepts in question. But at the end of the day this, together with conceptual negotia-
tion in relation to practical goals, need not be seen as all philosophers are good for,
a view that would entail, if not our redundancy then at least significant diminishment.
What is then this ‘something more’ that philosophers can offer? I believe the
question here is mis-posed from the perspective of ARTL, for whom the point is
rather that there is no sharp divide between conceptual clarification and innovation,
on the one hand, and saying how things are – saying what is true – on the other.
There are of course clear cut cases of the former in practice, where we just make
decisions about concept use that are grounded, not in how things are but in what
practical effects effectuating them will have. But not all conceptual debates need to
be seen like that (or else as clarifying matters of usage or semantics). Rather, we can
try to tackle more substantive issues – issues of what is true and false – precisely by
reflecting on and developing our concepts. This is clearly a model that applies in
natural science: science develops its concepts to better say what is true. ARTL sees
this as applying also within metaphysics insofar as there is ultimately no clear dis-
tinction between science and metaphysics, and also because it rejects the idea that
truth requires contact with any kind of ‘real’ (rejects the coherency of this very
notion). Of course, some issues are simple to resolve and will not be naturally
describable as conceptual, but for AR this is just the thin of the wedge. Whether
someone has impaired long-term memory, say, is not a ‘metaphysical’ question. But
there is in principle no ‘given’ here that decides it. So if we are instead asking
whether the individual in question is still the same person she was many years ago,
or even a person at all, we need not be simply asking whether it is useful to talk that
way, as if interpreting it as a factual question would raise special epistemological
problems. At the same time, what we mean by ‘same’ or ‘person’– what we under-
stand by those concepts – will naturally be taken up here in an attempt to answer the
question. And maybe new concepts (such as ‘relational identity’, cf. Lindeman
2014) will be needed to reach a satisfactory conclusion. In any case, this under-
standing of the process of conceptual engineering is in no way in conflict with see-
ing ourselves as moving via and towards commitments concerning what is the
case – even if the commitments are ever so hedged, as they typically will be in dis-
cussing metaphysical matters. They will be something we make in light of a holisti-
cally, historically constrained process, taking into account as much of what we
otherwise believe and see as relevant to the case at hand. But insofar as our language
opens up questions for us in this way – and also insofar as we abjure the idea of
there being a purely a posteriori method for the resolution of any question – we will
neither be able to reject them as meaningless or in some special way unanswerable,
nor to say that in seeking to answer them we must be offering something other than
our best stab at saying whether what they ask is true or false.
In this way I think we can see how a supporter of ARTL can see metaphysical
issues both as practically significant and as opening for a kind of insight that phi-
losophers in particular can be seen, professionally, as concerned to provide. The
view does not depend on there being some pregiven set of questions (as Thomasson’s,
at best, seems to). It only depends on the idea that there is some specific group of
people who will devote energy to asking what, in difficult cases, the issue at hand
really amounts to, − what the facts of the matter seem to be, in a suitably liberal
sense of ‘fact’ – thereby offering (part of) the basis for practical decision and action.
This process will not reduce to asking questions about how best to use certain con-
cepts to achieve certain ends, or even to asking which are ‘best’ in some broader
ethical sense.
It might seem that this latter conception of the activity of metaphysicians and my
own cannot yield very different kinds of prescription in practice, given both also
uphold ARTL’s rejection of metaphysical realism and the idea of there being one
overarching vocabulary which grounds or trumps all others. I can admit the differ-
ence might be small. But there is still a difference in terms of what the advice being
offered is and, moreover, it is a difference that makes a difference to how we think
of and go about metaphysical enquiry. We know what it is to just metalinguistically
negotiate with practical or ethical ends in sight, and we know that this can fall short
of seeking the truth about some matter. This is the extra that philosophers can pro-
vide, or at least try to.
So that, in a word, is my conception of metaphysics for ARTL, one that I think
can survive the rejection of the idea of metaphysics as an investigation into ‘funda-
mental reality’, and yet still preserve a distinctive kind of input that politicians and
other people generally won’t be concerned to provide. Lest however I be conceived
as advocating a return to a traditional way of thinking about philosophical activity
I should also point out several limitations in this conception of metaphysics.
Most basically, in rejecting the very idea of ‘the real’ ARTL rejects conceptions
or varieties of metaphysics that depend on such an idea, i.e. that depend on meta-
physical realism (MR). Seeking to uncover reality’s fundamental structure or ‘write
the book of the world’ as Sider (2011) calls his project is plausibly off the table (see
Chap. 1). Similarly the recent interest in a (metaphysically heavy-weight) notion of
grounding – (Schaffer 2009; Fine 2001) – the idea of some kind of complete, abso-
lute explanation of certain things in terms of others – will be looked upon with
suspicion by ARTL. Without the idea of absolute reality, the idea of absolute
7.4 Metaphysics for ARTL 173
explanation looks simply unmotivated (even if we allow it is coherent). The ideas

behind object naturalism – that we might seek to reductively understand all vocabu-
laries in terms of some more basic one – survives in principle. However, as we have
seen in Chap. 2, this is going to look unmotivated in the light of the rejection of MR
and Representationalism that ARTL involves.
Insofar as it is naturalistic, it is also reasonable to see ARTL as sharing the broad
ideas behind the movement of naturalized metaphysics, many of which are also
negative in character. Taking science seriously suggests the very ideas behind much
classical physicalism, such as that of levels of reality connected through relations of
supervenience and constitution (cf. e.g. Kim 2000), is an outmoded framework for
thinking seriously about ‘how things hang together’10 (cf. Ladyman & Ross op.cit.,
also Dupré 1994). As we have seen in Chap. 6, this attitude also plausibly impacts
on metaphysical frameworks like mereology which operate with a conception of
reality that looks incompatible with contemporary science. On the other hand, the
idea of a positive naturalized metaphysics, understood either as a theory of ‘how
things hang together’ or of some specific category (such as time), that is inspired by
though not simply given by science, is one that ARTL’s approach is conducive to, as
I argued in the previous section. (To be clear, I do not mean to suggest that this
conception of metaphysics and its epistemological credentials corresponds to how
all or even any of those who actually have espoused ‘naturalized metaphysics’ see
their project. Ladyman & Ross, for example, seem closer to a more metaphysically
naturalistic or physicalistic conception of things than I am, and arguably presuppose
this in arguing for the theses they do. But there seems no reason why ARTL cannot
coopt ideas of the movement within its own presuppositions. See also below, includ-
ing footnote 11.)
ARTL will also probably want to recruit the resources of ‘ordinary language
philosophy’ to understand and in some cases deflate metaphysical or ontological
debates – perhaps along something like the lines Thomasson herself does, but per-
haps in other or different ways too. This was also a theme of Chap. 6. For example,
if we reject the idea that ‘object’ is a genuine sortal, the kind of conundrums Putnam
thinks leads to the idea of conceptual relativity might be obviated.
Contemporary metaphysics as it is practiced today, then, certainly needs some
wing-clipping from the perspective of ARTL. But contra Thomasson, not all of it
ceases to exist, and as such: there is still significant work for ‘serious’ metaphysi-
cians to do and under more or less the traditional conception of it. Not all questions
thrown up by science are answered by science, or perhaps can be. Further, not all
metaphysical questions we want to ask are in the realm of natural science. That is
all good news for us philosophers insofar as it means that we can give some special
kind of input to debates of practical concern that raise these kinds of question.
More than that, however, I don’t think that metaphysical enquiry is dependent for
its legitimacy on having practical consequences. In relation to science it may well
10
‘The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest pos-
sible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term’ (Sellars 1963, 1).
be, as Price puts it, that metaphysicians and ontologists ask questions that ‘in prac-
tice, do […] not interest most working scientists – push [...] questions they recog-
nize as legitimate further than they themselves feel the need to go’ (Thomasson
2007, 385).11 As I see it, metaphysics is ultimately part of the questioning, human
spirit, and that spirit survives the rejection of MR. Insofar as we find ourselves ask-
ing metaphysical questions – ones that go above and beyond what science tells and
what our everyday life has to involve – and insofar as these are meaningful and in
that sense possible to answer, they have an inherent value for us as human beings
that we cannot and should not put aside just because finding answers to them ‘boils
no cabbages’.12
7.5 A Subject Naturalistic Demarcation Between Science

