Contemporary epistemological philosophy. As modern philosophy was exploring its crippling tribulations during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, modern science (sponsored by capitalism, the other offspring besides modern philosophy of ancient and medieval epistemological philosophy) was advancing, probing ever deeper beneath the perceptual appearance of the natural world, discovering the smaller and stranger bits of matter that help (along with space) constitute what is found in nature. The manifest success of natural science made it difficult to take absolute idealism seriously in the end.

Even epistemologists turned away from Descartes’ starting point. Instead of taking the natural world to be something whose existence had to be inferred on the basis of ideas in the mind, they reverted to common sense and took the existence of a public world for granted. But that did not mean that epistemological philosophy had to be abandoned, because there was another way for philosophers to deploy the same elements that reflective understanding makes present to rational subjects as a theory about the nature of reason. And even if the deeper rational cause it would use to explain the validity of first level arguments did not add any new kinds of substances to be realists about, analogous to the Forms (or God) of the ancient/medieval era or the external world of the modern era, it could hope to avoid the embarrassing excesses of past metaphysics and yet root the arguments of rational culture in a firm, epistemological foundation.

Language is the object of reflection that had been overlooked by earlier forms of epistemological philosophy. Plato had simply assumed that words are simply a way of referring to the Forms that everyone could rationally intuit, making it possible to describe the visible objects by the Forms they imitate. Descartes had recognized that the Forms were just clear and distinct ideas of rational imagination in the mind, but since the same ideas were supposed to be in every rational mind, he could also assume that words are just ways of communicating which abstract ideas speakers were talking about. In both cases, language played a decidedly secondary role to the main objects of reflection by which reason was supposed to know about the world.

Words, and the sentences that they make up, are nonetheless objects that rational subjects are aware of, and they are different from the objects that were central to the ancient and modern theories of reason. Words are perceptible, like other objects in space, when they are spoken or written. But they are unlike other objects in space, because they have meanings and they can refer to objects or properties in the world. To be sure, their meanings had been explained in ancient and modern philosophy by Forms or ideas in the mind. But the words were nonetheless different from them, because they could exist as perceptible objects, and that somehow made it possible for rational subjects to communicate with one another through their animal bodies in a world of objects in space. Thus, to those how accepted natural science, it was plausible to suppose that the analysis of language would provide an explanation of the nature of reason that would explain the validity of all the (valid) arguments of rational level culture (including arguments about natural and social science, practical as well as theoretical arguments, and about what is moral as well as what is in one’s self interest). And it would avoid the pitfall of modern philosophy, for it would not depend on anything that can be known only privately, if the analysis of language rested on a kind of knowledge about language that is inherently intersubjective.

Developments in logic would make language analysis all but irresistible. Given how important mathematics is to the advance of natural science, problems encountered in the evolution of mathematical arguments was bound to focus attention on the nature of formal proofs and logic. As we have seen (in Relations), such developments took place in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, giving rise to symbolic logic and the logical analysis of language (notably, in the work of the early Russell and Frege). Thus, much as natural science was prospering by making use of developments in mathematics, it would inevitably occur to some philosophers that philosophy might prosper by making use of the new developments in logic.

When natural science makes modern epistemological philosophy incredible, therefore, there is another way of doing epistemological philosophy. Hence, our ontological explanation of the nature of reason and consciousness leads us to expect some philosophers to make use of it during a late phase of evolution during the philosophical spiritual stage. That would explain what became known as “analytic philosophy” in Anglo-American philosophy, as we shall see. Much the same explanation might also be given of contemporary Continental and its trajectory toward deconstuctionism, though it will not be pursued here. By the same token, however, ontological philosophy implies that analytic philosophy (and Continental philosophy) are doomed to fail for much the same reason as earlier forms of epistemological philosophy.

Like all forms of epistemological philosophy, analytic philosophy is the attempt to found a theory about the nature of reason on what is known about how we know by reflection (that is, reflective understanding). It may not seem that public language is an object of reflection. Words (and sentences) may seem to be objects of perception, because they occur as material objects in the natural world when they are spoken or written. Indeed, they can be objects of perception along with other objects in space. But that is not how they are seen from the point of view of the rational subject — unless she is a critical realist and recognizes the difference between the immediate, phenomenal appearance of the world in perception and the natural world to which it corresponds. But critical realism is an insight into the nature of perception (and, thus, reason) that had to be abandoned in order to avoid the problems of modern philosophy.

