[DRAFT this penultimate version differs in some minor ways from the final

published version.]

Naturalism and the Transcendental Turn

Mark Sacks

Abstract
This paper is to a large extent an exercise in philosophical geography. It traces
the way in which a resilient naturalist orientation has derived support,
specifically in the analytic tradition, from a central structuring tenet of
transcendental idealism. It attempts to bring out the philosophical reasons that
drive this Kantian alliance. Attention then turns to the identification of two
salient problems that confront this alliance in its most acceptable form. To the
extent that a resilient naturalism is desirable, these problems need to be
addressed.

While the philosophical issue is brought into focus by attending specifically to

developments in the analytic tradition, this is primarily a convenience. The
preference for a resilient naturalism and the avoidance of metaphysical excess
is not by any means confined to that tradition.

1. Introduction

For some time now there has been a widespread withdrawal from metaphysics, in
favour of a strictly non-metaphysical, or naturalist conception of philosophy. The idea
is that the excesses of metaphysics, and of system-building metaphysics in particular,
should be avoided, and can be avoided without significant cost. Exactly what
naturalism means is not always clearly stated. For present purposes it is sufficient to
identify philosophical naturalism as a position that holds that there are no facts about
the world the knowledge of which requires resources that extend beyond those
available for use within natural science.1 There are at least two reasons for thinking
that a simple retreat to naturalism is problematic. The first is that the retreat to
naturalism is supposed to be more than just a personal (or collective) preference for
intellectual caution. It should, ideally, be a philosophically secured result that would
compel even those who have active metaphysical or system-building appetites. That
is what I will refer to in what follows as a resilient orientation in naturalism. Securing
that, however, requires an argument, and it is not quite clear how the case is to be
made. The other problem concerns relativism. It is assumed that an unadorned
naturalist orientation is sufficient to sustain a robust realism. But such realism is not
incompatible with a lack of universality or necessity: the natural world, as it is known
through natural science, in principle (and in fact) accommodates brute alterations and
shifts, such that any epistemic generalization can only ever be contingent. When it

Page 1
comes to natural science, this might not matter. But it might when our most
fundamental normative constraints emerge as equally indexed to a contingent bio-
chemical, or indeed socio-historical constellation. It seems that more would need to
be done to bolster philosophical naturalism. The question is whether we can, as seems
to be required, steer a course between metaphysical foundations on the one hand and a
simple retreat to naturalism on the other.

This need for a middle course between metaphysics and unadorned naturalism,
while it arises more generally, can be seen to be in direct continuity with a set of
concerns that have been at the heart of the Analytic Tradition. It may be instructive to
focus on the emergence of philosophical naturalism in that particular context.
Standardly, the middle ground is provided by transcendental idealism, and the
emergence of philosophical naturalism in the analytic tradition turns out to be closely
related to that Kantian structure.

2. Naturalism and the transcendental turn in the Analytic Tradition

A central strand of the Analytic Tradition involves a commitment directly or

indirectly to an epistemic structure characteristic of transcendental idealism.2
Clearly the intention is not to saddle the Analytic Tradition with a commitment to full
blown Kantian transcendental idealism, with all the extravagant metaphysical
elements, such as Kants transcendental psychology. The commitment identified is to
the contention that knowledge is confined to empirical facts, which are presented as
the way the world is independently, while they are in fact the result of an order
imposed by a human framework; of the world in itself, as it is devoid of imposed
human structure, we cannot have any knowledge at all. I will refer to any move
towards this position as a transcendental turn.3

Singling out a transcendental turn as a feature of central developments within

the Analytic Tradition might seem odd, and is to a large extent at odds with the self-
conception of its leading practitioners.4 It will help to set the alleged turn in the
context of the linguistic turn, with which the Analytic tradition is more obviously
bound up.

