Epoche and Suunyataa: Skepticism East and West

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Epoche and Suunyataa: Skepticism East and West

By Jay L. Garfield

Philosophy East and West

volume 40, no. 3(July 1990) P.285-307

(C) by University of Hawaii Press

P.285

The whole modern conception of the world is founded
on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature
are the explanations of natural phenomena.

Thus people today stop at the laws of nature,
treating them as something inviolable, just as God
and Fate were treated in past ages.

And in fact both are right and both wrong:
though the view of the ancients is clearer in so far
as they have a clear and acknowledged terminus,
while the modern system tries to make it look as if
everything were explained.

Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,
6.371, 6.372

Sextus regarded skepticism not as a nihilistic
attack on our cognitive life, but rather--as he
emphasizes in a variety of medical metaphors--as a
form of philosophical therapy, to cure us of the
cognitive and emotional ills born of extreme
metaphysical, moral, or epistemological positions.

...[T]he Sceptic's end, where matters of opinion are
concerned, is mental tranquility; in the realm of
things unavoidable, moderation of feeling is the
end.... Upon his suspension of judgment there
followed, by chance, mental tranquility in matters
of opinion. For the person who entertains the
opinion that anything is by nature good or bad is
continually disturbed. When he lacks those things
that seem to him to be good, he believes he is being
pursued, as if by the Furies, by those things which
are by nature bad, and pursues what he believes to
be the good things....On the other side there is the
man who leaves undetermined the question of what
things are good and bad by nature. He does not exert
himself to avoid anything or to seek after anything,
and hence he is in a tranquil state. (Hallie 1985,
p. 41)

The Sceptic wishes, from considerations of
humanity, to do all he can with the arguments at his
disposal to cure the self-conceit and rashness of
the dogmatists. And so just as healers of bodily
ailments keep remedies of various potency, and
administer the powerful ones to those whose ailments
are violent and the lighter ones to those with light
complaints, in the same manner the Sceptic too
propounds arguments...capable of forcibly removing
the condition of dogmatist self-conceit. (Ibid., p.
128)

(Wittgenstein also adopts the medical metaphor: "The
philosopher's treatment of a question is like the
treatment of an illness" (Philosophical
Investigations 255)). It should go without saying
that as far as Sextus was concerned, skepticism is a
moderate position, as compared with the available
alternatives.

Jay L. Garfield is Associate Professor of Philosophy
in the School of Communications and Cognitive
Science at Hampshire College.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I thank Dick Garner, David
Karnos, Dan Lloyd, and the members of the
Propositional Attitudes Task Force, particularly
Janet Gyatso, John Connolly, Kathryn Addelson, Bruce
Aune, Lee Bowie, Istuyaque Haji, Murray Kiteley,
Meredith Michaels, and Janice Moulton, for spirited
discussion and for many useful comments and
suggestions on an earlier draft of this essay.
Thanks especially to Janet Gyatso for much
enlightening conversation, for assistance and
support in my efforts to understand and to interpret
Buddhist philosophy, and for detailed criticism of
my use of the Buddhist texts I discuss here. An
earlier version of this essay ("Waking Up to
Regularity: Scepticism as a Meta Physick") was read
to an NEH Summer Institute on Nagarjuna and Buddhist
Thought, at the University of Hawaii in the summer
of 1989. I thank David Kalupahana, Steve Odin,
Kenneth Inada, and Arthur Herman for that
opportunity and for their comments on the paper.

P.286

Moreover, Sextus argued, the serene equanimity that
is the goal of skeptical practice is to be attained
by the achievement of the "suspension of belief" in
favor of receiving cognitive and practical guidance
from "the guidance of nature, the compulsion of the
feelings, the tradition of laws and customs, and the
instruction of the arts" (ibid., p. 40). Again, it
is important to note that whatever Sextus has in
mind by the "suspension of belief" or the "refusal
to assert," he does not mean that we are to become
cognitively inert, inactive, or disengaged,
epistemically or otherwise. For neither art, custom,
perception, nor appetite encourage such a life.
Moreover, such a life or attitude towards knowledge
would be extreme, and, again, skepticism is a
moderate position. And finally, by any standards,
such a rejection of epistemic and moral life would
be, in a straightforward sense, sick. And skepticism
is intended as a cure for just such ills.

It is important to emphasize these points
because many modern writers--following Kant and
earlier usage introduced by Berkeley and muddied
(though in constructive ways) by Hume--urge that a
central task of philosophy is to "answer the
skeptic": to show, presumably, that what the skeptic
denies to be possible is in fact not only possible,
but actual. To adopt a later medical metaphor, this
endeavor strikes me as a form of philosophical
resistance in the psychoanalytic sense, a
consequence of the very disease of which the skeptic
intends to cure philosophers. It is more
appropriate, I will argue, not to resist skeptical
arguments, but to attend carefully to them. In
particular, I will argue that resistance to
skepticism rests on a confusion of skepticism with
one of its extreme targets--typically what I follow
the Buddhist skeptics in calling "nihilism." Such a
confusion mistakes the point of skeptical arguments,
the conclusions of the critical portions of the
skeptical enterprise, and, most importantly, the
skeptical solutions, as Hume and more recently
Kripke (1982, pp. 66-68) have described them, that
skepticism offers to the puzzles it generates.

Much of the confusion I hope to clear up is
understandable given the expositions of skepticism
with which many of us are most familiar. I have in
mind those of Sextus, Hume, and Wittgenstein, with
appropriate ancillary figures in tow. For a variety
of historical, rhetorical, and other reasons, these
expositions have not placed at center stage either
the opposition of extremes against which skeptical
critical attacks are addressed. or the ways in which
the skeptical solutions to the problems ostensibly
solved by these extreme positions constitute what
can simultaneously be seen as a via media between,
and a complete rejection of the presuppositions of,
those extreme positions. But skeptical philosophy is
a cross-cultural phenomenon. A rich skeptical
tradition is present in Maadhyamika Buddhist
philosophy, and particularly the
Praasa^ngika-Maadhyamika tradition is startlingly
akin to the Western skeptical tradition, in respect
of its aims, methodology, and philosophical
problematic.

P.287

Naagaarjuna and Candrakiirti. like Sextus, emphasize
the therapeutic nature of philosophy:

[39] If one understands how actions are devoid
of inherent existence, then he sees the suchness of
actions. When he has seen suchness, he will have
eliminated ignorance, and when there is no ignorance
then actions which are caused by ignorance cannot
arise in him, and so the results of actions such as
consciousness and so forth, up to acting and death
will not be experienced by him. (Komito 1987, p. 89)

[73]...With the elimination of wrong views they
will have abandoned attachment, closed-mindedness
and hatred and thereby attain nirvana unstained by
wrong views. (Ibid., p. 95)

As it is said in the Samadhiraja Sutra, "An
existential element 'desire' would be roused by
something in someone; an existential element
'aversion' would be aversion in someone to
something; an existential element 'illusion' would
be illusion in someone concerning something." Such
an element of existence one cannot discover in
thought nor perceive in fact. One who does not
discover such an existential element in thought nor
perceive it in fact is said to be free of desire,
aversion and illusion, to have a mind free of
misbelief, to be composed in spirit. He is said to
have crossed to the other side, to have penetrated
deeply, to have attained peace. (Sprung 1979, p.
222)

They, too, are concerned to develop skeptical
problems and skeptical solutions thereto regarding
the existence of the external world, personal
identity, and the existence of the self, morality,
and meaning. And the arguments are immediately
accessible and familiar to Western philosophers.