Abandoning the problems of modern philosophy meant giving up the notion that the natural world is something beyond the world in which rational beings find themselves. This did not necessarily mean explicitly embracing naïve realism about perception. But it did preclude making philosophical hay out of the difference between the perceptual appearance of the world and what exists independently of it. Thus, though analytic philosophy did not embrace naïve realism about perception explicitly, most analytic philosophers did take naïve realism for granted in practice, because that is the inevitable effect of abandoning the distinction between the appearance of the world in perception and the world being perceived. Naïve realism is our natural attitude.

Thus, contemporary epistemologists were (or eventually became) naturalists in the minimal sense of believing in the existence of the world disclosed by perception, a world that seemed, at least, to be made up of material objects in space that move and interact over time. Naturalism in this sense is not only the view of natural science, but also the common sense view of the world, the vantage from which the arguments of rational level culture were made.

It was also Plato’s view of the natural world. But unlike Plato, analytic philosophers recognized that concepts are subjective, that is, parts of psychological states on which rational subjects could reflect, using reflective understanding. But they had to avoid making use of such private objects in their theory about the nature of reason.

Naïve realism, however, takes what is actually an object of reflection to be the natural world, and thus, even the public language that is analyzed by contemporary epistemological philosophy is also an object of reflection. To be sure, analytic philosophy thinks of words and sentences as public objects, along with the natural world in which they occur. But since it takes the words to be meaningful, they are actually objects of reflection, and their meanings connect the words to certain objects (or kind of objects) in the world (as their referents). That is the simplest way that reflective understanding can use language as theory about the nature of reason. Once the meanings of words are projected onto the world and appear as public references, it is possible to explain intersubjectively how sentences correspond to the world and to consider the validity of arguments for them.

As a result of naïve realism about perception, images in the brain representing words that are generated by overt verbal behavior are not distinguished from the words that exist as material objects independently of the brain. The images are confused with the material objects themselves, just like the perception of other objects in space. But since the perceptual images of the words are connected with images in the faculty of imagination as their meanings, it is natural to take their meanings to be public as well. That is, the word seems to be related to an object or objects of some kind, as if the semantic relation were a direct, public relationship between the word and object.

This is a theory about the nature of reason based on intuition, for it assumes, in effect, that users of language can intuit their meanings and references.

From our ontological perspective, however, both the words and their meanings are parts of the linguistic structure that is the structure of the spiritual animal under the cultural aspect. As such, they are properties of a material object, albeit a complex material object with a spiritual nature (that is, a organism in which the use of language entails both a social and a cultural structure as a whole). The linguistic structure is a structure of the spiritual animal as a whole, because it is, in principle, contained completely in every member’s brain, as well as in the overt verb behavior by which the use of language coordinates behavior, like the leader’s plan of social level behavior at the primitive spiritual stage.

What are called “abstract objects” are, therefore, just parts of a property of the spiritual animal (or an aspect of an aspect of a spiritual material object), and that gives words (and their meanings) a physical relationship to objects (or kinds of objects), because culture is part of the behavior guidance system by which the spiritual animal acts on other objects in space.

This is not how it appears, however, to contemporary epistemological philosophers, for they do not recognize the existence of spiritual animals. They cannot, because as practicing naïve realists, they do not recognize the existence of a faculty or rational imagination by which words as public, overt verbal behavior (spoken or written) is related to objects (or kinds of objects) in the world. To them it appears that words have a direct, public relationship to objects (or kinds of object), at least, at first.

Analytic philosophy is not always as naïve, however, as it was at first. In thinking about words as public objects, naturalists were forced to recognize that they are just sounds or marks made by speakers, which have only physical properties. But they do have meanings and referents, and if they are not physical properties of words as material objects, they must be explained in some other way. And since there is another way that meaning and reference can be just as public as the words themselves, it was still possible to do epistemological philosophy in the contemporary style. There must be a public way of determining meaning and reference, for otherwise children would be unable to learn a natural language and it would not be possible to translate one natural language into another for the first time.