The linguistic turn cannot itself be regarded as defining the Analytic Tradition,
given that it was a much broader cultural phenomenon. In a wide range of fields, as
disparate as architecture, the plastic arts, and literature, there was towards the end of
the 19th century and in the first decades of the 20th century, a reflexive turn back to the
medium. And certainly within philosophy the 20th century linguistic turn is not
unique to the Analytic Tradition. (It was as much a characteristic of Deconstruction as
of the Analytic Tradition.) More typical of the Analytic Tradition is the fact that in it
the linguistic turn is aimed at showing language to be a perspicuous and accurate
means of representing the world.5 In contrast, other philosophical forms of the
linguistic turn have been concerned precisely to point out the ineliminable opacity of
the linguistic structure, such that it cannot be seen as a neutral tool that serves to
depict, without tainting, the world beyond it.6 The relevant point for present purposes
is that nevertheless significant work in the Analytic tradition too has conceded that the
linguistic apparatus is not neutral, but rather leaves its footprint, its subjective stamp,

Page 2
on the represented domain. And it is in connection with this that we can find a
transcendental turn forming a significant strand in the Analytic Tradition. I will try to
bring this out.

From the earliest stages, what came to be known as the Analytic Tradition
combined a linguistic turn with a deflationary brief. The impact of Russells 1905
paper, 'On Denoting', cannot be comprehended properly without regard for its
significance as an early concrete result of this combination. Important as the problem
of definite descriptions was, it was as an instantiation of a general strategy that the
paper caught the imagination: an entire metaphysical theory being rendered
perspicuously superfluous by a linguistic analysis that revealed the problem on which
it was based to be nothing more than a product of the misleading surface structure of
language. The promise: that with progressive analysis of a similar sort the same fate
would befall a host of other traditional metaphysical problems. If all went well,
ultimately there would remain nothing other than the debris yielded by linguistic
analysis on the one hand, and the live agenda of the remaining genuine sciences on the
other. The proto-typical two-level split was thus ushered in, between philosophical
nonsense (the illusion of significance) and genuine propositional sense.

Now this two-level split does not militate against metaphysics as such. And
Russell himself was quite happy to be non-deflationary (about the metaphysical status
of meanings, for example). But things were moved on, in a way that introduced a
two-level split that did militate against all metaphysical pretensions. The envisaged
plethora of other equally effective persuasive deflationary analytical treatments was
not readily forthcoming.7 The shortfall of clear practical results was bound to invite
theoretical constructions to underpin the deflationary promise. These accounts were
supposed to identify the target pseudo-problems that should be excised, leaving over
those areas in which inquiry was appropriate. Obviously the lines of demarcation
should fall in the right places: specifically, the concern to eliminate the bogus carries
with it the (distinctly Kantian) concern to safeguard the domain of the empirical
sciences. Since metaphysical propositions are typically in the suspect category, it is
best that the empirical domain be clear of them. Essentially, the outcome would be to
ensure that the naturalism of our scientific orientation is rendered resilient: that it is
theoretically so constituted as to be prevented from giving way to metaphysics.

Philosophers of the Vienna Circle famously gave simple expression to just this
commitment. They endorsed the two-level split between propositional sense and
nonsense, extended so that nothing of metaphysics survives on the map. And
importantly, the kind of deflation of fake metaphysics that Kant yielded is affected
here, as in Russell, without any overt commitment to transcendental workings, or to
the category of synthetic apriori statements in which to describe them or their
consequences. Once we have cleared away the debris yielded by analysis, the
remaining genuine sciences would consist of nothing more contentious than synthetic
aposteriori judgements. But, notoriously, the mere verificationist criterion of meaning
proved insufficient to do the job.

And it is with this failure in mind that the austere combination of a linguistic
turn and a deflationary turn, already at work in Russell, can be thought to be in need of
augmentation by a transcendental turn. However, we will see that the general problem

Page 3
that arises in relation to the verificationist criterion of meaning namely, that once
endorsed, it itself had to be rejected proves to be tenacious. The problem concerns
the instability of the standard attempts to underpin an exhaustive two-level split
between philosophical pseudo-problems and the unproblematic propositions of
empirical science.