But the Buddhist skeptics, because of the
cultural and philosophical context in which they
write, are a bit more explicit about certain
features of the skeptical method than are their
European counterparts. In particular, the theory of
the relation of skeptical positions to dogmatic
positions is more carefully worked out; the nature
of the suspension of belief or "positionlessness" is
more explicitly characterized; and the relation
between skeptical methodology and the role of
convention in the life of the skeptic is more
apparent in these accounts. There are numerous other
interesting points of similarity and difference
between the traditions, but I want to trade on these
three expository advantages in order to use the
Praasa^ngika-Maadhyamika formulation of skepticism
to motivate and to illuminate certain obscurities in
the skepticism of Europe. This is an essay with a
complex agenda. I hope to provide a useful
reinterpretation of classical skepticism as a
constructive philosophical programme, and one which
provides a compelling picture of the nature of the
philosophical enterprise. I also hope to demonstrate
the possibility and desirability of discussing
European and Buddhist skeptical arguments together,
as a vehicle for their mutual illumination. Finally,
I hope to defend the skeptical enterprise as a
much-needed corrective to some contemporary
philosophical confusions. This is too large a task
to accomplish

P.288

in a single essay, and the discussion must
accordingly be regarded as a programmatic beginning.

After undertaking a cross-cultural expository
defense of skepticism as a moderate solution to the
problems attendant on metaphysical extremism, I will
undertake a bit of therapy. For much of contemporary
philosophy, I would argue, is seriously and
dogmatically ill. One physician on one housecall,
however, can cure only one patient. I will endeavor
to cure a prominently diseased dogmatist, Jerry
Fodor, of one of the more epidemic dogmatic
ills--that of causal realism, by a judicious
application of the skeptical physic. My hope is that
this cure will serve as a model, and that its ease
will inspire much self-treatment.

I

The Praasa^ngika-Maadhyamika Buddhists, (1) like
Sextus, refer to their opponents as "dogmatists."
They identify, for each philosophical problem
subject to skeptical treatment, a reificationist and
a nihilistic version of dogmatism. This taxonomy of
the relevant pathology is important. For while it
will be clear that, for example, both Sextus and
Wittgenstein have both extreme views in mind, the
failure in the European formulation of skeptical
arguments to be explicit on this distinction issues
in the easy and dangerous conflation of skepticism
with nihilism, and the attendant disparagement and
rejection of skepticism. Whereas reificationism, in
this philosophical taxonomy, is the assertion of the
ultimate reality of that whose reality (or reality
in that sense) the skeptic denies (for example, of
material substance, of a persistent self, of an
independent realm of mathematical or moral truth, of
a "third world" of meanings or of primitive semantic
facts), nihilism is the philosophical denial of the
existence of that which--at least in some
sense--clearly exists, or more accurately of the
warrant of what are in fact clearly warranted
claims. A nihilist hence might deny that any of our
statements about external objects, about ourselves
or our moral responsibility, or about the meanings
of words are true or warranted, or that one can make
sense of any of the practices associated with such
beliefs.

It is important to see that nihilism is a
forensic device for skepticism: in the language of
Hume, aptly appropriated by Kripke, the nihilistic
challenges to our beliefs and practices pose
"skeptical problems." The task of the skeptic is to
provide "skeptical solutions"--to respond to the
nihilistic attack on the reality or warrant of a
class of entities, beliefs, or practices in a way
that at the same time does not capitulate to the
metaphysical excesses of reificationism.

A sceptical solution of a sceptical
philosophical problem begins... by conceding that
the sceptic's negative assertions are unanswerable.
Nevertheless our ordinary practice or belief is
justified because--contrary appearances
notwithstanding--it need not require the
justification the sceptic has shown to be untenable.
And much of the value of the sceptical argument
consists

P.289

precisely in the fact that he has shown that an
ordinary practice, if it is to be defended at all,
cannot be defended in a certain way. (Kripke 1982,
pp. 66-67)

As Kripke points out in the context of his
exposition of Wittgenstein's skeptical response to
semantic nihilism, (2) this form of skeptical
response typically consists in granting the
principal arguments of the nihilist against the
possibility of the kind of knowledge, certainty,
justification, or entity the nihilist repudiates,
but also in pointing out that in fact the practices
the nihilist seeks to undermine are not in fact
grounded on things of that kind, but are rather
founded in conventions that remain untouched by
nihilistic arguments and which in no way presuppose
the reification of the entities whose existence is
at issue between nihilist and reificationist. This
is the sense in which skepticism constitutes a
"middle way" or a moderate position.

A few quick examples whose details are familiar
may help make this critical distinction between
skepticism and nihilism and the relation between
them clearer. Consider skepticism about the
existence of the external world. The reificationist
argues that since we apprehend qualities, there must
be some material substance in which they
inhere--that there is a substantial, independent
external world, whose furniture consists in material
substance and its attributes. The nihilist, on the
other hand (perhaps Berkeley or a Yogaacaara
fellow-traveler(3)) argues that we can make no sense
of the concept of such material substance or
substratum, or that if we can, we can never have
knowledge of it. So, s/he argues, there is no
external world, or at least we have no knowledge of
any such world.(4)

The skeptic--think of Hume ("that unintelligible
chimera of a substance" (Treatise, p. 222)) or
Naagaarjuna ("[47] Form is not apprehended as
inherently existing"(5) (Komito, p. 90) ) , or
Candrakiirti ("You may say: Although a material
cause of objects is in this way not logically
possible, nonetheless objects exist in fact as
effects and because of their real existence matter
as cause will exist as well. This would be so if the
object as effect existed, but it does not" (Sprung
p. 99).)--concedes to the nihilist that we have no
idea of material substance as a permanent substratum
for attributes, or that if we had a concept of such
a thing, we could never have knowledge of its
existence. But the skeptic denies that our ordinary
discourse about and use of material objects in any
way implicates the concept of a substance with
attributes. Instead, the skeptic argues, our
conventions and practices regarding the use of, talk
about, and justification of knowledge claims
regarding external objects get their point just from
their role in our individual and collective lives.
It is these practices that give sense to talk about
objects, and not the existence of substance that
makes these practices intelligible.

Or consider skepticism with regard to the
existence of the self. The reificationist (for
example, Descartes or the typical Brahman) argues
that experience presupposes a persistent self as its
subject. The nihilist (Hume in setting

P.290

up the problem, or Sextus) argues that in virtue of
the incoherence of such a notion, or in virtue of
its unknowability, there can be no such self. or at
least no self-knowledge. The skeptical
reconstruction proceeds by noting that the self is,
as Hume puts it, a "forensic" or, as Tsong Khapa
puts it, a "conventional" concept. The
identification and discussion of selves presupposes
not a substance to which we have privileged access,
but conventions regarding the applications of names,
attribution of responsibility, and so forth.

Think of skepticism with regard to meaning. The
reificationist (Frege, Old Testament Wittgenstein)
argues that there are particular semantic facts
which constitute or determine the meanings of words
and which we grasp when we know word meaning. The
semantic nihilist (Bhart.rhari on some readings or
Wittgenstein's imaginary interlocutor in the New
Testament) argues that there can be no such facts,
or that we could never know them, and hence that
there is nothing that constitutes the meaning or
correct use of terms. The skeptical solution
developed by Wittgenstein and Tsong Khapa concedes
the lack of any such special semantic facts, but
requires us to note that word meaning and the
assertability of correctness regarding word use rest
not upon such facts but upon a network of social
conventions regarding word use.