A less naïve way of analyzing the meanings and references of words recognizes that any images that may be associated with the words are private and that only the words as material objects are public. But it still conflates the perceptual images of the words with the physical tokens themselves, and since the relationship between word and object (and its meaning, whatever that is) must be one that can be established in terms of what is publicly perceived, it assumes that language is governed by public rules. The public rules explain how everyone learns it as they grow up and how it is possible to translate from one language to another.

This is also a theory about the nature of reason that is based on intuition, though it is indirect. The intuition that users of language have is that the meanings and references of words must be determined by public behavior in relation to public objects, if it is not the public rules themselves.

In either case, whether meaning and reference are taken to be inherent in the public words (and sentences) or they are explained by the learning of public rules, analytic philosophy is still basically reflection on language from the point of view of the users of language, and such a reflective explanation makes the analysis of language inadequate as a theory about the nature of reason. The relationship between word and object is not just a relationship of the kind that can appear to the user of language as she reflects an language and how it is used, but one that depends on the nature of the faculties of perception and imagination in the brain and how those brains are coordinated as parts of a spiritual animal.

In either case, meaning and reference are taken to be something intersubjective in the sense that it either is or can be explained in terms of what is public to users of language as practicing naïve realists. That way of analyzing language is the foundation for the theory about the nature of reason used in analytic philosophy. And what dooms it, like other forms of epistemological philosophy, is that it is trying to explain reason by objects that have an appearance to the subject who reflects on how she knows, in this case, the world as it appears in perception to naïve realists and the way that language appears to be public to its users.

What it overlooks is how the relationship between word and object is mediated by a faculty of perception and imagination located in the brain of each user of language. Words have meanings that are images in a faculty of imagination, and their references to objects in the world depend how its representations correspond to aspect of the world — where the latter is explained, as we have seen, by an isomorphism between sequences of images that are called up in the brain over time and the effects of locomotion, manipulation and the like. But the use of reflection (reflective understanding) to think about language as something public makes language appear to have a public relationship to what it represents in the world that does not depend on a faculty of imagination in the brain, but only on intersubjectively correctable rules. It makes the semantic relation appear to be public or determinable by pubic rules.

This is not to deny that there are public rules of language. The analytic philosopher’s talk of such public rules is, in effect, a reference to the spiritual animal. What gives such organisms a “spiritual” natural is the use of language to coordinate the behavior of its parts, and that social level behavior guidance system does depend on representations in the brain that have both a possibly overt verbal side and a necessarily covert nonverbal side. On the covert nonverbal side, images in the faculty of imagination are the meanings of words, and since those images have a geometrically structured relationship to objects in space by way of the animal system of representation, words are made to refer to objects by the connections established in Wernicke’s area between such images and words as verbal behavior. Grammatical markers indicating the kind of activity in the faculty of rational imagination are likewise established in Wernicke’s area, as we have seen. In other words, what is called learning the rules of language is actually just the neurological development of the reflective brain, during which linguistic behavior schemata evolve by reinforcement selection to give the subject the capacity to speak and understand a natural language. It is more basic than rule following. That is, it would be more accurate to say that learning to use language is to acquire the capacity to learn to follow public rules, because rule following, in the sense that is distinctive of human beings, for example, in playing games, is, as we have seen, something that requires the language-based ability to see into one another’s minds (that is, reflective understanding). On our ontological view, public rules are mutually accepted arguments about how one should behave in certain situations of the kind that generate institutions as social level behavior. But none of this is evident to analytic philosophers, because their approach to philosophy is epistemological, with a theory about the nature of reason that comes from reflective understanding.

Analytic philosophy was doomed, therefore, to suffer the same fate as earlier forms of epistemological philosophy, because the relationship between language and the world cannot be explained as a public relationship in that world. Language and the world is a dualism of much the same kind that Plato faced between Forms and visible objects and that Descartes faced between mind and body, because the relationships that appear to hold between these objects in reflection from the point of view of the subject makes it impossible to explain adequately how they are related at all when both sides are taken to be parts of the same, independently existing world. That is, as I have pointed out from time to time, the problem of dualism that epistemological philosophy inevitably causes. Words (and sentences) as linguistic representations, that is, with meanings and references, are not public objects, but representations in the brain of each language user who considers them, and when they are projected onto the natural world, there is no adequate way to explain how they are even parts of the same world.

