On Fixing Concepts and Changing the Subject: The Case of “Naturalism”

Dolores García-Arnaldos; Concha Martínez-Vidal

doi:10.14394/filnau.2023.0018

Authors

Dolores García-Arnaldos Complutense University of Madrid, Faculty of Philosophy https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9998-8060
Concha Martínez-Vidal University of Santiago de Compostela, Department of Philosophy and Sociology https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8837-2241

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14394/filnau.2023.0018

Keywords:

minimal naturalism, scientific naturalism, liberal naturalism, conceptual engineering

Abstract

In philosophy, it is common for a concept to be modified according to the author and the role this concept will play in a theory. This is the case with the term “naturalism.” Various naturalistic approaches have emerged from disagreements on how the inquiry underlying the term “naturalism” should be understood. Consider the approach to naturalism designed in the early days of “institutional” philosophy of science (Hanna 2006) versus proposals such as Putnam’s liberal naturalism or Price’s subject naturalism. Our intuition is that the latter two positions defend reformulations of the meaning of the term and of the underlying inquiry that go so far that it is difficult to see any naturalism in them beyond the minimal demand that explanations or inquiries are to be compatible with science.

The purpose of this paper is to see whether conceptual engineering can be useful to argue for the abovementioned intuition. Our tenet is that the case of liberal naturalism involves not just a change of meaning, but also a change of subject. To this purpose, we rely on Belleri’s (2021) notion of Progressive Semantic Inquiry and what counts as going too far in that change. The paper serves two objectives: on one hand, it helps to understand what is going on with the versions of naturalism mentioned above; on the other, it assesses Belleri’s solution to the change of subject objection.

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