Finally, consider for a moment the example with
which I will be most centrally concerned below. The
reificationist with regard to causation argues that
the regularities we observe in nature are to be
explained by a fundamental causal power that causes
have to bring about their effects--a necessary
connection. The nihilist argues that because we can
have no clear idea of such a causal power or natural
necessity, causal explanation is impossible. The
skeptical solution to the problem thus poses
regarding the possibility of scientific
explanation--as Hume, Wittgenstein, Naagaarjuna, and
Candrakiirti argue--is, rather than to understand
regularity as vouchsafed by causation, to understand
causal explanation as grounded in regularities.(6)

All of these examples, to be sure, are presented
in telegraphic form. But I hope that they serve to
illustrate the constructive response skepticism
provides to the challenges posed by nihilistic
critiques of reificationist positions. There is an
important additional characteristic of the relationship
between skepticism and the dogmatic extremes against
which it is counterposed that warrants emphasis. And
it is only by appreciating this feature of
skepticism that we can understand the sense in which
the skeptic can be claiming to "suspend belief" or
to be "positionless." To suspend belief in the sense
Sextus(7) has in mind is not to shrug one's
shoulders in indecision regarding competing claims.
To understand suspension this way is to see
skepticism as a wholly negative position. I want to
emphasize the essentially constructive character of
skeptical argument, however, and this requires a
subtler understanding of suspension. To suspend
judgment in this sense is to refuse to assent to a
position, while refusing to assert its negation,
since either assertion would commit one to a false
or misleading metaphysical presupposition. To

P.291

suspend judgment is hence to refuse to enter into a
misguided discourse. For the skeptic, European or
Buddhist, both members of any dogmatic pair, despite
their apparent antagonism, share some common
metaphysical thesis as a presupposition of their
respective positions. And it is in the rejection of
this position--and in the consequent suspension of
judgment regarding the opposing dogmatic
positions--that skepticism consists.(8) The dogmatic
thesis in the case of the existence of the external
world is that the existence of physical objects and
the truth of claims about them presuppose the
existence of material substance. With respect to the
existence of the self, the thesis is that personal
identity and self-knowledge are possible iff there
is a persistent soul; with respect to meaning, it is
that conditions for the correct use of words
presuppose the existence and grasp of semantic
facts. Finally, the causal reificationist and
nihilist agree that causal explanation is possible
only on the condition that the regularities it
exploits are grounded in independent causal links.
In each case, the reificationist and the nihilist
differ only regarding whether the metaphysical
presupposition in question is satisfied. The skeptic
rejects the presupposition of the dispute.

The skeptical move in each case consists in
rejecting exactly the thesis that the apparently
diametrically opposed dogmatic positions share. That
is what makes skepticism so radical, so deep, and so
apparently nihilistic when viewed uncritically. For
in each case, the thesis rejected is an unquestioned
fundamental presupposition of much mainstream
philosophical thought--"the decisive move in the
conjuring trick." In each case, however, the skeptic
determines to argue that these shared fundamental
metaphysical assumptions regarding the necessary
ontological conditions of knowledge must be rejected
in order to understand and explain epistemic
practice.

When Sextus urges us to suspend belief, it is
the metaphysical beliefs that lead to dogmatic
opposition that he urges us to suspend, and the
debates concerning them from which he urges us to
absent ourselves. When he says "not more," he urges
that the external world is not more than what we
observe, that personal identity is not more than an
aggregation of experiences and capacities, that
meaning is not more than convention, that causation
is not more than regularity. Custom and the
particular practices of the arts and sciences, he
urges, yield all the knowledge, certainty, and
justification we need in order to navigate the
world, identify ourselves and others, speak
telligibly, and explain natural phenomena.

Now, we cannot be entirely inactive when it
comes to the observances of everyday life.
Therefore, while living undogmatically, we pay due
regard to appearances. This observance of the
requirements of everyday life seems to be fourfold,
with the following particular heads: the guidance of
nature, the compulsion of the feelings, the
tradition of laws and customs, and the instruction
of the arts. It is by the guidance of nature that we
are naturally capable of sensation and thought. It
is by the compulsion of the feelings that hunger
leads us to food and thirst leads us to drink. It is
by virtue of the tradition of

P.292

laws and customs that in everyday life we accept
piety as good and impiety as evil. And it is by
virtue of the instruction of the arts that we are
not inactive in those arts which we employ. All
these statements, however, we make without
prejudice. (Hallie. p. 40)

This thought is echoed by Wittgenstein's observation
that when we hit explanatory bedrock, we find not
certain propositions, but practices:

204. Giving grounds, however, justifying the
evidence, comes to an end;--but the end is not
certain propositions' striking us immediately as
true, i.e. it is not a kind of seeing on our part;
it is our acting which lies at the bottom of the
language game.

344. My life consists in my being content to
accept many things. (On Certainty)

When the Mahaayaanists argue that phenomena are
all empty, the same insight is being expressed:
material objects are devoid of substance in the
metaphysician's sense; persons are empty of
immaterial souls that persist through change; words
are empty of special semantic facts that determine
their meanings; and regularity in nature is empty of
special causal powers that provide its
underpinnings.

The constructive side to the skeptical
enterprise has a characteristic strategy, a strategy
involving two moves. In the first place, it involves
what I like to call the "skeptical inversion" of the
order of explanation: the nihilist challenges us to
explain the apparently problematic by reference to
what, according to the reificationist, should be the
unproblematic, and argues that we cannot. The
skeptic grants the force of this argument, but
demonstrates that in fact the apparent explanans--or
at least the forms of discourse involving vocabulary
pertaining thereto--is what is problematic and
obscure. Moreover, s/he argues, the very
reality--such as it is--of that explanans is in fact
grounded in what was originally problematized by the
skeptical challenge. This is a highly abstract
characterization. Recalling a few familiar examples
should clarify the point. Hume accepts that we can
never explain the regularity of nature by appeal to
a causal link, and inverts the order of explanation
by arguing that our talk about causation is to be
explained by our familiarity with regularities.
Naagaarjuna makes the same move. Wittgenstein and
Tsong Khapa grant that the ability of a community of
language users to use words in roughly the same way
cannot be explained by the private grasping by each
member of the community of the meanings of words,
and invert the order of explanation, arguing that
the possibility of an individual using a word
meaningfully is to be explained by reference to the
regularity of practices in the community. Sextus,
Hume, and Naagaarjuna argue that our conventions
regarding the identification of persons are not to
be understood as grounded in the reference of each
person's "I" to a particular enduring mental
substance; rather the talk of myself as an
individual (and of others as

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individuals) is explained by reference to our
conventions of personal individuation, conventions
that are, as Hume notes, "forensic" in character.

The second characteristic of the skeptical
inversion, as should now be obvious from this brief
survey of examples, is that an appeal to social
conventions is central to the skeptical
reconstruction of our heretofore metaphysically or
epistemologically confused discourse. In the
private-language case this is obvious. It should
also be clear in the case of personal identity and
in that of the skeptical reconstruction of morality.
Though Hume and Sextus are less explicit on this
point, Naagaarjuna, Candrakiirti, and Tsong Khapa
emphasize--and and Hume and Sextus would undoubtedly
agree--social convention is also hard at work in
skeptical reconstructions of discourse about the
existence of physical objects and causation. For the
boundaries of physical objects are not given by
nature, nor are the classes of events that count as
"of the same type" that underlie the generalizations
that vouchsafe the attributions of explanatory
significance involving words like "because." The
canonizations of sortals and of object-boundaries
drawn in space, time, and composition require social
and linguistic conventions. Tsong Khapa puts the
point this way:

...[I]n presenting "earth" and "hardness" as
referent and identity, it cannot be done by
establishing them as the discovered object of
the...analytic quest for the designative bases of
the conventional terms used for identified referent
and identity, as such things can only be presented
as existent in terms of their mutual relations....