Analytic philosophy would take various forms, for there are various ways of explaining the nature of language intersubjectively, and different ways of using it as a theory about the nature of reason to explain the validity of the first level arguments of rational culture. But they are all different from earlier forms of epistemological philosophy, because using the analysis of public language as a theory about the nature of reason does not lend itself to any form of realism. It is not obvious that there are any entities beyond those that are immediately present to the subject whose existence and nature could be demonstrated by what is known about language and its relationship to the world, as the external world was for Descartes and the Forms were for Plato. The contemporary form of epistemological philosophy turns out, therefore, to be mostly a foundation for anti-realism, for there are entities and properties that it is possible to be skeptical about. The history of analytic philosophy is, therefore, another story about the discovery of the failure of another kind of epistemological philosophy. And in this case, the inability to construct an argument with a higher level of forensic organization that would explain the validity of the arguments of rational culture. Let us consider some of the main forms that analytic philosophy would take.

Logical positivism. The most obvious way to use the new form of epistemological philosophy is to explain the validity of the arguments of natural science, for even though they may depend on mathematics, they are basically arguments of rational level culture, which use perception and already established beliefs to justify new beliefs. This higher level argument was undertaken by the logical positivists as one of the earliest forms analytic philosophy. They took the most naïve view of language as a public objects, thinking of words and sentences as having meanings that are public, and that seemed to afford a way of explaining the validity of scientific arguments, because both the theories of natural science and the evidence on which such arguments were based were formulated in language. Thus, the logical positivists distinguished between theoretical statements and observational statements. Observational statements were sentences whose truth could be known by perceiving the objects and their properties, while theoretical statements were sentences used to formulate the theories that explained what could be observed. It seemed natural to assume that theoretical statements had to be based on observational statements, given traditional empiricism and its attempt to defend natural science in modern philosophy.

It was hoped that analyzing the arguments of natural science in this way would not only unify the arguments of natural science (the “unity of science” movement), but also explain why they were true in a way that would make clear which beliefs are, and which are not, scientific truths. Moreover, this was a theory about the nature of reason that promised to settle issues in traditional philosophy, for any statements about the world (that is, synthetic, as opposed to analytic statement) that could not be shown to be based on observational statements would be rejected as metaphysics, that is, as meaningless propositions.

Thus, logical positivism used a theory about the nature of language to claim, in effect, that a basically empiricist analysis of the method of natural science explained the nature of reason itself. Less sympathetic critics would dismiss it as “scientism,” because it rejected all the other arguments of rational culture as invalid. That was how they explained the validity of practical arguments: value judgments were cognitively meaningless (though logical positivists did not deny that they were nonetheless useful to express emotions and affect behavior by arousing similar feelings in others). But what brought logical positivism into disfavor among philosophers of science were its implications about natural science.

Theories in natural science commonly refer to entities that are not directly observable, such as electrons, force fields, quarks, and the like in physics. But since they are not observable, the meanings of such theoretical terms could not be analyzed in the same naïve way as observational terms. Only the meanings of observational terms could be explained by the kind of direct, public relationship that seems to hold between word and object that was taken for granted. Thus, the project was to show how theoretical statements are based on observational statements. But since it turned out that theoretical statements are not entailed by observational statements, it led to skepticism about the existence of unobservable theoretical entities.

Since physicists take it for granted that such theoretical entities exist, philosophical defenders of natural science were also inclined to be realists about theoretical entities. Thus, recognizing that they could not derive theoretical from observational statements, they might, as “scientific realists,” still be able to articulate the criterion by which science based them on observational statements. But to make a long story short, any criterion that would include the theoretical entities of science would also include metaphysical entities, unless the criterion was so specific that it was obviously contrived and ad hoc.

Even if a criterion for inferring to unobservable entities could be formulated, however, it was eventually recognized that it would be question-begging. The mere formulation of criterion would not provide any reason believing that scientific arguments for the existence of unobservable entities are valid. What they needed was an explanation of theoretical arguments that would explain why they are valid. A criterion for accepting them as scientific would be merely a principle to be used as a premise in first level arguments of natural science, where the validity of appealing to such principles is what is at issue, at least, judging by traditional philosophy.