A robust form of the transcendental augmentation in question had already been

put in place by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus. Wittgenstein there consolidates the split
between propositional sense and nonsense, running it together with an
empirical/transcendental divide. At the empirical level we are assured of language
permitting an accurate representation of the world. At this level the only propositions
that have any content are synthetic aposteriori. But what assures the representational
adequacy of language is that the represented world is not a metaphysical domain the
order of which could be quite independent of the linguistic structure by means of
which it is approached; rather, its possibilities are determined by the logical form with
which we are bound to articulate it. There is no room for that world of which we can
speak to outstrip language, to contain what we cannot think; or indeed for language to
outstrip the world, to articulate things that could not exist. The status of the world we
experience is thus resiliently rendered merely a world articulated to the measure of our
representational capacities. There is no room for mistaking knowledge of it for
knowledge of the world as it is in itself, independently of the logical form of our
representations of it. Of any such world we can say nothing. We thus have here the
parallel to Kantian empirical realism, i.e. naturalism, secured by a transcendental
framework.

It is important however to note the cost of this transcendental turn. It secures a

resilient naturalism encompassing the synthetic aposteriori (contingency statements),
and clearly delineates the domain of propositional sense, from the domain of non-
sense. But the theoretical explanation consists of claims to transcendental necessity.
And these claims, identifying the conditions that must be in place for linguistic
representation to be meaningful, permit as meaningful only contingency statements
(synthetic aposteriori) and tautologies (analytic apriori): yet they themselves are
neither. Wittgenstein, famously, was all too aware of this: the pseudo-babble that
should be revealed as meaningless includes the philosophical statements of the
Tractatus itself, not merely the illusory metaphysical excesses of others.8 Even if
Wittgenstein gives this problem an enticingly cryptic spin, the underlying problem is
endemic, and is not so easily disposed of. As with the verificationist criterion of
meaning, the theoretical move that secures the derived demarcation, fall fouls of that
very demarcation.

Carnap and Quine, while withdrawing from a full-blooded transcendental

doctrine, take an essentially similar Copernican turn, but one which in avoiding any
manifestly transcendental story seems like a more appropriate way of securing a
resilient orientation in naturalism. And again it is run alongside the linguistic and the
deflationary turn, in very much the same way as in Wittgenstein.

For both Carnap and Quine questions of existence, and the structures we can
have knowledge of, are settled by the linguistic apparatus with which we approach
them. The linguistic framework, or the conceptual scheme, plays the role of

Page 4
transcendental psychology in Kant: it determines or individuates the world which we
approach by means of it. And since we cannot approach a world except by means of
some such representational framework intellectual or Bergsonian intuition not
being an option for us it follows that we can only ever know the way of the world
as we have it structured, not the way of some world as it is in itself, prior to and
independently of our representational efforts.

This still approximates in an important respect to the transcendental idealist

thesis: knowledge is confined to empirical facts which are presented as the way the
world is independently, while they are in fact the result of an order imposed by a
human framework. But the transcendental turn here is naturalized. It is two steps
removed from Kant, and one from the early Wittgenstein. It is not the apriori faculties
of the mind, as in Kant, that are doing the work, but the structure of language;9 and, it
is not the a priori structure of language, as in the early Wittgenstein, but the empirical
linguistic frameworks in which in principle nothing need be held as immune to
revision.

Despite being naturalized, the Copernican turn here would still seem to meet
the aims that led to taking that turn: the world we can know is resiliently confined to
the status of merely empirical reality, we can only ever ask questions internal to one
imposed framework or the other. That is the limit of the intelligible. Everything that
lies beyond that external questions is the domain of the pseudo-problem, of
assertions for which there can be no possible evidence. Thus by running the
sense/nonsense distinction together with the internal/external distinction we get both
the desired theoretical demarcation of nonsensical issues (external issues) from
genuine knowledge (internal questions), and also guarantee the resilient status of the
confinement to latter: there is no possibility of sliding into taking the merely empirical
as metaphysical. The space in which metaphysical problems traditionally arose has
been closed down.