....................................................

The Dialecticist accepts [philosophical]
analysis as analysis of something's possession or
lack of ultimate status, [asserting that] existents
are merely nominal, symbolic, and conventional.
"Mere nominality" means... the undiscoverability of
anything through investigation into the meanings of
conventional expressions, and does not mean that
names exist and things do not, or that there is
nothing which is not a name. Finally, although they
do not accept everything proposed by the verbally
ascriptive conventional intellect as conventionally
existent, neither do they accept any conventional
things somehow not posited by conventionally
ascriptive intellect. (Thurman 1984, pp. 295-296)

When the skeptic follows the custom of his or
her country and participates in its linguistic
conventions in asserting the existence of material
objects, s/he does so in the recognition that it is
these linguistic, explanatory, and allied
conventions that justify such talk, rather than as a
consequence of a belief in the givenness of objects
as independent entities or in the givenness of
sortals as naturally determined. And, in particular,
the conception objects as substances and their
properties as essential or accidental attributes
inherent in them is rejected by the skeptic as it is
by the nihilist. But the skeptic rejects this
conception with the realization--not shared by the
reificationist who is the nihilist's target--that
none of our ordinary epistemic or social practices
regarding material objects presuppose such a view
anyway.

P.294

All of this allows us to characterize more
explicitly the paradoxical skeptical recommendations
of equipoise (Sextus: "to come first of all to a
suspension of judgement and then to mental
tranquility" (Hallie, p. 33), or "'All things are
false', for example, asserts its own falsity
together with that of all other things..." (p. 36)),
or positionlessness (Tsong Khapa: "'[I]f I had any
position, then there would arise that fault for
me'...applies to whoever has a definite position,
but since I have no position there is no fault for
me" (Thurman, p. 331)). These recommendations are
often regarded as paradoxical, because they at least
appear themselves to be assertions of the kind that
the skeptic rejects, or to constitute positions of
the kind the Maahaayanist refuses to adopt. But
closer inspection should indicate that they are not
so, and Sextus' metaphor of the laxative that purges
itself together with the ill it aims at curing can
be as useful here.(9) The ills that skepticism aims
to cure are philosophical ills--specifically
metaphysical and epistemological ills characterized
by the obsessive search for epistemologically or
ontologically primitive foundations for knowledge,
meaning, explanation, or morality that undergird our
collective epistemic, linguistic, scientific, and
moral practices. The positions the skeptic is
concerned to undermine are specifically
philosophical positions.(10) They are positions
regarding the necessary or sufficient underpinnings
of what the skeptic wants to reveal as practices
that stand in need of no grounding in independent
matters of fact. The skeptic does not reject these
practices. On the contrary, Sextus recommends
exactly that we follow nature, feeling, custom, and
the instruction of the arts, and Naagaarjuna
explains that

[71] It is known in the way of the world that
"this arises in dependence on that." Such statements
are not refuted. But whatsoever arises dependently
does not exist inherently, and how can that
non-inherent existence itself have inherent
existence? In fact, that non-inherent existence must
definitely not exist inherently! (Komito, p. 95)

That is, to understand the conventional as
conventional, and as empty of any reality or
foundation beyond convention, is the goal of
philosophical inquiry. Consider this remark of Tsong
Khapa:

...[Praasa^ngika] teaching is declared for the
sake of dispelling the mental habits of reification
and repudiation that prevent access to the
ultimate-repudiation of the superficial reality of
things, and reification of the existence of things
that are supposedly permanent yet that do not exist
conventionally, and of the ultimate existence of
form, etc...as they appear. Repudiation is avoided
by the refutation of the literalness of statements
of non-production by demonstration that such
statements are made in terms of the ultimate, and
further by establishment of the need for accepting
the existence of production and cessation
conventionally. (Thurman, pp. 277-278)

The pill is skeptical inquiry. But when the poison
is purged, the inquiry is no longer necessary. The
inquiry does not involve adopting one or the other
of the disputing dogmatic positions, but rather
involves making peace by reject-

P.295

ing both--and not in favor of a third dogmatism, but
rather in favor of not seeking the chimerical
foundations that get the dispute going in the first
place.

It is this sense that all skeptical philosophers
from Sextus and the historical Buddha to
Wittgenstein and contemporary Maahaayanists have
regarded skeptical philosophy as a form of therapy:
the goal is not simply the search for truth for its
own sake, or the critical appraisal of arguments, or
intellectual entertainment. The goal is to cure the
philosopher of the confusion attendant upon the
fundamental misconceptions underlying
dogmatism--that underlying any reasonable practice
must be some set of certain propositions, and that
underlying those propositions must be some
convention-independent, ontologically given reality.
Such misconceptions engender endless sophistical
dialectic and block clear thinking about language,
explanation, morality, and ontology. The skeptic
endeavors to replace such dogmatic impediments to
understanding not with an alternative theory about
the chimerical substratum of our practices but
rather with a contentment with those practices on
their own terms, and with their conventional status.

341. That is to say, the questions that we raise
and our doubts depend on the fact that some
propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were
like hinges on which those turn.

342. That is to say, it belongs to the logic of
our scientific investigations that certain things
are in deed not doubted.

343. But it isn't that the situation is like
this: We just can't investigate everything, and for
that reason we are forced to rest content with
assumption. If I want the door to turn, the hinges
must stay put. (On Certainty)

II

All of this would be beside the point if
philosophical dogmatisms were merely diseases of a
remote past, or if they were merely benign
philosophical playthings. But dogmatisms in many
forms are alive and well, and are, in fact, wreaking
philosophical havoc. In order to recommend the
skeptical purgative, I will consider one
contemporary case of the reificationist infection
and attempt to effect a skeptical cure. The variety
of the disease I have in mind is causal
reificationism, a disease one might have thought to
have been stamped out by the Humean vaccine. But it
is still with us, and gives rise to much needless
confusion in the philosophical foundations of
cognitive science, among other places. I will
articulate its consequences in Fodor's hands, and
demonstrate that a careful skeptical analysis frees
cognitive science from artificial dogmatic
methodological bonds.

Fodor, in Psychosemantics, attempts to
demonstrate that all scientific taxonomy is
individualistic--that science never does, and must
never, identify phenomena for theoretical purposes
qua relational, because all such taxonomy is
dependent upon the causal powers of the phenomena to
be clas-

P.296

sified, and because causal powers are always local.
This claim is important and controversial, for as
many (Garfield 1988, Milikan 1987, Burge 1979, Baker
1988, and others) have argued, psychology often at
least apparently does individuate phenomena in its
domain relationally. In particular, phenomena such
as the propositional attitudes are arguably
relational and are arguably essential to much
psychological explanation.

This is also metaphysically rich stuff--the
stuff of dogmatic reificationism with respect to
causation. I will argue that while
scientific-including psychological-taxonomy must
cleave nature at causally relevant joints, there is
good empirical reason to believe that the resulting
cuts are often relational, and no good metaphysical
reason to believe that they can't be. Moreover, and
most importantly for disarming this new realism
about causation, nothing in causal individuation
requires one to discover any causal powers that
things have. Explanation does not require such an
occult metaphysics. And once we appreciate the force
of this conclusion, psychological, intentional
causal relations between naturalistically(11)
characterized relata have as much claim to reality
as any microphysical causal relations linking
individualistically characterized phenomena.