and Metaphysics?
In closing this chapter and indeed the book as a whole, I want to offer some further
reflections on the relationship between science and metaphysics that ties in with
arguments and ideas from earlier in this book.
I have been arguing that metaphysics isn’t as badly off as many seem to think,
in effect because science has, ultimately, no sui generis epistemological privi-
lege over it. However, insofar as metaphysics then becomes, as it were, simply
more or less speculative theory, concerning matters science doesn’t (though per-
haps one day could) pronounce on, one may feel that the account leaves some-
thing to be desired. Isn’t there, to put it bluntly, something more to the
science-metaphysics distinction? Philosophers may sometimes work more
closely these days with scientists than they used to, but there remains a feeling
that they are doing something different from them even so. Even if one puts aside
other areas of philosophy, such as its history or semantics, it might seem simply
descriptively inapt to suggest philosophers qua metaphysicians are merely prac-
titioners of abstract or metatheoretical science – whether this is natural, physical
science, or cognitive science. Now I have argued there are also questions about
common sense categories that metaphysicians might concern themselves with,
and this might to an extent allay this kind of worry. On the other hand, it can
seem a bit conservative to suggest that philosophy’s ‘essence’, as it were, lies in
understanding common sense.
Whatever one makes of that debate, what I want to suggest here is that there
might be some scope within ARTL for saying something more principled about the
11
Price also suggests this is quite legitimate. This runs contrary to Ladyman & Ross’s ‘principle of
naturalistic closure’ for naturalized metaphysics, roughly an idea to the effect that genuine meta-
physical questions should be ones that can at least in principle might be answered by science.
I have never seen a coherent justification for this principle, assuming metaphysics is possible at all.
12
The phrase is due to David Wiggins.
7.5 A Subject Naturalistic Demarcation Between Science and Metaphysics? 175
metaphysics/science divide – in a non-epistemological, non-Representationalist