3. Problems with the naturalized Copernican turn

The naturalized counterpart to transcendental idealism thus stands to afford the kind
of resilient naturalism we were after. There are however two salient problems with
this naturalised form of the Copernican turn. The first is inherited from other forms,
and so is continuous with what has been said above. Although the given structures
that cast the lines of individuation of our empirical reality are themselves not
purported to be apriori or transcendental now, still the entire theoretical explanation
itself clearly amounts to a synthetic apriori claim, and it is not clear how any such
claim can be accommodated. We are supposedly being given a theory about linguistic
frameworks, internal questions and ontological commitment, and external questions, a
story that is itself not true only within one framework. And yet we are, according to
that very picture, restricted to just such truths: there is no room left for it to be
construed as an external truth. It would seem then that we again have resort here to
synthetic apriori claims which by their own lights must be excluded. If we are not to
rest here, precariously, on the Wittgensteinian simile, construing those claims as a
ladder that once climbed is discarded, this is a problem that must be addressed.

Page 5
 Second, once the Kantian transcendental psychology, or the Wittgensteinian
apriori linguistic form, are each avoided, some of the safeguards of a transcendental
idealist turn are undermined. The resilience of the confinement to a merely empirical
reality is sustained, but it no longer goes along with the resilience of the construal of
that reality. We are now faced with a relativism that goes beyond the mere instability
of bare naturalism (which was flagged at the outset): different frameworks, or
conceptual schemes, will result in different ontologies, different worlds, each of which
can be the object of knowledge for those inhabiting the relevant framework, but none
of them can lay claim to universality.

It might seem that the situation can be cast in a more positive light. The first
problem, namely, the illicit appeal to synthetic apriori truths, is in effect what
underlies Davidsons criticism of Quines scheme/content distinction as constituting a
third dogma of empiricism.10 Although Davidson does not set it in quite this light, it
is a dogma an apriori thesis that cannot be retained within a thoroughgoing
empiricism that holds that all non-trivial truth is aposteriori (posterior at least to the
adoption of one conceptual scheme or another). Whether the scheme/content
distinction is coherent is not the point (although Davidson spends much time on this):
the point is that even if coherent, it is not legitimate to accord it apriori status. But the
question is what results from the rejection of that dogma. And on Davidsons own
view the outlook is rosy. We establish 'unmediated touch' with the very objects whose
antics make our sentences true or false.11 Truth is no longer merely internal to a
scheme, we are no longer reading off the world as a discovery an individuation of
facts and states of affairs that we ourselves have in fact projected onto it in virtue of
one among many possible conceptual schemes, and in consequence ontological
relativity goes by the board. With the recognition that according a foundational place
to the scheme/content distinction would itself be relative to a scheme, relativism
reveals itself to be self-stultifying. Thus attending to the first problem also
purportedly takes care of the second.

In fact, however, the results are not quite so positive.

3.1 The theoretical importance of maintaining the synthetic apriori status of the
transcendental turn

First, it would appear that discarding the apriori set-up of conceptual schemes
imposing in their various ways an order on a preconceptual neutral content, does away
with the theoretical demarcation of legitimate questions (internal) from pseudo-
problems (external). Relatedly, and more importantly in the present context, it would
also do away with the resilient block on philosophical and scientific concerns straying
from the empirical to the metaphysical. Davidson says that [i]n giving up the
dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the world, but re-establish
unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and
opinions true or false.12 The question is why should we, having reached such brute or
naive realism, construe it as falling in any way short of the way the world is in itself
that is, construe it as less than the purported depiction of a metaphysical reality. In
the absence of the two-level structure of transcendental idealism, insisting on an
exclusively naturalist orientation seems dogmatic, and theoretically unstable. Indeed,

Page 6
we have a position incapable of securing universality as anything more than empirical
generalization, and to that extent it is likely to act as an impetus to a more robust
metaphysical construal of empirical reality. Yet once we do so construe it (and,
consequently, our epistemic task), it would seem that philosophy once again becomes
enmeshed in precisely the sort of evidence-transcending claims the debunking of
which guided the development of the strand we are tracing in the Analytic Tradition.
If we do not either dissolve metaphysical problems one by one, or reveal them, en
bloc, to be misguided, then in principle explanation is not kept in check, theoretically
at least, and the reversion to metaphysics is both possible and likely. Individual
philosophers may persist in construing their brief as strictly naturalist rather than
metaphysical. But that is then left as a contingency of individual or group
temperament, rather than a secure philosophical result. There is nothing left to force
the confinement of philosophical activity to one side of a line delineating empirical
realism or naturalism from full-blooded metaphysical assertion.