I will begin by rehearsing Fodor's argument in
some detail, explaining just how and where its
bizarre metaphysical commitments enter. Once the
argument is clearly in view, I will argue directly
for its unsoundness, and present an alternative,
more moderate skeptical account of the nature of
causation, and of the nature of causal taxonomy in
cognitive science inspired by Naagaarjuna, Sextus,
and Hume. After considering and dismissing some
possible Fodorian replies, I will conclude with some
general morals of this discussion for practice in
cognitive science.

Fodor's initial argument proceeds as follows:

(1) We want science to give causal explanations
to such things...as can be causally explained. (P.
34)

(2) Giving such explanations essentially
involves projecting and confirming causal
generalizations. And causal generalizations subsume
the things they apply to in virtue of the causal
properties of the things they apply to.(P.34)

(3) And...[consider] the property of being a
mental state a person who lives in a world where
there is XYZ rather than H2O in the puddles [as
opposed to being that of a person who lives in an
H2O world]. These sorts of differences in the
relational properties of psychological
(/brain/particle) states are irrelevant to their
causal powers; hence irrelevant to scientific
taxonomy.

....[I]f you're interested in causal
explanation, it would be mad to distinguish between
Oscar's brain states and Oscar2's; their brain
states have identical causal powers. That's why we
individuate brain states individualistically. And if
you're interested in causal explanation, it would be
mad to distinguish between Oscar's mental states and
Oscar2's; their mental states have identical causal
powers. (P. 34)

(4) So, [relational] taxonomy won't do for the
purposes of psychology. Q.E.D....It's true that when
I say "water" I get water and when my Twin says
"water" he gets XYZ. But that's irrelevant to the
question about identity of causal powers, because
these utterances (/thoughts) are being imagined to

P.297

occur in different contexts.... What is relevant to
the question of identity of causal powers is the
following pair of counterfactuals: (a) If his
utterance (/thought) had occurred in my context, it
would have had the effects that his utterance
(/thought) did have, and (b) if my utterance
(/thought) had occurred in his context it would have
had the effects that my utterance (/thought) did
have. For our utterances (/thoughts) to have the
same causal powers, both of those counterfactuals
have to be true. But both of those counterfactuals
are true....(Pp. 34-35)

Fodor then brings this all together:

So, then, to bring this all together: you can
affect the relational properties of things in all
sorts of ways--including by stipulation. But for one
thing to affect the causal powers of another, there
must be a mediating law or mechanism. It's a mystery
what this could be in the Twin (Oscar) cases; not
surprisingly, since it's surely plausible that the
only mechanisms that can mediate environmental
effects on the causal powers of mental states are
neurological. The way to avoid making this mystery
is to count the mental states--and, mutatis
mutandis, the behaviors--of Twins (Oscars) as having
the same causal powers, hence as taxonomically
identical. (P. 41)

So here's Fodor's position: we individuate
phenomena by reference to their causal powers.
Causation is local in the case of psychological
phenomena, so psychological taxonomy must be
individualistic. Individualistic psychological
taxonomy identifies psychological phenomena with
neurological phenomena. So, in order for
psychological explanations to be causal, and hence
scientific, psychological phenomena must be
individualistic in character. And this is just
because for Fodor causal explanations must carve
nature at her joints by characterizing explanans and
expiananda under sortals that capture phenomena
which in fact have genuine causal powers--the
ability to bring about effects of the right kind or
to be brought about by causes of the right
kind--powers that inhere in precisely those
phenomena.

III

No existents whatsoever are evident anywhere that
are arisen from themselves, from another, from both,
or from a non-cause. (1)
(That is, there are no sui generis phenomena, nor
any power by means of which one event or state can
bring about another. Nor can any such power be found
in any combination of phenomena or in some
non-natural arena.)

The self-nature of existents is not evident in
the conditions, etc....In the absences of
self-nature, other-nature too is not evident. (3)
(Natural phenomena have no essences independent of
their place in the network of explanatory
relationships and regularities in which they occur,
and there is no privileged ontological scheme.)

Activity is not constituted of conditions nor is
it not non-constituted of conditions. Conditions are
neither constituted nor non-constituted. (4)
(The explanatorily useful relations phenomena bear
to one another--natural regularities--are not, when
conceived clearly, due to any independently present
power. Ontology depends upon explanatory interests.)

P.298

These are conditions, because depending upon
them these others arise....(5) (Naagaarjuna,
Kaarikaa, trans. Kalupahana)

(None of this is to say that there are not natural
regularities that are usefully exploited in
scientific explanation.)

In these famous (though obscure and diversely
interpreted) opening verses of the Kaarikaa,
Naagaarjuna defends a middle way between nihilism
and strong realism with respect to causation.
Against the nihilist he urges that there are natural
regularities and that they can be and are exploited
in explanation. Against the realist--who (with
Fodor) is committed to a reification of such
regularities in a cement-of-the-universe model of
causation-he argues that natural regularities
themselves lie at the base of explanation. The use
of these regularities in explanations, Naagaarjuna
argues, neither demands nor profits by the
interposition of a force. For then cause and effect
would each need to be individually connected to that
force by....(12)

This moderate skepticism about causation--which
finds echo in Sextus and Hume and in the remarks of
Wittgenstein quoted at the beginning of this
paper--provides the key to understanding what is at
bottom wrong with Fodor's excessive causal realism.
To begin with, consider the odd pair of conclusions
concerning the predicates that are instances of is a
belief that p and the predicate is a planet: is a
planet counts, for Fodor, as a useful astronomical
predicate despite its relational character because
being a planet affects planets' causal powers,
namely, the power to bump or not into various
things. Puzzlingly, having these causal powers is
presumably supposed to be constant across
counterfactual contexts in which the nonrelational
properties of the planet are held constant--that is
what makes this predicate, in Fodor's mind,
individualistic despite being at the same time
relational. Believes that there is water on Mars,
however, unless it can be identified with a local
property of its bearer's brain--unless it is
nonrelational--fails to be individualistic, and
hence fails to count as a scientifically useful
predicate. For, as Twin-Earth examples show, when
relationally individuated, its causal powers are not
constant across counterfactual contexts.

But this putative distinction cannot be
maintained. The causal powers of Uranus are not
constant across counterfactual contexts. Consider
the world where it orbits a sun with a different
mass, or is a different distance from Neptune.
There, of course, its trajectory differs, and so,
then, does that of what it might or might not bump
into. There is no principled respect in which this
variability in powers differs from that of
inscriptions, or, if Burge, Baker, and I are right,
of individualistically described psychological
states They, too, have different causal powers in
different counterfactual circumstances. The only
difference is that in these cases, it is not the
variation of mass of nearby astronomical bodies that
issues in covariation in trajectory, but rather the
variation in social conventions and behaviorally
relevant environment that issues in covariation in
semantic character, in the conditions under which

P.299

they would be uttered, and in their probable
consequences--hence in the psychological or
linguistic type of significant tokens. And to
suggest that the descriptive vocabulary appropriate
to describing these properties and the variations
therein is ruled out a priori is groundlessly to beg
the question at issue. Why not rule out trajectory
talk? Just as the latter is essential to practice in
astrophysics, the former is essential to practice in
cognitive science.

Fodor might object at this point that in each of
these pairs of cases something is constant--the
physical counterfactual dispositions of the planets
on the one hand and of the twins on the other. And
the fact that these physical dispositions remain
constant across counterfactual contexts privileges
the physical vocabulary for scientific purposes. But
there are at least two things wrong with this reply.
First, as I noted above, it begs the question
against the claim that intentional predicates are as
appropriate to psychology as non-intentional ones
are to astronomy, and that the intentional
properties of the twins differ. Second, it betrays
an unmotivated natural essentialism. For asserting
in this context that what makes a rock the object
that it is for any and all scientific purposes are
just its individualistic properties is to plump for
a particular set of predicates as constituting a
necessary description of it, regardless of one's
descriptive or explanatory purposes. And how would
one defend such metaphysical extravagance? (A bit
later on I will consider some slightly more
sophisticated forms of this Fodorian objection.)