key, as Price would put it. I should stress that this suggestion is very much that – a
suggestion; much more would need to be said to vindicate it. Nevertheless I think it
is sufficiently interesting to warrant inclusion in a book about the prospects of anti-
representatitonalist philosophy generally.
The account builds again on the Pricean idea of subject naturalism, though in the
form I have developed as an alternative to his GE. Subject naturalism seeks to
understand human subjects in broadly scientific terms in order to understand the
nature and function of our different discourses. In Chap. 2, I criticized Price’s ver-
sion of subject naturalism, GE, on the grounds that it fails to do justice to the
involved, first-personal nature of our discourses, operates with a representatational
conception of cognitive science that today is challenged by movements like enactiv-
ism, and has problems in vindicating the central role e-representation is meant to
play in it. But rejecting GE doesn’t mean no interesting kind of subject naturalism
can be upheld, and in Chaps. 3 and 4 I argued this alternative will involve distin-
guishing vocabularies concerning the world for us and those concerning the world
in itself (neither seen as ‘reality’), a distinction in turn based on foundational ideas
within the paradigm of enactivism that also resonate with the debates about the
nature of perceptual experience. If we operate with that distinction, we might now
also it seems posit and distinguish between capacities for different kinds of think-
ing, and then, further, suggest that these capacities constrain particular sciences in
ways that make progress in them meaningful and possible. By contrast, these capac-
ities do not apply to the ‘non-scientific’ projects of metaphysics in which our con-
cept use operates in a maximally free and unconstrained manner. This is my
suggestion as to what a deeper difference between science and metaphysics might
look like.
To be a little more concrete, the idea here is that something like our capacity for
abstract mathematical thinking, on the one hand, and our ‘capacity’ for embodied
experience (as one might put it, admittedly somewhat strainedly), on the other,
might function as constraints on, respectively, natural scientific and cognitive scien-
tific theories, in such a way that we might naturally expect a kind of convergence in
these areas that we would not expect in those where these constraints do not apply.
The idea of an abstract mathematical capacity as something that constrains theoriz-
ing in physics is easiest to relate to here, insofar as physics today has demonstrably
made progress over the centuries, arguably largely thanks to operating with mathe-
matical constraints on its theoretical models (empirical ones too of course, but that,
as noted in Sect. 4.2, is fundamentally a function of the fact of that we, as human
beings, necessarily take our point of departure for any cognitive practice in the
experientially constrained world for us). The idea of a similarly systematic cogni-
tive science is certainly less clear and much more controversial than the case of
physics in relation to natural science, but the broad idea is something similar: that in
virtue of having a conscious, lived, embodied perspective on a world, we can mean-
ingfully pursue a science of that perspective and what it amounts to. Arguably, it has
been cognitive science’s unwillingness to embrace the centrality of lived experience
that has stymied its progress in the past, a progress that the advent of enactivism
(possibly together with other approaches) will, hopefully, now allow us to make.13
Neither of these (how-possibly) explanations of convergence in these different
areas appeal to the idea of a ‘reality’ constraining the relevant discourses; in that
way, they are true to ARTL and subject naturalism. Rather they see convergence as
explicable, at least in part, by reference to shared natural capacities for thinking in
particular ways. This is not to say that these capacities constitute the truths in ques-
tion. As with discourses more generally as understood by ARTL, this would involve
a kind of use-mention confusion. In talking of the capacities in question here, we are
mentioning the discourses in question and pointing to a part of their natural grounds
that explain certain features of them.
When it comes to metaphysics, by contrast, there is arguably nothing like this
kind of constraint on theorizing, beyond our use and understanding of concepts in
the most general sense. We are here, as it were, in the realm of ‘pure spontaneity’ or
‘pure reason’ (though these Kantian allusions should not necessarily be understood
as corresponding to precisely what Kant had in mind). When the metaphysician
asks a physician what the quantum world is really like, in layman’s terms, the latter
is likely to shrug her shoulders, or perhaps walk away. This is not I believe because
what physicists provide us with by way of their theories has no ontological implica-
tions: that all they are bothered about is formal calculating devices. At least that is
what I am assuming here, namely, that some minimal interpretation of these theories
is presupposed amongst physicists themselves, if only in terms that for most ordi-
nary people would be incomprehensible. Philosophers, by contrast, will typically
want to ask more. Are there are objects or only structures in the quantum world (cf.
Ladyman and Ross 2007, ch. 2)? How should we think of the relationship between
the micro-events that quantum mechanics describes and objects at larger spatiotem-
poral scales? And so on and so forth. Answering these questions and others like
them is plausibly underdetermined by applying the mathematical capacity that
makes consensus on physical theory possible. They are not meaningless questions
or necessarily hopelessly speculative, such that any answer we give to them is
doomed to be forever unwarranted. However, they are not such either that we can
reasonably hope for the kind of resolution we find in science. Metaphysics will only
ever be desultory, or at least we cannot expect it to be otherwise (at least so long as
13
A further possible area of scientific research where my idea of a ‘subject naturalistic’ explanation
of convergence in science might apply is theoretical linguistics: if we have, as Chomsky avers,
something like an innate linguistic capacity, then theorizing about language and linguistic meaning
might be expected to converge in virtue of being constrained to do so by our having this capacity.
Following Price, I have mentioned Chomsky’s view as a possible approach to meaning a supporter
of ARTL might develop instead of more usual communitarian accounts like Brandom’s (see Chap.
1), though have not said much about how we should conceive of such theories or what adopting
them might have for how ARTL is conceived or my own development of ARTL in this book. One
might worry (indeed, I do personally worry) about whether seeing a theory of meaning as con-
strained in this way is compatible with seeing metaphysical theorizing as unconstrained, and that
is at least one reason I have relegated this discussion to a footnote. In spite of that, the general idea
seems worth registering.
7.5 A Subject Naturalistic Demarcation Between Science and Metaphysics? 177
its problems are not transformed into more tractable scientific ones). Science, by
contrast, in being constrained in the way I have suggested is something we could
reasonably expect to show convergence.
When it comes to cognitive science something similar might be said. Delineating
and understanding the experiential worlds of humans (or bats, or cats etc.) and how
these relate to their sensory and neural apparata is possible if one takes seriously the
ideas of enactivism with its phenomenologically constrained methods, which in
turn are only available to us as living embodied creatures. Enactivism also vindi-
cates thereby, I argued, the idea of a peculiarly human world. But if one probes the
surface of this world, asking what persons, freedom, value and so on are, then enac-
tivism will not, it seems to me, be giving answers to these questions, at least of the
kind that philosophers have been interested in. Perhaps this kind of questioning
comes with having such a world at all, in the sense that there is no sub-structure
upon which we impose our concepts: the world is always already interpreted, and
being in the world is interpretational being (as Heidegger put it). This relates to the
problem of givenness discussed in Sect. 4.2. There I argued that enactivist cognitive
science posits umwelts, but these are essentially theoretical posits, unlike the world
that we humans live in and understand. By the same token, there is little reason to
think questions about the things in this human world will yield to convergent enquiry
insofar as they are not answerd by applying any identifiable capacity we have, even
though they are not for that reason meaningless or unanswerable.
This conception of what delineates metaphysics from science also yields the
result that a central claim I have put forward in this book, to the effect of there being
both a world for us and a world in itself, must itself class as metaphysical. The claim
is not part of science, either physics or enactivism. Someone might wonder whether
this abrogates the subject naturalist character of the suggestion insofar as subject
naturalism is meant to offer a kind of scientific account of the differences between
our different vocabularies. But, as we have seen, it seems clear that science throws
up questions it does not answer that we nevertheless feel need to be answered. Many
of the central original ideas of this book are plausibly part of naturalized metaphys-
ics in a sense recognizable from recent discussions of this idea, and this is itself a
form of scientific naturalism. As far as I can see, to uphold the kind of naturalism
I want to uphold, it makes no difference whether the ideas behind one’s subject
naturalism stem from science itself or from ideas that are responses to or extensions
of science.
Having waxed Kantian above, and at various other times in this book, one might
remark a similarity between the current suggestion and Kant’s project in his first
Critique, which famously opens with the following words:
Human reason, in one sphere of its cognition, is called upon to consider questions, which it
cannot decline, as they are presented by its own nature, but which it cannot answer, as they
transcend every faculty of the mind. (Kant 1787/1934, 1)
Somewhat as Kant goes on to argue, my subject naturalist account allows for the
possibility of answers to certain questions we ask, namely those that accord with
identifiable faculties of our sensibility and understanding. Unlike Kant, I am not
sure the other questions, the ones reason cannot answer, are given ‘by its own
nature’, even though that we ask certain kinds of questions is I think in a sense natu-
ral, and at least unavoidable. More significantly, I do not see any prospect for a kind
