Abstract
Subject Naturalism is a pragmatist approach to naturalism; naturalism being an attempt to articulate how scientific inquiry and philosophy relate to the world. There are certain varieties of naturalism – those that Price calls ‘Object Naturalism’ (Price 2011:185) –that take that which we acquire from science to be the measure of either all that we legitimately know, or indeed all that there is (2011:185). Price sees those approaches belonging to this family of naturalism as not only unable to account for a variety of issues in metaphysics, but indeed are the source of many of these issues. His suggestion is that we ought to adopt Subject Naturalism instead, which claims that philosophy ought “to begin with what science tells us about ourselves.” (2011:186) The project here is to explore precisely what this could mean. Subject Naturalism looks to be related to forms of liberal naturalism, insofar as it aims to save certain parts of how we tend to talk of ourselves as subjects (Shapiro 2022:152), but what exactly does the subject look like in this account? I will attempt to flesh out an answer to this question by examining Sellars’ account of subjectivity, as both the Sellarsian approach to naturalism and its’ account of language both heavily informed Price in the development of Subject Naturalism. I will contrast this view with a synthesized pragmatic-hermeneutic account of subjectivity, one that I see in the work of McDowell (and which is informed by Gadamer). McDowell’s liberal naturalism will serve as a foil by which we can see precisely what sorts of questions need to be answered when asked what subjectivity is, and measure how well our own account does this. This will allow for a fair way to show the distinctiveness of the account expounded here and show precisely what it means to say that an account of subjectivity is restricted by ‘what science tells us’.