The source of the error has yet to be identified
and examined. And here is where Naagaarjuna's
insight can be pressed into service. Naagaarjuna
pointed out, as Hume would some sixteen centuries
later, that while regularities are to be found in
nature, and while explanation must exploit
regularities, appeal to some occult causal nexus
joining explanans to explanandum, or predecessor
event to successor event is both otiose and
ultimately incoherent. But it is this misguided,
unreflective image of such a "cement of the
universe" that holds the natural order together, and
at that in very thin mortar-joints, that underlies
causal reificationism. There are, of course, as
Naagaarjuna insists, conditions-explanatorily
necessary and/or sufficient conditions of explananda
(and moreover lots of types of them, as everybody
(except for Hempel and a few others) from Aristotle
to Pylyshyn has emphasized) . We
explain--correctly--the ignition of the match by its
striking in the presence of oxygen, my dialing 911
by reference to my desire to get help, and the
clicking on of the thermostat by reference to its
regulatory function. And explanation presupposes
both regularity and the possibility of describing
explanans and explanandum in the vocabulary in which
these regularities are properly expressed. But that
is all that is presupposed. It is no set of
individualistic facts about the individual match,
its striking, and its ignition at a particular time
that constitutes the fact that the striking caused
the ignition. Rather it is the regularity of such
successions that makes it appropriate to say that
this striking so described caused this ignition so
described.

P.300

The addition of causation or a causal power in
the "cause" or of effectual potential in the
"effect" is unwarranted, unnecessary, and
explanatorily impotent: it is unwarranted because
there can be no evidence for such a mysterious,
occult causal link. There is plenty of evidence for
the occurrences of the phenomena putatively so
linked, and in the right cases there may be plenty
of inductive or theoretical evidence for the
regularity of their association. But no such
evidence can be even relevant to some mysterious
necessity--some unknown force or glue--beyond what
can be observed or measured. Moreover, explanation
proceeds quite smoothly, as does prediction, in the
absence of any such causal glue.(13) And this is the
central point: our natural laws, functional
generalizations, structural explanations, and
narratives provide coherence and intelligibility
without interpolating causal glue or ascribing any
modal powers to the phenomena they subsume. And even
if we did add the cement, the regressive problem
would remain: what empowers causes to generate
causal power, and what enables causal power to bring
about effects?(14)

Once we replace Fodor's loose, metaphysically
luxurious talk about causal powers with more
commonsense and methodologically sound--that is to
say, skeptical--talk about explanatorily useful
regularities, the central methodological project
underwritten by this metaphysical currency
collapses. For it was the claim that causal powers
inhere in an individual object in virtue of its
particular natural type (leaving aside the
incoherence of Fodor's account of what constitutes
an appropriate natural type) that lay behind the
claim that scientific individuation must be
individualistic. And if I am right, the obscure and
unacknowledged image of causation as a kind of
immaterial superglue that can bond only adjacent
surfaces of natural kinds is what lies behind the
(undefended-presumably obvious) assertion that
causal powers are possessed only by
individualistically characterized individuals.

But such grand causal realism is incoherent.
Regularity is as real as connection gets, and
subsumability under explanatorily useful
regularities is as real as a natural kind gets. But
here is the point: there is nothing about regular
association in any of its forms that demands
spatiotemporal locality of the regularly associated
phenomena. And there is nothing, at least nothing
obvious, that blocks their relational individuation.
In a particular domain the truth or falsity of
individualism or naturalism would hence appear to be
an empirical matter. And given the irreducibility
that Fodor acknowledges to obtain generally between
the vocabularies of the "special sciences," there is
no reason to feel queasy about an individualistic
ontology in a science of the interior of, say, a
person whose behavior in situ is best explained by
subsumption under regularities captured by a
vocabulary that individuates that person's states
relationally.

This is, of course, but a case study, and its
implications must be treated with appropriate
caution. But this much, I think, emerges:
reificationism with re-

P.301

gard to causation is not philosophically benign. It
issues in a commitment a priori to an ontologically
radical and methodologically restrictive vision of
the nature of mind and of cognitive science. This
vision and its attendant strictures on the conduct
of science and the construction of theories are seen
to be gratuitous when subjected to the constructive
critical analysis suggested by skepticism with
respect to causation. Such an analysis does not
undermine the possibility of psychology or our faith
in its explanations. Rather it facilitates a more
naturalistically conceived theoretical posture in
that discipline--one that corresponds more closely
to actual practice.

IV

I can imagine discomfort with this skeptical view.
The hyperrealist metaphysics of causation I have
been attacking is indeed well entrenched. So I will
consider several plausible replies.

The reply that Fodor implicitly endorses is what
might be called "the argument from the unity of
science" or perhaps the argument from physics. It
goes something like this: The laws of the special
sciences are not properly laws at all--they are
rough generalizations that demand copious,
ineliminable ceteris paribus clauses. What underlies
their verisimilitude is the truth of closed,
exceptionless, really true laws--the laws of the
millennial physics. But the laws of physics employ
an individualistic taxonomy. So, insofar as a
special science generalization is true, it too must
employ an individualistic taxonomy. Chemistry,
physiology, and neuroscience promise reduction and
hence their own volumes in the Encyclopaedia of
Unified Science (Fodor 1991?) just because their
individuation schemes promise, when suitably
refined, to coincide with that of physics. But if
psychology recognizes naturalistically individuated
phenomena, and seeks generalizations that subsume
them, it does so at the cost of a gerrymander of the
natural world that will forever condemn it to
theoretical excommunication.

This argument has a certain nostalgic power,
but, I fear, there is not much else going for it. To
note two salient difficulties: There is no reason to
believe that explanatory utility and reducibility to
physics go hand in hand. Good economics is possible
even despite variations in media of exchange, and
good linguistics does not presuppose that larynxes,
ink, chalk, and other media of expression share any
essential physical properties. (A more sober and
careful argument for this point is to be found in
Garfield (1988) .) More significant, though, and
closer to the heart of my difficulty with Fodor's
position is this: the laws of physics--even the best
laws of the best physics--are fraught with ceteris
paribus clauses. They are not (as Cartwright (1978)
has so eloquently argued) true of any actual
physical phenomena. Nor are scientific laws meant to
be. Laws of nature are true only of ideal types, and
idealization is an ineliminable aspect of scientific
explanation--the ground of the possibility of the
universality to which they aspire. This is no less
ture of physical laws than

P.302

it is of psychological laws. So if the point of
striving for an individualistic ontology is unity
with physics, and if the point of that is the
attainment of exceptionless truth when instantiated
by actual empirical phenomena, the point is
chimerical. And the source, I suspect, of this faith
in the perfectibility of physical science is
intuition that it is onto causal powers.(15)

A closely related reply concerns forces. After
all, one might argue, physics does recognize causal
powers. In fact it recognizes at present
approximately four of them, or maybe three if the
electroweak unification is successful. And if
further unification occurs the ultimate
unification-we will have an account of the genuine
causal power, the actual cement of the universe.
This would be all well and good if physics
characterized forces as powers that physical
phenomena have, or as things that have powers over
physical phenomena. But that's just not what they
are. Forces represent dynamic relations between
physical parameters. Period. They do not inhere in
physical phenomena, nor do they exist independently
of them, and act on them. Physicists seem to have
read their Hume. Or their Naagaarjuna.(16)