of metaphysical understanding of the limits of our understanding that in effect con-
stitutes Kant’s theory of transcendental idealism. We are essentially stuck with the
must-answer/cannot (see how to) answer structure when it comes to metaphysics.
But that is still, to an extent, a Kantian thought.
The supporter of ARTL will however further precisify that metaphysics is not for
that reason pointless or even doomed to failure, let alone incoherent. We have no
reason to think it will succeed in the way science has, but neither can we pronounce
definitively that it cannot succeed. Moreover, on the picture I have sketched, the
success of science, or the various sciences, must be understood as, as it were, an
internal feature of them – not something that gives them a special endorsement as
knowledge, or as charting reality. Metaphysics will probably always be with us and
should simply be appreciated for what it is. As such, supporters of ARTL can uphold
its significance, notwithstanding that they also think some projects traditionally
identified as metaphysics and which persist in the contemporary debate should fall
by the wayside.
References
Akins, K. 1993. What is it like to be boring and myopic? In Dennettand His Critics, ed. B. Dahlbom.
Blackwell
Allen, K. 2016. A Naïve Realist Theory of Colour. Oxford University Press.
Anderson, M., and T. Chemero. 2013. The problem with brain GUTs: conflation of different
senses of “prediction” threatens metaphysical disaster. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (3):
204–205. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X1200221X.
Anjan Chakravartty. 2018. Scientific Ontology: Integrating Naturalized Metaphysics and
Voluntarist Epistemology. Oxford University Press.
Austin, J.L. 1962. Sense and Sensibilia. Oxford University Press.
Ayer, A. J. 1936. Language, Truth, and Logic. Penguin edition, 1990.
Baggs, E. and Chemero, A. 2021. Radical embodiment in two directions. Synthese 98: supplemen-
tary volume 9, S2175–S2190.
Bar-On, D., and K. Simmons. 2018. Truth: one or many or both? In Pluralisms in Truth and Logic,
ed. J. Wyatt, N. Pedersen, and N. Kellen. Routledge.
Bickle, J. 2019. The philosophy of neuroscience. Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. https://
plato.stanford.edu/entries/neuroscience/.
Bird, G. 1995. Carnap and Quine: internal and external questions. Erkenntnis 42 (1): 41–64.
Blackburn, S. 1984. Spreading the Word. Oxford University Press.
———. 1991. Essays in Quasi-realism. Oxford University Press.
———. 1998. Ruling Passions. Oxford University Press.
———. 1999. Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy. Oxford University Press.
———. 2005. Truth: A Guide for the Perplexed. Penguin.
———. 2012. Some remarks about minimalism. In Mind, Meaning, and Knowledge: Themes
from the Philosophy of Crispin Wright, ed. C. Wright and A. Coliva, 195–210. Oxford
University Press.
———. 2013. ‘Pragmatism: all or some?’ in Price (2013), 67–84.
Block, N. 1986. Advertisement for a semantics for psychology. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 10
(1): 615–678.
———. 2003. Mental paint. In Reflections and Replies: Essays on the Philosophy of Tyler Burge,
ed. M. Hahn and B. Ramberg, 165–200. MIT Press.
———. 2010. Attention and mental paint. Philosophical Issues 20 (1): 23–63.
Boghossian, P. 1990. The status of content. The Philosophical Review 99 (2): 157–184.
———. 1996. Analyticity reconsidered. Noûs 30 (3): 360–391.
———. 2006. Fear of Knowledge. Oxford University Press.
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to 179
Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
473, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26924-0
180 References
Bostrom, N. 2003. Are you living in a computer simulation? Philosophical Quarterly 53 (211):
243–255.
Brandom, R. 1994. Making It Explicit. Harvard University Press.
———. 1998. Articulating Reasons. Harvard University Press.
———. 2000. Vocabularies of pragmatism: synthesizing naturalism and historicism. In Rorty and
His Critics, ed. R. Brandom, 156–183. Blackwell.
———. 2002. ‘The centrality of Sellars’s two-ply account of observation to the arguments of
“Empiricism and the philosophy of mind”’ reprinted in his From Empiricism to Expressivism:
Brandom Reads Sellars, 99–119. Harvard University Press 2015.
Braver, L. 2007. A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-realism. Northwestern
University Press.
Brewer, B. 2011. Perception and Its Objects. Oxford University Press.
Brooks, R. 1991. Intelligence without representation. Artificial Intelligence 47 (1-3): 139–159.
https://doi.org/10.1016/0004-3702(91)90053-M.
Bruineberg, J., J. Kiverstein, and E. Rietveld. 2018. The anticipating brain is not a scientist: the
free-energy principle from an ecological-enactive perspective. Synthese 195 (6): 2417–2444.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1239-1.
Burge, T. 2010. Origins of Objectivity. Oxford University Press.
Burgess, A., H. Cappelen, and D. Plunkett, eds. 2019. Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual
Ethics. Oxford University Press.
Button, T. 2013. The Limits of Realism. Oxford University Press.
———. 2020. Deflationary metaphysics and ordinary language. Synthese 1: 33–57. https://doi.
org/10.1007/s11229-016-1212-z.
Campbell, J. 1993. A simple view of colour. In Reality, Representation, and Projection, ed.
J. Haldan and C. Wright, 257–268. Oxford University Press.
———. 2002a. Reference and Consciousness. Oxford University Press.
———. 2002b. Berkeley’s puzzle. In Conceivability and Possibility, ed. T. Gendler and
J. Hawthorne. MIT Press.
———. 2008. Sensorimotor knowledge and naïve realism. Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research 76 (3): 666–673.
Campbell, J., and Q. Cassam. 2014. Berkeley’s Puzzle: What Does Experience Teach Us? Oxford
University Press.
Cappelen, H. 2018. Fixing Concepts: An Essay on Conceptual Engineering. Oxford University Press.
Carnap, R. 1950. Empiricism, semantics, and ontology. Revue Internationale de Philosophie 4:
2–40 (http://www.ditext.com/carnap/carnap.html, Accessed 05 Jan 2022).
Cartwright, N. 1999. The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science. Cambridge
University Press.
Case, J. 1997. On the right idea of a conceptual scheme. Southern Journal of Philosophy 35
(1): 1–18.
———. 2001. The heart of Putnam’s pluralistic realism. Revue Internationale Philosophie 4
(218): 417–430.
Chalmers, D. 1996. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford
University Press.
———. 2005. The matrix as metaphysics. In Philosophers Explore the Matrix, ed. C. Grau,
132–176. Oxford University Press.
Chang, H. 2012. Is Water H2O?: Evidence, Realism and Pluralism (Boston Studies in the
Philosophy and History of Science 293). Springer.
———. 2022. Realism for Realistic People: A New Pragmatist Philosophy of Science. Cambridge
University Press.
Chemero, A. 2009. Radically Embodied Cognitive Science. MIT Press.
Clark, A. 1989. Microcognition: Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and Parallel Distributed
Processing. MIT Press.
———. 1997. Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again. MIT Press.
References 181
———. 2008. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. Oxford
University Press.
———. 2009. Spreading the joy? Why the machinery of consciousness is (probably) still in the
head. Mind 118 (472): 963–993.
———. 2013. Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents and the future of cognitive science.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (3): 181–204. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X12000477.
Chomsky, N. 2000. New Horizons in the Study of Language. Cambridge University Press.
Clark, A., and D. Chalmers. 1998. The extended mind. Analysis 58 (1): 7–19.
Cozzo, C. 2012. Gulliver, truth and virtue. Topoi: An International Review of Philosophy 31
(1): 59–66.
Crane, T. 2009a. Is perception a propositional attitude? Philosophical Quarterly 59 (236): 452–469.
———. 2009b. Intentionalism. In The Oxford Handbook to the Philosophy of Mind, ed. Brian
McLaughlin and Ansgar Beckermann, 474–493. Oxford University Press.
Crane, T., and C. French. 2021. The problem of perception. Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-problem/.
Davidson, D. 1969. ‘True to the facts’ reprinted in his Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation.
Oxford University Press.
———. 1984. ‘On the very idea of a conceptual scheme’ in his Inquiries into Truth and
Interpretation. Oxford University Press.
———. 1986. A coherence theory of truth and knowledge. In Truth and Intepretation, ed.
E. Lepore, 307–319. Oxford University Press.
———. 1990. The structure and content of truth. Journal of Philosophy 87 (6): 279–328.
De Caro, M., and D. Macarthur, eds. 2004. Naturalism in Question. Harvard University Press.
———, eds. 2010. Naturalism and Normativity. Columbia University Press.
———, eds. 2022. The Routledge Handbook of Liberal Naturalism. Routledge.
De Jaegher, H., and E. Di Paolo. 2007. Participatory sense-making: an enactive approach to social
cognition. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6 (4): 485–507.
Dennett, D. 1991. Consciousness Explained. Penguin.
———. 2018. From Bacteria and Bach – and Back. Penguin.
Devitt, M. 1984. Realism and Truth. Blackwell.
———. 1991. ‘Aberrations of the realism debate’ reprinted his (2010), 31–56.
———. 2002. Moral realism: a naturalistic perspective. Croatian Journal of Philosophy 2
(1): 1–15.
———. 2010. Putting Metaphysics First. Essays on Metaphysics and Epistemology. Oxford
University Press.
———. 2013. Hilary and me: tracking down Putnam on the realism issue. In Reading Putnam, ed.
M. Baghramian, 101–120. Routledge.
Di Paolo, E. 2005. Autopoiesis, adaptivity, teleology, agency. Phenomenology and the Cognitive
Sciences 4 (4): 429–452.
Dołęga, Krzysztof, Luke Roelofs, and Tobias Schlicht. 2018. Introduction to special issue on
‘enactivism, representationalism, and predictive processing’. Philosophical Explorations 21
(2): 179–186. https://doi.org/10.1080/13869795.2018.1479440.
Dreyfus, H. 2005. Overcoming the myth of the mental: how philosophers can profit from the phe-
nomenology of everyday expertise. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical
Association 79 (2): 47–65.
Dreyfus, H., and S. Dreyfus. 2005. Existential phenomenology and the brave new world of The
Matrix. In Philosophers Explore the Matrix, ed. C. Grau, 71–97. Oxford University Press.
Dreyfus, H., and C. Taylor. 2012. Retrieving Realism. Harvard University Press.
Dreyfus, H., and C. Taylor. 2015. Retrieving Realism. Harvard University Press.
Dreyfus, H., and M. Wrathall, eds. 2014. Skillful Coping: Essays on the Phenomenology of
Everyday Perception and Action. Oxford University Press.
Dummett, M. 1978 ‘The reality of the past’ in his Truth and Other Enigmas, 358–374. Duckworth.
182 References
Dupré, J. 1994. The Disorder of Things. Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science.
Harvard University Press
Eddington, A. 1928. The Nature of the Physical World. Macmillan.