The validity of arguments that entail the existence of unobservable theoretical entities cannot be shown by the success of such arguments in the history of science, because that would be circular. It would be using the very principle whose validity is at issue to justify its validity. At best, the history of science can be used to show that science is moving in a certain direction, perhaps, toward a unique outcome (as Kitcher 1992 argues). But even that would not show that what is believed at that ideal end of inquiry is true.

Finally, in the course of such philosophical disputes, the very distinction between theoretical and observational statements began to seem suspect. Since they had abandoned the starting point of modern philosophy, they could not explain the difference between observational an theoretical statements as the difference between ideas of perception and what they represent from the point of view of the subject (that is, parts of the external world). They had to define observational statements as what a normal observer could report from her perception in a given situation. But then it became clear that what normal observers would report depends heavily on their beliefs, and well informed observers would report observing theoretical entities in experimental situations where they were detected. This led to a form of “holism” about meaning, for as Quine would argue, what confronts experience is not individual sentences, but entire theories, worldviews, and even including logic itself.

Logical positivists had also expected to explain the validity of arguments in the science of subjects by showing that they were simply another form of the same empirical methods. The conclusions of a science of subjects are typically formulated as psychological sentences, but the attempt to base them on observational statements led to behaviorism in psychology (thereby justifying Skinner’s operant conditioning). But for those who believe that psychological states are real, it was another form of anti-realism. For similar reasons, logical positivists sided with methodological individualists in their battle with social holists, leading to anti-realism about spiritual animals.

Ordinary language philosophy. There was, however, another way that analytic philosophy would lead to anti-realism about psychological states and spiritual animals, because there was another way of analyzing public language that would account for the use of psychological sentences. Instead of analyzing the logical structure of language and explaining how it corresponds to the world, as logical positivism did, it was possible to analyze the use of language as a practice governed by public rules that children learn as they grow up and by which the use of language can be corrected. This way of using contemporary epistemological philosophy was introduced by the “latter” Wittgenstein in a development that was called “ordinary language philosophy.” The various game-like interactions making up the public phenomenon of language use were “forms of life,” and as Wittgenstein intended, this theory about the nature of reason was mainly negative, a critique of how the first level arguments of the science of subjects are understood even in rational culture.

Wittgenstein’s analysis of ordinary language revealed that language is used for many reasons, not just describing the world. In particular, he saw the use of psychological sentences, not as descriptions of psychological states that are somehow private to each individual, but rather as sentences with behavioral criteria for attributing psychological states to others (or, in the case of first person uses, expressing feelings). They were moves in a game, or part of a form of life that we share. His goal was to show that the problems of modern philosophy had been based on illusion, and thus, that its many problems could be dismissed as mere pseudo-problems. He argued from the nature of language as governed by public rules that there could not be a private language, that is, a language whose terms referred to objects or states that are essentially private, such as ideas in the mind. In the end, therefore, his ordinary language philosophy led to a form of behaviorism, which is called “philosophical behaviorism,” in order to distinguish it from scientific behaviorism, such as Skinner’s theory of operant conditioning, which is supported by logical positivism. Thus, just as logical positivism led to anti-realism, rather than realism, about theoretical entities, so both ordinary language philosophy and logical positivism led to anti-realism, rather than realism, about psychological states. 

Ordinary language philosophy lent itself to explaining the arguments of social science, as well as those of a science of individual subjects. After all, it explained language as an interaction among individuals governed by public rules, and if that was an explanation of the nature of reason, it showed the validity of our ordinary way of understanding of institutions and, thus, the reflective science of the social world, which is an inevitable part of the culture of rational spiritual animals. See Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science.

Skepticism about metaphysical realism. Logical positivism led to skepticism about the existence of theoretical entities, but as we have seen, logical positivism led to problems that made it possible for defenders of natural science to continue to accept scientific realism. But more recently, analytic philosophy’s theory about the nature of reason has been found to lead to another kind of skepticism, this time, about the nature of the entities described by its theories. Thus, analytic philosophers could concede that theoretical entities exist and still have grounds for more subtle skepticism about natural science, for they could doubt metaphysical realism, rather than scientific realism. (Putnam calls them “internal realists.”) And these doubts could not be dismissed so easily.