The situation then is as follows. The residual synthetic apriori claim implicit
in Carnap and Quine still sustained the Kantian two-tier structure whereby empirical
science is confined to the one, and illusory inquiry to the other. In consequence
philosophy was resiliently construed as non-metaphysical. But in virtue of being non-
metaphysical, it looks as though there is no room left for accommodating the operative
synthetic apriori thesis. And yet without it we face the impossibility of carrying out
the theoretical delineation needed. It would seem then that the apriori structural tenet
of transcendental idealism that leads from early Wittgenstein to Quine, is both such as
cannot be accommodated within that trajectory, and yet is central to it.

What is needed is a way of sustaining the two-level structure typical of the

transcendental idealist account, but without it being predicated on precisely the sort of
excess that that set-up itself militates against, i.e. without engaging in precisely the
sort of metaphysics we are concerned to expunge. The room for manoeuvre is narrow.
And ideally of course the result would (as in Kant and the early Wittgenstein) suffice
to safeguard the construal of empirical reality against excessive relativism.

3.2 The extent of the relativist threat

Here we turn back to the anti-relativist result that Davidson seems to think follows
from his rejection of (what we are referring to as) Quines naturalized Copernican
turn.

It is in fact not the case that excising the problematic synthetic apriori
framework results in a relief from relativist pressure. At issue is how much in fact
falls away with the problematic scheme/content distinction, or with the concept of a
conceptual scheme still at work in Carnap and Quine. In Davidsons view: Given the
dogma of a dualism of scheme and reality, we get conceptual relativity, and truth
relative to a scheme. Without the dogma, this kind of relativity goes by the board.
...13 And Davidson assumes that without that relativism we fall back into a
comfortable naturalism, the reassurance of immediate contact with ordinary empirical
objects. But this is too quick. Clearly, to the extent that we no longer talk about
conceptual schemes, there will no longer be room to talk of truth being relative to

Page 7
such schemes. But arguably that does not tell against relativism in general, or indeed
against ontological relativity, but only against one particularly vivid way of
articulating it, in terms of conceptual schemes. That is, conceptual schemes, and the
scheme/content distinction, are a piece of philosophical artifice. It might be natural
for us to use those terms in expressing a form of naturalized Kantianism that results in
relativist pressure on naturalism. But they might well be mere window dressing,
theoretical props that bear no philosophical weight, such that disposing of the
language of conceptual schemes leaves the relativist import of a naturalized
Copernican turn untouched.

A sound appreciation of just this can be drawn from the later Wittgenstein,
who provides materials for a move even further towards a naturalized form of the
Copernican turn. We still retain the view that what is presented to us as a discovered
order might in fact be of our own making, such that it can be made in different ways.
But there is no longer any apriori mechanism involved: not the Kantian apriori
faculties, not the apriori structure of language, not even the apriori necessity of
articulation being in accordance with the order imposed by one conceptual scheme or
another. All of these are just so many philosophical pictures that have held us in their
grip. Freed of them we recognize that it need not be something specifically
conceptual or narrowly linguistic that structures the empirical order we discover
around us. The structuring framework may be a worldly affair. Habits, practices,
traditions, create and enforce certain taxonomies, certain patterns of perceptual
salience, which present a certain world to us as discovered, thereby occluding the
extent to which it is a reflection of our own form of life. Different practices, different
customs, different historical authorities and power relations, result in different patterns
of salience, and so in different individuations.14

In other words, the articulation of the world as we encounter it might be the

result of our own entrenched world-involving practices, and so might change as the
practices to which it is indexed change. Of course this is not incompatible with talk of
conceptual schemes, and should such talk be found helpful, the relativism in question
can be cast in those terms. But the point that emerges is that such talk is not
necessary, and even without it the relevant relativist pressure on naturalism is
sustained. Any attack on the notion of a conceptual scheme, or on the scheme/content
distinction, will therefore merely topple a convenient surface structure, but will not
stand to curb the underlying relativist threat to the assumption of a single empirical
reality.15

In terms of curbing the pressure towards relativism, then, the elimination of

the synthetic apriori framework is in itself of no benefit.