Egan, F. 1999. In defence of narrow mindedness. Mind and Language 14 (2): 177–194.
Eklund, M. 2008. The picture of reality as an amorphous lump. In Contemporary Debates in
Metaphysics, ed. T. Sider, J. Hawthorne, and D. Zimmerman, 382–396. Blackwell.
———. 2016. Carnap’s legacy for the contemporary metaontological debate. In Ontology After
Carnap, ed. S. Blatti and S. Lapointe. Oxford University Press.
Evans, G. 1982. The Varieties of Reference, ed. J. McDowell. Oxford University Press.
Feiton, T. 2020. Mind after Uexküll: a foray into the worlds of ecological psychologists andenac-
tivists. Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00480.
Field, H. 1972. Tarski’s theory of truth. Journal of Philosophy 69 (13): 347–375.
———. 1994. Deflationist views of meaning and content. Mind 103 (411): 249–285.
Fine, K. 2001. The question of realism. Philosophers’ Imprint 1 (2): 1–30.
Fish, W. 2009. Perception, Hallucination, and Illusion. Oxford University Press.
———. 2010. Philosophy of Perception: A Contemporary Introduction. Routledge.
Fodor, J. 1975. The Language of Thought. Harvard University Press.
———. 1983. The Modularity of Mind. MIT Press.
———. 1987. Psychosemantics. MIT Press.
———. 1990. A Theory of Content and Other Essays. MIT Press.
———. 2001. The Mind Doesn’t Work that Way. MIT Press.
———. 2008. LOT 2. MIT Press.
Forster, P. 1992. What is at stake between Putnam and Rorty? Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research 52 (3): 585–603.
French, C. 2018. Naïve realism and diaphaneity. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 118 (2):
149–175.
French, S., and J. Ladyman. 2011. In defence of ontic structural realism. In Scientific Structuralism
(Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 281), ed. A. Bokulich and P. Bokulich, 25–42.
Springer.
Friston, K., and K. Stephan 2007. Free-energy and the brain. Synthese 159: 417–458. https://doi.
org/10.1007/s11229-007-9237-y
Gallagher, S. 1997. Mutual enlightenment: recent phenomenology in cognitive science. Journal of
Consciousness Studies 4 (3): 195–214.
Gallagher, S., and D. Zahavi. 2008. The Phenomenological Mind. Routledge.
Gallistel, R. 1990. Representations in animal cognition: An introduction. Cognition 37 (1–2): 1–22.
Gascoigne, N., and M. Bacon. 2020. Taking Rorty seriously: pragmatism, metaphilosophy, and
truth. Inquiry. https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2020.1820375.
Gersel, J., R. Thybo Jensen, and M. Thaning. 2017. McDowell’s new conceptualism and the dif-
ference between chickens, colours and cardinals. Philosophical Explorations 20 (1): 88–105.
https://doi.org/10.1080/13869795.2016.1273377.
Giananti, Andrea. 2020. Perception, content, generality. Theoria 86: 245–267. https://doi.
org/10.1111/theo.12234.
Gibbard, A. 1990. Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment. Oxford
University Press.
Gibson, J. 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Psychology Press.
Gładziejewski, P. 2016. Predictive coding and representationalism. Synthese 193: 559–582. https://
doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0762-9.
Goff, P. 2022. Panpsychism. Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/
entries/panpsychism/
Gow, L. 2016. The limitations of perceptual transparency. The Philosophical Quarterly 66 (265):
723–744. https://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqw018.
———. 2019. Everything is clear: all perceptual experiences are transparent. European Journal of
Philosophy 27 (2): 412–425. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.12427.
References 183
Gross, S. 2015. Does the expressive role of ‘true’ preclude deflationary Davidsonian semantics?
In Meaning without Representation: Expression, Truth, Normativity, and Naturalism, ed.
S. Gross, N. Tebben, and M. Williams, 47–63. Oxford University Press.
Hacking, I. 1983. Representing and Intervening. Cambridge University Press.
Hare, R. 1952. The Language of Morals. Oxford University Press edition, 1991.
Harman, Gilbert. 1990. The intrinsic quality of experience. Philosophical Perspectives 4: 31–52.
https://doi.org/10.2307/2214186.
Hawley, K. 2020. Temporal parts. Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.
edu/entries/temporal-parts/.
Hirsch, E. 2011. Quantifier Variance and Realism: Essays in Metaontology. Oxford University Press.
Holton, R. and Price, H. 2003. ‘Ramsey on saying and whistling: A discordant note’ reprinted in
Price (2011), 148–162.
Horwich, P. 1982. Three forms of realism. Synthese 51 (2): 181–201.
———. 1990. Truth. Blackwell.
———. 1996. Realism and truth. Philosophical Perspectives 10: 187–197.
———. 1998. Meaning. Oxford University Press
———. 2003. Meaning and its place in the language faculty. In Chomsky and His Critics, ed.
L. Antony and N. Hornstein, 162–178. Blackwell.
———. 2008. Being and truth. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 33: 258–273.
———. 2010. Truth, Meaning, Reality. Oxford University Press.
———. 2012. Wittgenstein’s Metaphilosophy. Oxford University Press.
———. 2013 Naturalism, deflationism and the relative priority of language and metaphysics, in
Price (2013), 112–127.
Howhy, J. 2013. The Predictive Mind. Oxford University Press.
Hoyningen-Huene, P. 1993. Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn’s Philosophy
of Science. University of Chicago Press.
Huang, L., and H. Pashler. 2007. A Boolean map theory of visual attention. Psychological Review
114 (3): 599–631. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.114.3.599.
Hurley, S. 1998. Consciousness in Action. Oxford University Press.
Hutto, D. 2005. Knowing what? Radical versus conservative enactivism. Phenomenology and the
Cognitive Sciences 4 (4): 389–405.
Hutto, D., and E. Myin. 2013. Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds without Content. MIT Press.
———. 2017. Evolving Enactivism: Basic Minds Meet Content. MIT Press.
Jackson, F. 1998. From Metaphysics to Ethics. Oxford University Press.
Johnston, M. n.d. ‘It ain’t necessarily so’ unpublished ms. https://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/
courses/consciousness97/papers/johnston/aintso.html. Accessed on 11 Jan 2022
Jonas, H. 1966. The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology. Harper & Row.
Joyce, R. 2006. The Evolution of Morality. MIT Press.
Kant, I. 1787/1934. The Critique of Pure Reason (2nd edn). Trans. J.M.D. Meiklejohn. Dent & Sons.
Kennedy, M. 2010. Naïve realism and experiential evidence. Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society 110 (1): 77–109.
Kim, J. 2000. Mind in a Physical World. MIT Press.
Knowles, J. 1995. Explanation, Tacit knowledge, and Language: An Inquiry into the Philosophical
Significance of Cognitive Science. Phd thesis, London University.
———. 2006. Non-scientific naturalism? In Science – A Challenge to Philosophy? ed. S. Pihlström,
R. Vilkko, and H. Koskinen, 209–220. Peter Lang GmbH.
———. 2010. Two kinds of non-scientific naturalism. In Beyond Description: Normativity in
Naturalised Philosophy, ed. M. Milkowski and K. Talmont-Kaminski, 157–175. College
Publications.
———. 2011. Naturalism, pragmatism and the retreat from metaphysics: scientific versus subject
naturalism. In Pragmatism, Science and Naturalism, ed. J. Knowles and H. Rydenfelt, 63–85.
Peter Lang GmbH.
184 References
———. 2013. Non-reductive naturalism and the vocabulary of agency. Contemporary Pragmatism
10 (2): 155–172.
———. 2014. Naturalism without metaphysics. In Realism, and Pragmatism, ed. K. Westphal,
200–218. Routledge.
———. 2017. Global expressivism and the flight from metaphysics. Synthese 194 (12): 4781–4797.
———. 2018a. Rortian realism. Metaphilosophy 49 (1-2): 90–114.
———. 2018b. Representationalism, metaphysics, and naturalism: Price, Horwich, and beyond.
In Wittgenstein, Philosophy of Mind, and Naturalism, ed. K. Cahill and T. Raleigh. Routledge.
———. 2019a. Pragmatism, naturalism, and realism: Pihlström, Price and beyond. Acta
Philosophica Fennica 95: 69–86.
———. 2019b. Relationalism, Berkeley’s puzzle, and phenomenological externalism. In
Acquaintance: New Essays, ed. T. Raleigh and J. Knowles, 169–190. Oxford University Press.
———. 2019c. Anti-representasjonalisme og realisme. Norsk Filosofisk Tidsskrift 2019
(1-2): 55–69.
———. 2023. Anti-representationalism, naturalism, and placement metaphysics. Topoi. https://
doi.org/10.1007/s11245-022-09866-2
———. forthcoming. ‘Is knowing how a natural kind? In Doing, Saying and Showing: Knowing
Our Ways About in the World, ed. B. Molander, T. Netland, and M. Solli. Scandinavian
University Press.
Kraut, R. 1990. Varieties of pragmatism. Mind 99 (394): 157–183.
———. 2016. Three Carnaps on ontology. In Ontology After Carnap, ed. S. Blatti and S. Lapointe,
31–58. Oxford University Press.
Kripke, S. 1981. Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. Blackwell.
Kuhn, T. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed. Chicago University Press.
Kyselo, M. 2018. The minimal self needs a social update. Philosophical Psychology 29 (7):
1057–1065. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2016.1214251.
Ladyman, J., D. Ross, D. Spurrett, and J. Colliier. 2007. Every Thing Must Go. Oxford
University Press.
Larson, G., and G. Segal. 1995. Knowledge of Meaning. MIT Press.
Levins, R., and R. Lewontin. 1985. The Dialectical Biologist. Harvard University Press.
Lewis, D. 1972. Psychophysical and theoretical identifications. Australasian Journal of Philosophy
50 (3): 249–258.
———. 1984. Putnam’s paradox. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 62 (3): 221–236.
———. 1986. On the Plurality of Worlds. Blackwell.
Lindeman, H. 2014. Holding and Letting Go: The Social Practice of Personal Identities. Oxford
University Press.
Locatelli, R., and K. Wilson. 2017. Introduction: perception without representation. Topoi 36:
197–212. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-017-9460-1.
Loeffler, R. 2009. Neo-pragmatist (practice-based) theories of meaning. Philosophy Compass 4
(1): 197–218. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-9991.2008.00186.
Lycan, W. 1987. Consciousness. MIT Press.
———. 2001. The case for phenomenal externalism. Philosophical Perspectives 15: 17–35.
Macarthur, D. 2014. What’s the use? Price and Wittgenstein on naturalistic explanations of lan-
guage. AL-MUKHATABAT: Special Issue on Wittgenstein 9: 77–95.
———. 2020. Does Rorty have a blindspot about truth? European Journal of Pragmatism and
American Philosophy 12: 1. https://doi.org/10.4000/ejpap.1851.
Macarthur, D. and H. Price 2008. ‘Pragmatism, quasi-realism and the global challenge’ reprinted
in Price (2011), 228–252.
Macbeth, D. 2012. Realizing Reason. Oxford University Press.
Mackie, J. 1977. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. Penguin.
Maher, C. 2012. The Pittsburgh School: Sellars, McDowell. Brandom: Routledge.
Mandik, P., and A. Clark 2002. Selective representing and world-making. Minds and Machines 12:
383–395. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1016159621665.
References 185
Marr, D. 1982. Vision. San Francisco: Freeman.