A final argument can be anticipated, and this is
the one that really betrays the metaphysics that
Naagaarjuna, Hume, and Wittgenstein are concerned to
debunk: regularities are cheap. Not all of them are
explanatory. Take the regular coincidence of the
noon whistle and the noon train, for example. In
order for a regularity to be explanatory, what must
underlie it is a real causal link--the causal power
of the cause to bring about the effect. So, if there
are explanatory regularities, and not mere cosmic
coincidences, there must be causal powers. But here
is where we must recall the powerful argument from
the Tractatus with which I opened this paper. The
addition of a causal cement between cause and effect
can add nothing explanatory to an explanation. For
one would still need (as noted in the Third Man
argument offered above) an explanation of how the
cause brought about the cement, and of how the
cement brought about the effect. And as any good
mason will tell you, adding an additional loose
joint will do nothing to improve the bond. As Hume
emphasized, it is regularities that vouchsafe
individual attributions of causation, and networks
of regularities that vouchsafe particular
regulatities. Counterfactuals are supported by
confidence and success, and not by occult
metaphysics. And as the skeptic--Buddhist or
European--will be quick to emphasize, this amounts
to the adoption of positionlessness as a guilding
principle in the interpretation of scientific
theories. We neither assert the existence of occult
causal powers, nor do we deny the explanatory
utility of our theories in virtue of their
absence.(17)

Someone might well object at this point that any
claim of skeptical cure is at least premature. For,
it might be argued. the skeptic has not demonstrated
that his/her account of causal discourse as grounded
in regularity is devoid of metaphysical commitment.
For one thing, the account so far is sketchy, and it
might well turn out to involve non-obvious
metaphysical commitments as it is

P.303

elaborated. And doesn't the skeptic owe us some
account of why the practice of exploiting
regularities in nature for the purposes of
explanation is itself justified? There is a point to
this objection, and the skeptical response
illuminates the structure of the enterprise. It may
indeed be that the skeptic unwittingly dogmatizes.
But if s/he does, that fact will emerge and be
treatable by subsequent skeptical therapy. Skeptical
analysis may be interminable analysis. But that does
not undermine its utility. (On the other hand, of
course, it might well be--as it appears in this
case--that the skeptic does not dogmatize, in which
case the therapy is short-term.) And
practices--including the broadest explanatory
practices--are subject to criticism, and can often
be justified or shown to be unjustified. But the
justification of a practice does not necessarily
consist in producing a set of true or indubitable
sentences about the way the world is upon whose
truth or certainty the practice rests. The
justification of practices can often be simply
pragmatic. They work; or that's the way we do
things--if one wants to engage in this enterprise,
one does it this way. Scientific explanation, and
the identification of causes may be like that. So it
in no way follows from the inability of the skeptic
to produce decisive arguments for the truth of
competing theories concerning causation, the nature
of the physical world, or of the self, that the
enterprise is bankrupt. The activity of producing
such theories is just what the skeptic wants us to
abandon. And if the skeptic is guilty of
dogmatizing, that only shows that more analysis is
required.

V

I conclude by drawing attention to the several
skeptical morals of these discussions for
metaphysics and method in science. None of these
conclusions is new, but since all are called into
question by what I think is a very popular dogmatic
causal hyperrealism, it is worth repeating them in
one place.

First, while it is certainly true that
scientific taxonomy--including both those of physics
and psychology--individuates phenomena in response
to the demands of explanation, this does not in any
way entail individualism. For, when stripped of
incoherent and otiose metaphysical baggage, all that
the phrase "causal powers" could ever indicate is
explanatorily useful relations. And there is no good
reason, once this rich metaphysics of causation is
abandoned, to believe that such relations always
comprise individualistically characterized relata.
Moreover, the claim that the relational categories
of physical science are somehow more individualistic
than those of the special sciences, for example,
cognitive science, is false. Naturalism is hence not
simply a hall-mark of special science, let alone
immature cognitive science.

Second, reducibility to a more fundamental, or
to a physical science--in particular reduction by
demonstrating a token-identity relation between
phenomena respected by the respective taxonomies of
reduced and reducing science--is no prerequisite of
respectability for cognitive sciences, or, for that

P.304

matter, of any science. The ground for the belief
that it is is a belief in the special insight of
physics into occult causal powers. But this belief
is groundless, or at best is grounded on a mistaken
mythology of the peculiar perfection of physical
laws and a failure to recognize the central and
universal role of idealization and ceteris paribus
instantiation of ideal types in scientific
explanation.

Third, a unitary, broadly physicalistic ontology
is compatible with ontological pluralism at the
level of the taxonomy of nature, and does not entail
the unity of science, or even the unity of good
science. One does not need to be some kind of
Cartesian substance-pluralist to endorse the
disunity of science.

Finally, and most importantly, the philosophy of
science can do without any rich metaphysics of
causation or causal powers. The superstition that,
in order for an ontology to grip nature by the
throat so as to carve her at the joints, it must
first discover real relations between phenomena
underwritten by causal powers as opposed to "mere"
natural regularities is just that--a superstition.
Explanatory regularities and the taxonomies they
induce are plenty real enough--they are as real as
it gets.

Moreover, I should emphasize that I have
presented but a single case history. If the general
thrust of the initial portion of my discussion is
correct, there is an epidemic to be addressed, and
many of us are victims. This is but one example of
the cure that can be wrought by skeptical analysis.
The cure may be difficult, and it may leave many of
us profoundly dissatisfied with what we now take to
be the goals and nature of philosophy, and with many
of our own positions and arguments. Fortunately,
however, skeptical medicine has one salient side
effect: it is good philosophical fun. I hope that
this provides encouragement for the view that the
appropriate response to the skeptic is not to search
for a reply but to take one's medicine and wake up
to regularity.

NOTES

1. From here on, for the sake of brevity, I use
the term "Buddhists" to refer specifically to the
Praasa^ngika-Maadhyamika school of Mahaayaana
Buddhism. Those persons with whose work I will
primarily be concerned are Naagaarjuna,
Candrakiirti, and Tsong Khapa, all major figures of
this school. Many of the arguments and the specific
tenets I will discuss would not necessarily be
endorsed or understood in the same way by
philosophers in other schools of Buddhism.

2. Wittgenstein, of course, frequently denies
that he is a skeptic: "Scepticism is not
irrefutable, but obvious nonsense..." (Notebooks
1914-1916 p. 44). But I would argue that the
position Wittgenstein denotes by "scepticism" is
what I am calling here "nihilism." The type of
response Wittgenstein repeatedly offers to the
skeptical problems posed by nihilistic arguments is
characteristically skeptical.

3. At least as the Yogaacaara are interpreted by
Candrakiirti and Tsong Khapa. But the Praasa^ngika
accounts of Yogaacaara may well be uncharitable, and
the idealism imputed to them and attacked by the
Praasa^ngika may well be more extreme than any
position the Yogaacaara philosophers actually
espouse. I take no position here on the correct
resolution of the attendant hermeneutical disputes.
In a similar vein, it may well be that a correct
reading of Berkeley would

P.305

recognize his idealism as more Kantian and
transcendental than that "dogmatic idealism" Kant
and most others impute to him. But these questions
of interpretation, too, are beyond the scope of this
discussion.

4. Note that here I am lumping together
ontological and epistemological claims. This is not
to suggest that the rejection of the existence of
the external world is the same as the rejection of
knowledge of the external world. It is merely to
remind us of the fact that historically the route to
nihilistic ontological claims has often been through
the assessment of the objects of putative knowledge.

