Dennetrida

R. Scott Smith takes aim at the fact-value dichotomy in In Search of Moral Knowledge. Along the way, he argues that naturalist materialism makes knowledge of reality impossible. David Dennett is his main target, but he does a nice little jiu-jitsu move that leaves Dennett indistinguishable from Jacques Derrida:

“Derrida draws the more consistent conclusion than Dennett seems willing to do, once we acknowledge that there are only takings/interpretations and no givens. Derrida realizes that if there are no givens . . . nothing is ever directly present (immediately) before us, and this entails that everything is interpretation, all the way down. Dennett, however, wants to privilege his own particular story, with its realist elements, as the objective truth about reality, but his own views end up being (at best) just another interpretation, and one that cannot give us the objective truth of the matter. At worst, Dennett’s views cannot even give us interpretations of reality, for he denies the existence of what is needed to even begin to access reality” (152).

Thus the possibility of knowledge itself becomes an argument against naturalism: It is “intrinsic to naturalism” that knowledge is impossible, but we can and do know things. Therefore, “naturalism is false” (153).

It’s a neat little move, and it works on Dennett. But I’m not sure it works on theistic versions of “interpretation-all-the-way-down,” such as the pragmatism of James K.A. Smith. Why should our access to the world be “immediate” for it to be secure? Scott Smith makes a lot of the importance of essences, but they seem to function only as a limiting concept designed to provide some necessary bedrock for reality. Do we know the “essence” of an apple? Or do we know apples?