Martin, M.G.F. 2002. The transparency of experience. Mind and Language 17 (4): 376–425.
———. 2004. The limits of self-awareness. Philosophical Studies 120 (1/3): 37–89.
———. 2008. Commentary on Action in Perception. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
76 (3): 874–881.
Maturana, H., and F. Varela. 1980. Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Reidel.
McCulloch, G. 1995. The Mind and Its World. Routledge.
McDowell, J. 1984. Wittgenstein on following a rule. Synthese 58 (March): 325–364.
———. 1985. Values and secondary qualities. In Morality and Objectivity: A Tribute to J.L. Mackie,
ed. T. Honderich, 110–129. Routledge.
———. 1994. Mind and World. Harvard University Press.
———. 2009. Having the World in View: Essays on Sellars, Kant, and Hegel. Harvard
University Press.
———. 2011. Perception as a Capacity for Knowledge. Marquette University Press.
McGrath, S. 2014. Relax? Don’t do it! Why moral realism won’t come cheap. In Oxford Studies in
Metaethics, ed. R. Schafer-Landau, vol. 9, 186–214.
McKenna, T. (2017) Hilary Putnam and Conceptual Relativity. BA thesis, University of Sydney.
https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/bitstream/handle/2123/18837/McKenna_Travis_thesis_
S2_2017.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y. Accessed 08 Dec 2022
Menzies, P., and H. Price. 1993. Causation as a secondary quality. British Journal for the
Philosophy of Science 44: 187–203.
———. 2009. Is semantics in the plan? In Conceptual Analysis and Philosophical Naturalism, ed.
D. Braddon-Mitchell and R. Nola, 183–200. MIT Press.
Metzinger, T., and W. Wiese, eds. 2017. Philosophy and Predictive Processing. MIND Group:
Frankfurt am Main.
Miller, J. 2016. Can an ontological pluralist really be a realist? Metaphilosophy 47 (3): 425–430.
Millikan, R. 1984. Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories: New Foundations for
Realism. MIT Press.
Moore, A. 1994. Vats, sets, and tits. In Transcendental Philosophy and Naturalism, ed. J. Smith
and P. Sullivan. Oxford University Press.
Moore, G.E. 1903. The refutation of idealism. Mind 12 (48): 433–453.
Nagel, T. 1983. ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ in his Mortal Questions, 165–180. Cambridge
University Press.
Nes, A. 2019. Acquaintance, conceptual capacities, and attention. In Acquaintance: New Essays,
ed. T. Raleigh and J. Knowles, 191–212. Oxford University Press.
Newell, H. 1980. Physical symbol systems. Cognitive Science 4 (2): 135–183.
Noë, A. 2004. Action in Perception. MIT Press.
———. 2008. Reply to Campbell, Martin and Kelly. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
76 (3): 691–706.
———. 2012. Varieties of Presence. Oxford University Press.
———. 2015. Concept pluralism, direct perception, and the fragility of presence. In Open
MIND, ed. T. Metzinger. https://open-mind.net/papers/concept-pluralism-directperception-
and-the-fragility-of-presence.
O’Regan, K. 2011. Why Red Doesn’t Sound Like a Bell: Understanding the Feel of Consciousness.
Oxford University Press.
O’Regan, K., and A. Noë. 2001. A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (5): 883–917.
Papineau, D. 2000. The rise of physicalism. In Physicalism and Its Discontents, ed. C. Gillett and
B. Loewer, 3–36. Cambridge University Press.
Pautz, A. 2012. Do the benefits of naïve realism outweigh the costs? Comments on Fish, Perception,
Hallucination and Illusion. Philosophical Studies 163 (1): 25–36. https://doi.org/10.1007/
s11098-012-0080-8.
Peacocke, C. 1992. A Theory of Concepts. Oxford University Press.
186 References
———. 1998. Non-conceptual content defended. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58