5. There are real philosophical and interpretive
problems regarding my interpretation of Naagaarjuna
as indicating by "material form" something akin to
what Hume disparages as "material substance." This
is not the place to defend this interpretation in
detail, and in fact there are important differences
between the ways substance and material form figure
in their respective ontological positions. But these
differences do not undermine the central claim that
in the context of disputes concerning the reality
and status of the material world, their respective
conceptual roles are importantly analogous. It also
should be noted in this context that Naagaarjuna in
the stanzas just quoted and elsewhere in his corpus
discusses the emptiness of material form as a single
central example of the emptiness of Phenomena quite
generally. But again, this rhetorical role of the
discussion of form leaves the comparative point
undisturbed.

6. My reading of Naagaarjuna's distinction
between causes and conditions, and the account of
causation and explanation I attribute to him is, I
know, controversial; and Naagaarjuna's remarks on
these topics are cryptic enough to sustain a number
of plausible competing interpretations. The view I
attribute to Naagaarjuna (developed in more detail
below), however, renders his account of causation,
of the conditions, of the nature of explanation in
the world of samsara, and of the ultimately empty
nature of causation both compelling and remarkably
similar in form to his more explicitly articulated
views concerning the nature of self, of action, and
of form. I acknowledge the somewhat tendentious
character of the reading, and the fact that it is
hard to see these theses explicitly asserted in the
texts, but I stand by the cogency of the
interpretation.

7. The Praasa^ngika conception of suspension is
very much the same. Compare with the discussion of
nonduality in Book 9 of the Vimalakiirti
suutra(Thurman 1976).

8. There is hence a similarity here to
Strawson's account of refusing to assert either that
the present king of France is bald or that he is not
bald, in virtue of rejecting the common
presupposition that the two alternatives share--the
existence of a present king of France.

9. This metaphor also appears in the Buddhist
literature, both in the early suutras and in the
later Mahaayaana literature. Candrakiirti quotes the
Ratnakuu.ta suutra:

One for whom, in turn, the absence of being itself
becomes a dogmatic view I call Incurable. It is,
Kaa`syapa, as if a sick man were given a medicine by
a doctor, but that medicine, having removed his
ills, was not itself expelled, but remained in the
stomach. What do you think, Kaa`syapa, will this man
be freed of his sickness? No indeed, illustrious
one, the sickness of this man in whose stomach the
medicine, having removed all his ills remains and is
not expelled, would be more violent. The illustrious
one said: In this sense, Kaa`syapa, the absence of
being is the exhaustion of all dogmatic views. But
the one for whom the absence of being itself becomes
a fixed belief, I call incurable.

10. In fact, this point is rather complicated.
For while, as Tsong Khapa argues, nihilism really is
a philosopher's view--one to which the vulgar are
not readily susceptible (Berkeley, to the contrary,
notwithstanding) -reificationism comes in two
versions. We might call these, with Tsong Khapa,
"ordinary" and "philosophical." For arguably the
person-on-the street-thinks of the physical as
substantial, thinks of causation as a real force,
thinks of personal identity as grounded in a soul,
and so forth. But these views are probably in the
typical case rather inchoate. Philosophical
reificationism can be seen as a careful conceptual
refinement of this fallacy of everyday metaphysics.
It is the job of the skeptic to cure both the
ordinary and the sophisticated forms of the disease.
The relative prevalance of reificationism as opposed
to nihilism in the streets probably also lies behind
the common confusion of skepticism with nihilism.
For given this reificationist epidemic, the
arguments the skeptic must most often muster are
quasi-nihilistic in character, so as most
effectively to undermine that dogma.

11. I use the term "naturalistic" to denote
relational, or nonindividualistic properties or
predicates. The relations in question may be either
intentional or nonintentional. The contrast is with

P.306

individualistic properties or predicates--those
which apply to their subjects irrespective of any
relations they may bear to other things.

12. Again, I emphasize that this interpretation
of Naagaarjuna on causation and explanation is not
definitive, and the extension of his expressed views
on ordinary explanation to a theory of scientific
explanation must be regarded as highly tendentious.

13. Fodor never comes completely clean in
expressing his commitment to this "cement of the
universe" picture of causation. The view, however,
emerges quite clearly both from the passages I have
quoted above and others such as this: "Effects on
causal powers require mediation by laws and/or
mechanisms, and in the Twin cases there are no such
mechanisms and no such laws.

"If you are inclined to doubt this, notice that
for any causal relation that holds between my mental
states and the local water puddles, there must be a
corresponding relation that holds between my
neurological states and the local water puddles..."
(157, n. 6 to p. 39).

And consider, "...[Y]ou can't affect the causal
powers of a person's mental states without affecting
his physiology" (p. 39).

But even without an explicit endorsement of this
view (a view which even Fodor might acknowledge
sounds crazy when explicitly stated) we can note
that Fodor is committed to it inasmuch as, without
it, there is no way to begin to make the strong
locality argument about causation, or to draw the
distinctions between genuine and ersatz causal
relations Fodor is after.

14. This is, of course, a causal version of the
"third man" argument.

15. Note, however, that the question regarding
whether or not there are exceptionless natural laws
(whatever account one gives of what a natural law
is) is independent both of the question regarding
individualism in the philosophy of science generally
and that regarding individualism in psychology.

16. There is, as Lee Bowie has noted, another
account of what physicists do: they posit particles
as bearers of forces. But this is no comfort for the
Fodorian causal realist. For the behavior of these
particles, and the nature of their interactions with
other fundamental particles are again characterized
by more-or-less exceptionless regularities, and not
by reference to the bonding powers of ghostly
subatomic superglue.

17. Dick Garner and an anonymous reviewer each
raise the following objections at this point:
Sextus, they argue, is more circumspect regarding
causal powers than I suggest, and in fact, they
argue, I am downright dogmatic about causal powers
in insisting on their superfluity in scientific
explanation. For, they point out, in Sextus' chapter
in the Outlines of Pyrrhonism on causation, he
provides arguments both in support of the hypothesis
that there are causes, and in support of the
hypothesis that nothing causes anything, concluding
"From this, then, we conclude finally that if
plausibility attaches both to the arguments...[for
and against the plausibility of the existence of
causes] we must necessarily suspend judgement
regarding the existence of cause..." (Hallie, p.
116).

Admittedly, this is a strong exegetical case.
But things are not so simple. Careful attention to
the differences between the arguments in support of
the causal hypothesis and those against it reveals
an important methodological insight. The arguments
for the existence of causation (ibid., p. 113) all
hinge on one of two observations--the existence of
natural regularities and our ability to exploit
these regularities in explanation and prediction.
None of these arguments or observations is called
into question in the succeeding discussion. The
arguments against the causal hypothesis all hinge
either upon the conceptual connection between cause
and effect or on the lack of evidence for the
existence of any tertium quid between putative cause
and putative effect. And each presupposes the
relativity and explanatory utility of putative
causes and putative effects, denying only the
efficacy or occult link between them. And none of
these arguments is called into question. When the
two sides are put together carefully, we have an
argument for the lack of any necessity to assert the
existence of occult powers in order to vouchsafe the
explanatory utility of regularities.

Moreover, there is nothing dogmatic about this
position. What is at issue is the existence of
causal powers. Neither Sextus nor I either assert or
deny their existence. What we both deny is the need
to posit them, and the view that they have any
explanatory force. We suspend--as pointless--any
judgment regarding them. But while doing so, we can
accept the very scientific and explanatory practices
the dogmatist thinks require the existence of causal
powers.

P.307

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