Their way of analyzing language also gave analytic philosophers reason to doubt that natural science, even if it was right about the existence of theoretical entities, is correct about their real nature. That is, while the theories of science may not be mistaken by failing to refer to entities of kinds (unobservable or observable) mentioned by them, those theories could still be mistaken in the properties predicated of such entities, including the dispositional properties (described by laws of nature) that are involved in the efficient-cause explanations given by natural science. That means that science might even be mistaken in the causal explanations it gives of what happens in the world. The kind of realism that would be denied in this second way is sometime called “metaphysical realism,” to distinguish it from realism about the existence of the entities mentioned by scientific theories, or mere “scientific realism.” Metaphysical realism holds that science discovers not only the existence, but also the real nature of what exists in the world.

Skepticism about metaphysical realism is justified by a certain looseness in the relationship between language and the world that appears when language is explained in the way that analytic philosophy does. As Quine has argued, analytic philosophers cannot admit that words have meanings that are private to each subject. The meanings of words must be determined by the references they make as public objects to public parts of the world. But when the role of the faculties of perception and imagination in the brain in the semantic relation is ignored, different relationships between word and object (or language and the world) seem possible. Two forms of looseness can be distinguished, an indeterminacy about what words refer to in the world, and an inability to determine which of different possible properties they actually have.

Quine showed the indeterminacy of reference, or ontological indeterminacy, in a famous series of arguments that showed that there are different ways of translating a foreign language using as evidence only the behavior of speakers of the language in certain situations. For example, he showed that “gavagai” in such a language might refer to rabbits, rabbit-parts, or time-slices of rabbits, depending on how other words in the language were translated. That there are always different possible translation manuals based on such observational evidence shows that we are unable, in principle, to tell what another subject is referring to.

Putnam suggests the universality of this kind of argument by appealing to the Lowenheim-Skolem theory. It holds, as we have seen (in Relations), that, for any formal system as complex as set theory or arithmetic, there is an interpretation of all its sentences that makes them true in the realm of natural numbers. Thus, Putnam argues that even if a formal system were constructed that conjoined all the theories of science, including all the observational statements on which they rest, it would still not make its own references to the world determinate.

The other kind of looseness in the relationship between language and the world is the underdetermination of scientific theories by the evidence for them. Putnam makes this argument concretely by pointing to the existence of equivalent theories, or actual theories with different principles that are equally able to predict all the same phenomena. He mentions different forms of geometry (one postulating points and the other spheres shrinking indefinitely), different forms of quantum mechanics (Heisenberg matrix mechanics and Schroedinger’s wavefunction), and different views of the dates and locations of events by observers on different inertial frames (though he recognizes that Einstein’s special theory of relativity provides a single description for them all). But the arguments are all typified by a dispute between Carnap and the Polish logician about how many objects there are in a universe that contains nothing but x1, x2, and x3. Carnap would hold that there are three objects, but the Polish logician would hold that there are seven (or eight, if he counted the empty set as an object). (See Putnam (1987, p. 18ff; 1988, p. 109ff.) Putnam argues that there is no principled way of choosing between such theories and, thus, that there is no truth of the matter about which is true. (Putnam defends a Kantian view that holds that the conclusions of natural science are inevitably determined as much by the nature of the scientists as by the nature of the world they would describe.)

Analytic philosophy supports, therefore, a kind of anti-realism with respect to metaphysical realism. As long as the relationship between language and the world is indeterminate or loose in this way, there is reason to doubt that science discovers the truth about the world, where that means the way that things really are in themselves. Thus, Putnam can taunt defenders of science as foolish believers in “The One True Theory” or a “God’s Eye View of the World.”

Though defenders of natural science may not like to think of themselves as metaphysical realists, neither do they want to accept the “internal realism” that Putnam would saddle them with, for that is to admit that natural science, even at the ideal end of inquiry, may not have described the real nature of what exists. They need a defense against the more recent skepticism founded in analytic philosophy. But the obvious way of defending science from its attacks does not work. A brief account of one more step in the dialectic of contemporary epistemological philosophy will put us in a position to see why philosophical culture inevitably evolves from epistemological philosophy to ontological philosophy.