(2): 381–388.
Pettit, P. 1991. Realism and response-dependence. Mind 100 (4): 587–626.
Pihlström, S. 2003. Naturalizing the Transcendental: A Pragmatic View. Humanity Books.
Pinker, S. 1995. How the Mind Works. Penguin.
Plunkett, D., and T. Sundell. 2013. Disagreement and the semantics of normative and evaluative
terms. Philosopher’s Imprint 13 (23): 1–37.
Price, H. 1988. Facts and the Function of Truth. Blackwell.
———. 1991. Agency and probabilistic causality. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
42 (2): 157–117.
———. 1992. ‘Metaphysical pluralism’ reprinted in Price (2011), 34–53.
———. 1996. Two paths to pragmatism. In European Review of Philosophy, ed. R. Casati and
C. Tappolet, vol. 3, 109–147.
———. 1997a. What should a deflationist about truth say about meaning? In E. Villanueva, ed.,
Truth (Philosophical Issues, Vol. 8), 107–115. California: Ridgeview.
———. 1997b. Naturalism and the fate of the M-worlds. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society
LXXI: 247–267.
———. 1998. ‘Ramsey, reference and reductionism’ unpublished ms. https://philpapers.org/
archive/PRIRRA-2.pdf. Accessed 21 Apr 2022.
———. 2003. ‘Truth as convenient friction’ reprinted in Price (2011), 163–183
———. 2004. ‘Naturalism without representationalism’ reprinted in Price (2011), 184–199.
———. 2005. Causal perspectivalism. In Causation, Physics and the Constitution of Reality:
Russell’s Republic Revisited, ed. H. Price and R. Corry, 250–292. Oxford University Press.
———. 2007. Quining naturalism. Journal of Philosophy 104 (8): 375–402.
———. 2009a. ‘Immodesty without mirrors: making sense of Wittgenstein’s linguistic pluralism’
reprinted in Price (2011), 200–227.
———. 2009b. ‘Metaphysics after Carnap: the ghost who walks?’ reprinted in Price (2011),
280–303.
———. 2009c. ‘The semantic foundations of metaphysics’ reprinted in Price (2011), 253–279.
———. 2010a. ‘One cheer for representationalism’ reprinted in Price (2011), 304–321.
———. 2010b. Postscript: reply to Knowles. In Beyond Description: Normativity in Naturalised
Philosophy, ed. M. Milkowski and K. Talmont-Kaminski, 176–179. College Publications.
———. 2011a. Naturalism without Mirrors. Oxford University Press.
———. 2011b. Expressivism for two voices. In Pragmatism, Science and Naturalism, ed.
J. Knowles and H. Rydenfelt, 87–113. Peter Lang.
———. 2015. Idling and sidling towards philosophical peace. In Meaning without Representation:
Essays on Truth, Expression, Normativity, and Naturalism, ed. S. Gross, N. Tebben, and
M. Williams, 307–330. Oxford University Press.
———. 2019. Global expressivism by the method of differences. Royal Institute of Philosophy
Supplement 86: 133–154. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1358246119000109.
Price, H., S. Blackburn, P. Horwich, M. Williams, and R. Brandom. 2013. Expressivism,
Pragmatism, and Representationalism. Cambridge University Press.
Pritchard, D. 2012. Epistemological Disjunctivism. Oxford University Press.
Putnam, H. 1967. Mathematics without foundations. Journal of Philosophy 64 (1): 5–22.
———. 1975. ‘The analytic and the synthetic’ in his Philosophical Papers (Vol. 2). Cambridge
University Press
———. 1981. Reason, Truth, and History. Cambridge University Press.
———. 1983. Philosophical Papers Volume 3: Realism and Reason. Cambridge University Press.
———. 1987. Realism with a Human Face. Harvard University Press.
———. 1988. Representation and Reality. MIT Press.
———. 1992. Replies. Philosophical Topics 20 (1): 347–408.
———. 1994. Sense, nonsense, and the senses: an inquiry into the powers of the human mind.
Journal of Philosophy 91 (9): 445–517.
References 187
———. 2000. Das Modelltheoretische Argument und die Suche nach dem Realismus des Common
sense. In Realismus, ed. M. Willaschek, 125–142. Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag.
———. 2004. Ethics without Ontology. Harvard University Press.
———. 2016. Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity. Harvard University Press.
Quine, W.V.O. 1953 ‘Two dogmas of empiricism’ in his From a Logical Point of View, 20–46.
Harvard University Press.
———. 1960. Word and Object. MIT Press.
———. 1970. Philosophy of Logic. Harvard University Press.
———. 1975. On empirically equivalent systems of the world. Erkenntnis 9 (3): 313–328.
———. 1981. Theories and Things. Harvard University Press.
Quine, W.V.O., and J. Ullian. 1970. The Web of Belief. Random House.
Raleigh, T. 2009. Understanding how experience “seems”. European Journal of Analytic
Philosophy 5 (2): 67–78.
———. 2019. The recent rise of acquaintance. In Acquaintance: New Essays, ed. T. Raleigh and
J. Knowles, 1–30. Oxford University Press.
Redding, P. 2010. Two directions for analytic Kantianism: naturalism and idealism. In Naturalism
and Normativity, ed. M. De Caro and D. Macarthur, 263–285. Columbia University Press.
Reynolds. 2020. Phenomenology, Naturalism and Science: A Hybrid and Heretical Proposal.
Routledge.
Ridge, M. 2019. Relaxing realism or deferring debate? Journal of Philosophy 116 (3): 149–173.
Roberts, Jason Scott. 2008. Evo-devo. In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Biology, ed.
M. Ruse. Oxford University Press.
Robinson, H. 1994. Perception. Routledge.
Rorty, R. 1972. ‘The world well lost’ reprinted in Rorty (1982), 3–18.
———. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton University Press.
———. 1982. Consequences of Pragmatism. University of Minnesota Press.
———. 1986. Pragmatism, Davidson, and truth. In Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the
Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. E. Lepore, 333–355. Oxford University Press.
———. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge University Press.
———. 1991. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers. Vol. 1. Cambridge
University Press.
———. 1996a. ‘The very idea of human answerability to the world: John McDowell’s version of
empiricism’ reprinted in Rorty (1998), 138–152.
———. 1996b. ‘Hilary Putnam and the relativist menace’ reprinted in Rorty (1998), 43–62.
———. 1998. Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 3. Cambridge University Press.
———. 1999. Pragmatism as anti-authoritarianism. Revue Internationale de Philosophie 53
(207): 7–20.
———. 2000. Response to Brandom. In Rorty and His Critics, ed. R. Brandom, 183–190.
Blackwell.
———. 2007. ‘Naturalism and quietism’ in his Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical
Papers, Volume 4. Cambridge University Press.
Rosenborg, A. 2012. The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions. W. W. Norton
& Company.
Rovelli, C. 2021. Helgoland. Trans. E. Segre and S. Carnell. Allen Lane.
Russell, B. 1912. The Problems of Philosophy. Williams and Norgate.
Sachs, C. 2018. In defense of picturing: Sellars’s philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 18 (4): 669–689.
Schaffer, J. 2009. On what grounds what. In Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of
Ontology, ed. D. Chalmers, D. Manley, and R. Wasserman. Oxford University Press.
Schiffer, S. 1972. Meaning. Oxford University Press.
———. 1987. Remnants of Meaning. MIT Press.
Schlicht, T., and T. Starzak. 2021. Prospects of enactivist approaches to intentionality and cogni-
tion. Synthese 198: 3. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02361-z.
188 References
Seager, W. 2016. Theories of Consciousness: An Introduction and Assessment. 2nd ed. Routledge.
Searle, J. 1995. The Construction of Social Reality. Penguin.
Sellars, W. 1956. ‘Empiricism and the philosophy of mind’ reprinted in his Science, Perception
and Reality, 129–194. Routledge, 1963.
———. 1963. ‘Philosophy and the scientific image of man’ in his Science, Perception and Reality,
7–43. Routledge.
———. 1968. Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes. Routledge.
Shapiro, Lawrence. 2019. Embodied Cognition. 2nd ed. Routledge.
Shapiro, Lionel. 2021. Global expressivism as global subjectivism. Philosophical Studies. https://
doi.org/10.1007/s11098-021-01694-1.
——— (2022) ‘Price’s subject naturalism and liberal naturalism’ in De Caro & Macarthur (2022).
Shea, N. 2018. Representation in Cognitive Science. Oxford University Press.
Showler, P. 2021. Why subject naturalists need pragmatic genealogy. Synthese 199: 4313–4335.
Sider, T. 2011. Writing the Book of the World. Oxford University Press.
Siegel, S. 2021. The contents of perception. Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. https://plato.
stanford.edu/entries/perception-contents/.
Simpson, M. 2017. Non-Representationalism and Metaphysics. PhD thesis, Cambridge University.
———. 2021. Deflationism and truth making. Synthese 198: 3157–3181.
Smith, A. 2002. The Problem of Perception. Harvard University Press.
Stich, S. 1983. From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science. MIT Press.
Stoljar, D. 2021. Physicalism. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/
entries/physicalism/. Accessed 12 Jan 2022.
Strawson, P.F. 1959. Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics. Routledge.
———. 1979. Perception and its objects. In Perception and Identity, ed. G. Macdonald, 41–60.
Macmillan.
Tartaglia, J. 2010. Did Rorty’s pragmatism have foundations? International Journal of
Philosophical Studies 18 (5): 607–627. https://doi.org/10.1080/09672559.2010.528599.
———. 2020. Rorty’s philosophy of consciousness. In A Companion to Rorty, ed. A. Malachowski.
Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118972199.ch3.
Thomasson, A. 2007. Ordinary Objects. Oxford University Press.
———. 2009. Answerable and unanswerable questions. In Metametaphysics: New Essays
on the Foundations of Ontology, ed. D. Chalmers, D. Manley, and R. Wasserman. Oxford
University Press.
———. 2014. Deflationism in semantics and metaphysics. In Metasemantics, ed. A. Burgess and
B. Sherman, 185–213. Oxford University Press.
———. 2015. Ontology Made Easy. Oxford University Press.
———. 2017a. What can we do, when we do metaphysics? In Cambridge Companion to
Philosophical Methodology, ed. G. d’Oro and S. Overgaard, 101–121. Cambridge University
Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316344118.007.
———. 2017b. Metaphysics and conceptual negotiation. Philosophical Issues 27 (1): 364–382.
———. 2018. Changing metaphysics: what difference does it make? Royal Institute of Philosophy
Supplement 82: 139–163. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1358246118000188.
———. 2019. What can global pragmatists say about ordinary objects? In The Nature of Ordinary
Objects, ed. J. Cumpa and B. Brewer, 235–259. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.
org/10.1017/9781316612897.012.
Thompson, E. 1995. Colour Vision. Routledge.
———. 2007. Mind in Life. Harvard University Press.
———. 2018. Review of Hutto & Myin (2017), Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. https://ndpr.
nd.edu/reviews/evolving-enactivism-basic-minds-meet-content/. Accessed 29 Mar 2022.
Thomasson, A. 2020. Norms and Necessity. Oxford University Press.
Thompson, E., and D. Corelli. 2011. Brain in a vat or body in a world? Brainbound versus enactive
views of experience. Philosophical Topics 39 (1): 163–180.
References 189
Tomasello, M. 1999. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Harvard University Press.
Travis, C. 1994. On constraints of generality. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 94: 165–188.
———. 2004. The silence of the senses. Mind 113 (449): 57–94. https://doi.org/10.1093/
mind/113.449.57.
Tye, M. 1995. Ten Problems of Consciousness. MIT Press.
Van Gelder, T. 1995. What might cognition be if not computation? Journal of Philosophy 92 (7):
345–381.
Van Inwaagen, P. 2001. Ontology, Identity, and Modality: Essays in Metaphysics. Cambridge
University Press.
Varela, F., and E. Thompson. 1990. Color vision: a case study in the foundations of cognitive sci-
ence. Revuede Synthèse 111: 129–138.
Varela, F., E. Rosch, and E. Thompson. 1991. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human
Experience. MIT Press.
Velmans, M. 2017. Towards a Deeper Understanding of Consciousness. Routledge.
Ward, D., D. Silverman, and M. Villalobos. 2017. Introduction: the varieties of Enactivism. Topoi
36: 365–375. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-017-9484-6.
Wheeler, M. 2005. Reconstructing the Cognitive World: The Next Step. MIT Press.
Williams, B. 1985. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Routledge.
———. 2002. Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy. Princeton University Press.
Williams, D. 2018a. Pragmatism and the predictive mind. Phenomenology and the Cognitive
Sciences 17: 835–859. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-017-9556-5.
———. 2018b. Predictive processing and the representation wars. Minds & Machines 28: 141–172.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-017-9441-6.
Williams, M. 1999. Meaning and deflationary truth. Journal of Philosophy 96: 545–564
———. 2007. Meaning, truth and normativity. In Truth and Speech Acts, ed. D. Greimann and
G. Siegwart, 377–395. Routledge.
———. 2008. Problems of Knowledge. Oxford University Press.
———. 2013. How pragmatists can be local expressivists, in Price (2013).
Williamson, T. 2007a. Past the linguistic turn? In The Future for Philosophy, ed. B. Leiter. Oxford
University Press.
———. 2007b. The Philosophy of Philosophy. Blackwell.
———. 2013. Modal Logic as Metaphysics. Oxford University Press.
Wright, C. 1991. Truth and Objectivity. Harvard University Press.
———. 2000. On Putnam’s proof that we are not brains-in-a-vat. Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society 92: 67–94.
Wrisely, G. 2022. Realism and conceptual relativity. Phd thesis, University of Iowa. https://www.
georgewrisley.com/Wrisley%20Dissertation%208-10-09.pdf. Accessed 2 Feb 2022.
Zahavi, D. 2008. ‘Internalism, externalism, and transcendental idealism’ reprinted in his Husserl’s
Legacy: Phenomenology, Metaphysics, and Transcendental Philosophy, 77–136. Oxford
University Press 2018.
———. 2018. ‘Real realism’ in his Husserl’s Legacy: Phenomenology, Metaphysics, and
Transcendental Philosophy, 170–204. Oxford University Press.
Zahidi, K. 2014. Non-representationalist cognitive science andrealism. Phenomenology and
Cognitive Science 13: 461–475. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-013-9310-6.