Some may regard this as the unacceptable and unavoidable consequence of a

post-metaphysical orientation, and in response resort to the apparent comfort of full-
blooded metaphysics. Others, thinking to follow Wittgenstein, may celebrate the local
indexing of our various naturalistically based construals of reality and normative
commitments, happily giving up on the ideal of the universality of epistemic and
moral claims. From the present point of view, however, both responses simply
indicate acutely the need for an alternative to metaphysical excesses on the one hand
and to unadorned naturalism on the other.

Page 8
4. Conclusion

The later Wittgensteins position can, however, if pushed to the limit, itself be
regarded as implementing the transcendental turn, and its way of doing so might be
thought to point the way towards the required position. For Wittgenstein there is no
room to assert that we are confined to an empirical reality of our own making, such
that we cannot ever get beyond the structure introduced by our own practices to know
the way of the world as it is in itself. That would be simply one more picture, internal
to one more practice. Arguably, that precisely respects the fact that there is no room
for the kind of synthetic apriori thesis that various philosophers (including
Wittgenstein himself) had wrongly tried to assert. But in itself that need not mean that
there is no room here for something that may still count as a form of transcendental
insight. The transcendental insight may be something that is now properly shown,
even though it cannot consistently be said. If we are shown that the naturalized
Copernican turn is so pervasive that we come to appreciate that any construal of the
empirical world will be a reflection of the contingent practices to which it is anchored,
then we might come to see, and to internalise the recognition, that all individuation is
merely internal, that we cannot get beyond our own structuring impacts, so that we
can only ever raise internal questions, external questions being beyond the bounds of
possible enquiry. The result of the Wittgensteinian therapy would be to keep us
resiliently confined to only ever taking ourselves to be investigating the way of our
domestic reality, not the way the world is in itself; and by showing rather than saying
it, by inculcating an outlook without asserting it, would avoid the need to state the
synthetic a priori claim, which statement seemed to transgress the very limits the
claim itself establishes.

Thus the progressive naturalisation of the transcendental turn in the Analytic

Tradition might culminate in a resilient confinement of philosophy to merely internal
questions. Even if this were the case, however, the cost of the naturalisation still
seems to be relativism: any empirical world would be as variable as the contingent
practices to which its construal is anchored. As we have remarked, the universality of
our construal of the empirical world is undermined once the structuring framework is
itself not transcendental, but a contingent empirical structure to which alternatives are
available.

Now there are those who have contended that this later Wittgenstein in fact
offers a form of transcendental idealism something that goes beyond merely
implementing the transcendental turn such that it secures universality of certain
fundamental normative structures.16 Whether or not Wittgensteins position does this,
the target is clear. We need, without inconsistency, to secure our naturalist orientation
resiliently, while nevertheless also securing the scope for epistemic and normative
claims to genuine universality.

Significantly, this agenda is not merely internal to the Analytic Tradition. It is

not only in that tradition that it seems necessary today both to avoid the dangers of an
unadorned naturalism on the one hand, and of the resort to metaphysical dogma on the
other; to secure universality of normative structure without metaphysical excesses.

Page 9
What the history of the Analytic Tradition specifically indicates are the difficulties,
and at the same time the appeal, of trying to secure this middle ground by means of
some minimalist form of the insight that transcendental idealism was after. It remains
to consider, amongst other things, whether those difficulties might arise because we
have not yet come up with the appropriate minimalist construal of that insight.17

Mark Sacks
Department of Philosophy
Universityof Essex
Colchester CO4 3SQ
England

msacks@essex.ac.uk

NOTES
1
In what follows I will use the term naturalism to mean philosophical naturalism,

adding the qualifying phrase only where in the context there might otherwise be some

confusion.
2
On this see, for example, P.F. Strawson, Kants New Foundations of Metaphysics,

in his Entity & Identity and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1997), pp. 232-243. Strawson does not bring out the problematic nature of this

relationship and the ensuing agenda with which we are faced.

3
I will also refer to it as a Copernican turn. It is important to note, and this will

emerge more clearly later, that taking a transcendental turn does not on its own deliver

the purported strengths of transcendental idealism.