Since the analytic philosophy’s skepticism about metaphysical realism depends on its way of analyzing language, that is, taking words and sentences to be public objects whose (meanings and) references are determined by the public process in which animals use them in a mutually understood way, defenders of natural science can insist that there is a deeper, naturalistic explanation of the semantic relation. Though they do not have such a so-called “causal theory of reference” worked out in detail, they argue that when it is used to explain the relationship between language and the world, there will no longer be any indeterminacy about reference or uncertainty about which of equivalent theories is true, because science will know what each word and sentence refers to. This is called the “naturalistic” approach to language, and disputes currently rage about how to formulate such a theory.

Such naturalistic theories about language are vulnerable, however, to a rebuttal. The vulnerability comes from the way that even scientists understand the empirical method of natural science (though it can, perhaps, be traced in part to the alliance between science and empiricism in modern philosophy). They assume that the goal of natural science is to discover laws of nature, or more broadly, that it is the attempt to discover the best efficient-cause explanation of what happens in the world. That is why the naturalistic explanation of language is called a “causal” theory of reference. Regardless how science may explain the semantic relation, it will presumably be a causal relation of some kind. It will involve a regularity of some kind that can be described by a law of nature. This leaves defenders of science vulnerable to Putnam’s refutation.

Putnam argues that no such causal theory of reference can possibly eliminate the looseness that analytic philosophy has found in the relationship between language and the world because it will itself by subject to that same looseness. The terms used by a causal theory of reference will admit of different interpretations, which connect them to different objects or different properties, and thus, the indeterminacy about reference will merely be promoted to the level of the causal theory about language. Thus, the dispute about metaphysical realism is a standoff.

The argument between analytic philosophy and defenders of natural science is unresolved, because defenders of natural science do not have an explanation of the nature of reference that would show that Putnam is wrong. Nor do they understand natural science in a way that can show how their theories would escape indeterminacy about their own references. And though scientific realism is generally taken for granted, there is still no justification of inferences to the existence of unobservable entities mentioned by scientific theories. Ontological philosophy, however, would supply all three.

Ontological philosophy recognizes that, because of the reflective foundation of its epistemological argument, analytic philosophy’s explanation of the nature of the relationship between language and the world overlooks the role of the faculties of perception and rational imagination that are part of the brain of each user of language.

If naturalists recognized that brain mechanisms like these mediated the relationship between word and object (or sentence and state of affairs), they would see that reference is not a mere causal relation, but a geometrical isomorphism in space and time between states and processes in the brain, on the one hand, and states in the world. The structure of that correspondence between brain states and the world makes if clear that there is nothing indeterminate about a semantic relation that is mediated by it. It would be clear, for example, that “gavagai” refers to whole rabbits, because the basic structure of the faculty of spatial imagination represents the spatial relations among such objects. (And they would see that language is public because it is a mechanism that coordinates the behavior of individuals in generating social level behavior by coordinating the activity in their faculties of rational imagination.)

Nor is it plausible for analytic philosophers to argue that this isomorphism is itself infected by the same indeterminacy, for it involves not only a spatial isomorphism at each moment, but also a correspondence between sequences of images over time and the structure of space and the geometrical structures of objects. It is sequences of images of the kind that can represent change in the world that represent the possible against which the actual is seen in a faculty of imagination. And though that is a correspondence between images in imagination and the world, it is one that must, by the nature of the mechanism, correspond to what actually happens when the covert behavior operating imagination is overt. There can be no indeterminacy about references mediated by it, once the neurological mechanisms of imagination are understood.

Even without its theory about the nature of language, however, ontological philosophy would enable naturalists to show that scientific theories in general are not subject to any indeterminacy about reference, because it gives an ontological explanation of the validity of the arguments used in natural science (that is, of why efficient-cause explanations are true) that does not admit any indeterminacy. Instead of postulating the substances mentioned by scientific theories (matter, or matter and spacetime), it postulates space and matter, and by recognizing space itself as an ontological cause of their validity, ontological philosophy can show the determinacy of reference, because they all come down to references to particular objects located in a single three dimensional space. Moreover, scientific terms referring to properties will be determinate, because those properties are all explained as aspects of the basic substances constituting the world and how they exist together.