KNOWLES-Representation, Experience, and Metaphysics

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

KNOWLES-Representation, Experience, and Metaphysics

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Synthese Library 473

Studies in Epistemology, Logic, Methodology,

Studies in Epistemology, Logic, Methodology, and

Editorial Board Members

ISSN 0166-6991 ISSN 2542-8292 (electronic)

5 Brains in Vats�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 109

Abstract In this introductory chapter I introduce the idea of anti-­representationalism

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Richard Rorty famously defends a form of what he calls ‘anti-representationalism’

structure, respond selectively to different aspects of our environment and in virtue

1.2 Anti-Representationalism About Thought and Language

Though I am very sympathetic to phenomenological externalism and enactivism, it

scepticism towards traditional ‘dualistic’ kinds of philosophy that posit distinctively

comes to analyticity, Price seems, as we noted above, happy to go Quinean,

distinctive kinds of philosophical knowledge – contrary to even a broad natu-

of reality – still often taken to be fundamentally physical – as the reality we

1.3 The Rest of the Book

Chapter 2 is devoted to a fuller presentation, discussion and critique of Price’s

(which at least in certain respects builds on ideas from representationalist cognitive

This chapter focuses on global expressivism (GE), the version of anti-­

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 25

understood – are dependent on accepting Representationalism. Placement problems

2.2 The Argument against Object Naturalism

In his paper ‘Naturalism without representationalism’ (Price 2004), Price mounts a

a theory of language (for reasons we surveyed in Chap. 1); moreover he thinks

2.3 Does Object Naturalism Really Depend

2.3.1 Simpson and Horwich

In earlier work I offered an argument for a conclusion somewhat similar to Simpson’s

2.4 How Does Global Expressivism ‘Hang Together’?

I have been talking so far of GE as a more or less unified philosophical theory.

different discourses will be explained in different ways, according to their differing

a is G, then, for whatever range of predicates is in question, I will be held to account

The first corner is Representationalism and if relaxed realism is a version of our

2.5 Is GE the Best Form of ARTL?

E-representation thus seems central to much of what is interesting and philo-

fundamentally symmetrical conception of reality that is at odds with the asymmetri-

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 51

weaknesses – apart from being in any case, its alleged ‘anti-representationalism’

3.2 Representationalism Versus Anti-Representationalism

Contemporary representationalism about perceptual experience (henceforth

understanding of perceptual experience insofar as notions of intentionality and con-

like-­minded ‘pragmatists’, have sought to understand perception in view of their

perceptual experience as propositional, that is, as ‘saying’ anything; it rather simply

An apparently larger challenge for relationalism is how to make sense of phe-

Campbell has employed a broader epistemological argument to argue for rela-

view of experience, whilst in embracing transparency it has phenomenological

I claim, however, that this reply shows relationalism to be implausible.

Whatever the inherent merits of the sensorimotor theory, in relation to my overall

perceptual experience is (non-representationalistically) conversant about such an

3.3 Representationalism Versus Anti-Representationalism

Carl Sachs (2018) has recently elaborated on this suggestion in relation to

Exactly how more precisely to characterize enactivism is a complex and ongoing

organism thus involves a notion of something exterior whose significance is never-

to a view of experience as correlative with an organism-dependent world, and we

cannot meaningfully decompose a natural system into a pregiven organism, or spe-

This perhaps rather cryptic passage notwithstanding, Gibson’s followers have,

In view of Gibson’s scepticism towards the ‘subjective-objective’ divide, one might

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 89

4.2 Umwelts, the World for Us, and the World in Itself

4.3.1 Non-classical Representationalist Cognitive Science

Whether it is totally in line is perhaps somewhat unclear insofar as it is possible

4.3.2 Content, Concepts, and Knowledge

I have so far been understanding enactivism as an anti-representationalist form of

5 Brains in Vats�� 109

Abstract In this introductory chapter I introduce the idea of anti-representationalism

1.2 Anti-Representationalism About Thought and Language

1.3 The Rest of the Book

This chapter focuses on global expressivism (GE), the version of anti-

2.2 The Argument against Object Naturalism

2.3 Does Object Naturalism Really Depend

2.3.1 Simpson and Horwich

2.4 How Does Global Expressivism ‘Hang Together’?

2.5 Is GE the Best Form of ARTL?

3.2 Representationalism Versus Anti-Representationalism

like-minded ‘pragmatists’, have sought to understand perception in view of their

3.3 Representationalism Versus Anti-Representationalism

4.2 Umwelts, the World for Us, and the World in Itself

4.3.1 Non-classical Representationalist Cognitive Science

4.3.2 Content, Concepts, and Knowledge

4.3.3 How Is My View Really (Very) Different

5.2 Button on the Limits of Realism

5.4 Could We Really Be BIVs?

5.5 The Existential Phenomenological Take

5.6 Postscript on Dreyfus and Taylor’s Realism

In Chap. 1, I presented as part of the view I have been calling ‘anti-representationalism

6.2 Semantics and Realism

7.2 Thomasson on Metaphysics as Descriptively

7.3 Problems with Thomasson’s View

7.4 Metaphysics for ARTL

7.5 A Subject Naturalistic Demarcation Between Science