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Philosophical Psychology
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Nihilism, skepticism, and philosophical

method: A response to Landau on
coherence and the meaning of life
Paul Thagard
Published online: 18 Jun 2012.

To cite this article: Paul Thagard (2013) Nihilism, skepticism, and philosophical method: A response
to Landau on coherence and the meaning of life, Philosophical Psychology, 26:4, 619-621, DOI:
10.1080/09515089.2012.696330

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2012.696330

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 Philosophical Psychology, 2013
Vol. 26, No. 4, 619–621, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2012.696330

Nihilism, skepticism, and

philosophical method: A response to
Landau on coherence and the
meaning of life
Downloaded by [Tufts University] at 13:25 05 November 2014

Paul Thagard

Some epistemologists think that a fundamental philosophical task is to refute the

skeptic, who claims that no knowledge claims are justified. Analogously, one might
suppose that an account of the meaning of life needs to refute the nihilist who claims
that life has no meaning at all. One way of responding to the skeptic or nihilist would
be to produce a deductive argument from incontrovertible premises that concludes
that people indubitably have knowledge or meaningful lives. Inevitably this strategy
fails, because the skeptic or nihilist can always challenge premises and inferential
steps in the argument.
Landau’s (2012) critique of my book, The brain and the meaning of life (Thagard,
2010), operates under the misapprehension that I am trying to give some sort of
deductive justification for my answer to the question of what makes life worth living.
He complains that my argument from empirical evidence ‘‘deduces values from
facts,’’ and insists that the large amounts of psychological and neuroscientific results
that I discuss are simply irrelevant to determining the meaning of life. Similarly, anti-
naturalistic epistemologists think that brain processes are irrelevant to accomplishing
the philosophical goal of refuting the skeptic by solid arguments. My response to
Landau consists in clarifying how naturalistic and coherentist philosophy can deal
with nihilism and skepticism in similar ways, taking into account the rapidly
increasing understanding of how neural processes enable people to achieve
knowledge and attain meaning.
As Peirce (1931–1958) pointed out a century and a half ago, Cartesian skepticism
that purports to doubt all knowledge claims is actually a sham. People’s operations in
the world in practices that range from everyday living to scientific and technological

Paul Thagard is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Waterloo.

Correspondence to: Paul Thagard, Department of Philosophy, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario N2L
3G1, Canada. Email: pthagard@uwaterloo.ca

© 2013 Taylor & Francis

 620 P. Thagard
inquiry make it plausible that they acquire many sorts of knowledge. There is no
deductive argument that refutes absolute skepticism, which Peirce derides as paper
doubt, but rather a large set of interconnected beliefs and experiences that cohere
successfully to constitute knowledge. Peirce used metaphors to characterize how such
coherence works, as a cable of interconnected fibers rather than as a chain only as
strong as its weakest link, and later philosophers had to fall back on other metaphors
such as Neurath’s ship and Quine’s web of belief (Thagard & Beam, 2004).
Fortunately, there are now mathematically exact and computationally calculable ideas
about coherence that supersede such metaphors (Thagard, 2000).
As I argue in chapter 4 of my book, neuroscience provides a big help to this
coherentist exposition of knowledge. For example, we now know much about how
light reflects off objects into a person’s eyes, stimulating the retina and leading to
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extensive neural processing that yields reliable representations that fit with different
kinds of sense experience and the reports of other people. Thus neuroscience
describes the mechanism by which sensory experience leads to knowledge.
Theoretical knowledge goes far beyond sensory experience, but theoretical
neuroscience is beginning to provide accounts of how this works, by describing
binding mechanisms that combine existing concepts into new ones (Thagard, 2012;
Thagard & Stewart, 2011). Coherentist metaphors suggest an alternative to
foundationalist, deductivist pictures of epistemological method, but they need to
be fleshed out by naturalistic accounts based on psychology and neuroscience of how
coherence is actually achieved. Cognitive science does not refute the philosophical
skeptic, but it contributes to a rich account of how knowledge grows.
Landau fails to understand both coherentism and naturalism. He trumpets that
‘‘an ought cannot be derived from an is by arguments from coherence anymore than
by deductive arguments.’’ The naturalistic coherentist, however, is not trying to
derive an ought from an is, but rather to show appropriate fits between what is and
what ought to be. Discoveries about how the brain processes sensory information and
generates new concepts are highly informative to figuring out how people do and
how they should acquire knowledge.
Similarly, the appropriate response to nihilism is not a deductive argument against
all challenges that human lives are meaningless, but rather the identification of
elements that reliably contribute to people’s positive evaluations of their existence.
For this task, psychology and neuroscience are indispensable for providing multilevel
accounts of what people value and why they value it. Empirical work allows a leap
beyond what people want, to consideration of what they actually need. For example,
observation tells us that if people do not get water and food, they die, and physiology
tells us why bodies expire without sustenance. Similarly, psychology tells us how love,
work, and play contribute to human needs for relatedness, competence, and
autonomy; and neuroscience tells why people have these needs. Thus naturalistic
coherentism leads to a plausible account of the meaning of life, whereas a more
traditional foundationalist and deductivist approach remains as mired in nihilism as
it is in skepticism.
 Philosophical Psychology 621
For value theory, an invaluable part of the bridge between the descriptive and the
normative is the concept of human needs. Unlike wants, which may be the capricious
result of social accidents, needs are fundamental requirements of being human.
Requirement here is not conceptual necessity, but rather biological facts that apply
just as well to psychological needs like relatedness as they do to more obvious needs
like food. I am not trying to establish some axiom like, ‘‘if X needs Y, then X ought to
have Y’’ that might provide a deductive argument from is to ought, but rather to
assemble all the information relevant to coming up with the most coherence view of
how human lives do and ought to work. The sensible question to ask is not, ‘‘how can
we disprove nihilism?’’ but rather, ‘‘what does everything we know about human
minds, brains, and societies, tell us about what makes life worth living?’’
In the last chapter of The brain and the meaning of life, I provide a general
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depiction of how descriptive evidence can help to establish prescriptive norms, called
the normative procedure:
1. Identify a domain of practices.
2. Identify candidate norms for these practices.
3. Identify the appropriate goals of the practices in the given domain.
4. Evaluate the extent to which different practices accomplish the relevant goals.
5. Adopt as domain norms those practices that best accomplish the relevant goals.
For the question of the meaning of life, the domain of practices is human action,
and the candidate norms include nihilism, happiness, and my own candidates of love,
work, and play. The appropriate goals are vital needs identified by psychological,
cultural, and neuroscientific investigations. The adoption of norms as prescriptively
appropriate does not result from some a priori or deductive procedure, but rather by
empirically guided assessment of how practices, norms, and needs all fit together.
Thus coherence does not derive ought from is, but nevertheless yields plausible
answers of how people should lead their lives.

References
Landau, I. (2012, forthcoming). Neurology, psychology, and the meaning of life: On Thagard’s The
brain and the meaning of life. Philosophical Psychology. DOI: 10.1080/09515089.2012.677531.
Peirce, C.S. (1931–1958). Collected papers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Thagard, P. (2000). Coherence in thought and action. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Thagard, P. (2010). The brain and the meaning of life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Thagard, P. (2012). The cognitive science of science: Explanation, discovery, and conceptual change.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Thagard, P., & Beam, C. (2004). Epistemological metaphors and the nature of philosophy.
Metaphilosophy, 35, 504–516.
Thagard, P., & Stewart, T.C. (2011). The Aha! experience: Creativity through emergent binding in
neural networks. Cognitive Science, 35(1), 1–33.