4
Certainly, they have not generally regarded a concern with the nature and

significance of the transcendental turn (and still less of transcendental idealism) as

fundamental to their philosophical agenda.

5
For further discussion of the Analytic Tradition in the light of this commitment to

linguistic perspicuity, see my Through a Glass Darkly: Vagueness in the Metaphysics

Page 10
of the Analytic Tradition, in The Analytic Tradition, eds D. Bell and N. Cooper

(Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).

6
In this respect the linguistic turn in non-analytic philosophy is close to that taken in

the plastic arts: reflection on the medium turns attention back on ourselves and the

role of subjectivity. (On the latter in the case of the plastic arts, see for example

Kandinskys descriptions in his Concerning the Spiritual in Art (New York: Dover

Publications, 1979).
7
Which is not to say that the results of these attempts were not influential: Ryle's

deflationism about the traditional mind-body problem, for example, was largely

responsible for the advent of 'philosophy of mind', and for direction it took in the 50s

and 60s. But it came too late in the day such results were simply too few and far

between to preclude the felt need for theoretical delineation of the deflationary task.
8
That is, it ranges across the transcendental and the transcendent, in Kantian terms.
9
Although of course Kant takes his clue, as least when it comes to identifying the

apriori furnishings of the understanding, from what he takes to be the basic forms of

linguistic judgement.
10
See Davidson, On the very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme, in his Inquiries into

Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).

11
Op. cit.: 198.
12
ibid.
13
ibid.
14
Insights of the same sort are worked out in less schematic detail in Foucault: in the

context of discussing the nature of the Analytic Tradition, it is however more

obviously appropriate to concentrate on Wittgenstein.

Page 11
15
I present the case in outline here: for more detail, see Sacks, Objectivity and Insight

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003 paperback), ch. 5.

16
J. Lear, most notably, developed a reading along such lines. See his Leaving the

World Alone, in Journal of Philosophy LXXIX (1982), pp. 382-403; and The

Disappearing We, in Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, LVIII (1984), pp.

219-242. In these papers Lear picks up on the groundbreaking paper by Bernard

Williams, Wittgenstein and Idealism (in his Moral Luck, Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1981). On reasons for thinking that Wittgensteins form of

transcendental idealism, if that is what it is, does not suffice to secure universality, see

Sacks, Transcendental Constraints and Transcendental Features, in International

Journal of Philosophical Studies, V (1997) pp. 164-186.

17
This paper has been presented at the University of Tel Aviv, Southampton

University, and at the University of East Anglia. I am indebted to audiences at all

three for comments and discussion.

Page 12
REFERENCES

Carnap, R. (1931/2), The Elimination of Metaphysics through the Logical Analysis of

Language, in Erkenntnis.

Davidson, D. (1984), On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme, in his Inquiries into
Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hacker, PMS. (1999), On Carnaps Elimination of Metaphysics through the Logical

Analysis of Language, in Deutsche Zeitschrift fr Philosophie.

Kandinsky, V. (1979), Concerning the Spiritual in Art. New York: Dover Publications.

Lear, J. (1982), 'Leaving the World Alone', in Journal of Philosophy, LXXIX, pp.
382-403.

Lear, J. (1984), 'The Disappearing "We"', in Aristotelian Society Supplementary

Volume, lviii, pp. 219-242.

Quine, W. (1953), From a Logical Point of View. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press.

Quine, W. (1969), Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York: Columbia
University Press.

Russell, B. (1905), On Denoting, in Mind.

Sacks, M. (1990), Through a Glass Darkly: Vagueness in the Metaphysics of the

Analytic Tradition, in The Analytic Tradition, edited by D. Bell and N.
Cooper. Oxford: Blackwell.

Sacks, M. (1997), Transcendental Constraints and Transcendental Features, in

International Journal of Philosophical Studies, V (1997) pp. 164-186.

Sacks, M., Objectivity and Insight. Oxford University Press, 2003.

Strawson, P.F. (1997), Kants New Foundations of Metaphysics, in his Entity &
Identity and Other Essays, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997.

Williams, B. (1981b), Wittgenstein and Idealism, in Moral Luck. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Wittgenstein, L. (1961), Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F.

McGuiness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Wittgenstein, L. (1952), Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.

Page 13