We have already seen (n Relations) how this resolves the problem posed by the Lowenheim-Skolem theorem in mathematics. It also works for the formal theory that includes all the theories and observations of science which Putnam uses.

Nor are there any equivalent theories in science, once the truth of its laws and efficient-cause explanations are explained ontologically by spatiomaterialism. We have seen how both Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics and Schroedinger’s wavefunction can be incomplete representations of bits of matter that really move continuously across space as time passes and that interact in determinate ways.

We have also see how a spatiomaterialist explanation of the truth of Einstein’s special theory of relativity denies that the dates and times assigned to events by observers on different inertial are equally true. One of them is correct and the others false, though it is not possible to tell which one has the truth.

The different ways of formulating geometry all turn out to be true when the truth of geometry is explained as a correspondence to the structure among the parts of space and, thus, among the bits of matter that coincide with them.

Finally, even the dispute between Carnap and the Polish logician is resolved by ontological philosophy, because it turns out that both of them are mistaken. In a spatiomaterial world with three material objects, x1, x2 and x3, there would be four objects: space and the three material objects. (Space can be counted as a single object because its parts cannot exist without one another.) In holding that there are only three, Carnap would be overlooking space, and in holding that there are seven (or eight, if the null class is counted), the Polish logician would be overlooking how space explains all the sets that can possibly be formed of material objects in space.

Even without its explanation of the truth of mathematics and the basic laws of physics, ontological philosophy makes it possible to justify scientific realism. There is a real difference between observational and theoretical statements, because there is a difference between the objects represented in images of perception and those that are not. Some objects to which scientific theories refer are too small, too transient, move too fast, or just not the right kind to be represented in the animal system of representation (such a force fields and photons). But spatiomaterialism justifies inferences to the existence of such unobservable entities, because it explains the truth of the efficient-cause explanations that mention them. Efficient causation is just what happens as a result of the motion and interaction of bits of matter in space as time passes. The observable evidence is the occurrence of certain kinds of events in well understood experimental situations (such as the vapor trail in a Wilson cloud chamber), and given how those events are located in space at that time, there is no other way they could be caused than by the existence of the entities postulated. If some other entity were responsible for what happen, there would be a violation of either the principle of local motion or the principle of local action, because it would have to act from outside the experimental apparatus. Thus, scientific realism has an ontological justification.

This is not a justification of the empirical method as such. It cannot be, since spatiomaterialism is itself the conclusion of an empirical argument, an inference to the best ontological-cause explanation. But it is still a justification of inferences to the best efficient-cause explanations of what happens in the world as a way of discovering basic laws of physics, because such basic laws are descriptions of the behavior of the substances that constitute what is being observed in nature. There is no reason to doubt inductive inferences from particular cases to general laws, because what is being described in the particular case are substances of certain kinds that endure through time and, as substances, they have essential natures that do not change over time.

Naturalized epistemology. The response of most defenders of science to analytic philosophy’s skepticism about metaphysical realism has been simply to walk away from such disputes and simply side with science. This now includes most philosophers of science (according to Kitcher, 1992, and Rosenberg, 1996). They are naturalists who recognize that what they are doing is rejecting philosophy, which they see as the belief that there is a “foundation” or “first principle” that would make it possible for a second order argument to so explain the first level arguments of science in a way that shows their validity. They admit that there is no non-circular way to defend the method of science against alternative methods of knowing, such as religion, new age mysticism, dogmatism, poetry, or literary criticism. For them, it is enough simply to affirm the validity of the empirical method of science and accept the conclusions that it draws about the nature of the world.

This does not mean that they are not concerned with the method of science. They do believe that it ought to be clarified and improved. But they expect to use the conclusions of science itself (discoveries about instruments, about psychological and social processes, and the like) to improve the methods of science. What they deny is that there is any standpoint outside of science from which its method can be judged or justified.

Those who describe and defend this attitude toward analytic philosophy (Kitcher) call themselves “naturalized epistemologists” (following Quine), because they are giving up philosophy and trying to give a naturalistic explanation of all cognitive capacities, not just language.