1. Three Varieties of Scientific Naturalism

The particular variety of scientific naturalism at issue depends on the way that science is construed. The most stringent variety of naturalism that I know of construes science to be microphysics. On this view, the deliverances of microphysics exhaust reality. Ontologically speaking, there is nothing but what is recognized by microphysics; all else is illusion. I'll call this form ‘eliminative naturalism’. A second variety of naturalism is broader; it holds that there are higher-level sciences in addition to microphysics – chemistry, biology, psychology, the social sciences – but that they are all reducible to microphysics. I'll call this form ‘reductive naturalism’.

The most relaxed scientific naturalistic view construes science to include – not just physics and what is reducible to it – but all the natural, psychological and social sciences. This variety takes the sciences to have laws that are not reducible to lower-level laws. I'll call this third form of scientific naturalism ‘nonreductive naturalism’. I'll consider these in turn. (All three of these are forms of scientific naturalism, but to avoid tedium, I'll omit the term ‘scientific’ in discussing them.) First, and very briefly, turn to the narrowest form of naturalism, eliminative naturalism.

Eliminative Naturalism: This ultra-stringent form of naturalism takes nature (or reality) to be nothing but the point-sized entities and laws recognized by microphysics. All properties and larger entities are thought to reduce to local microphysical properties and entities, and the putative higher-level entities and properties are reducible to the microphysical – according to eliminative naturalism, they are eliminable from a complete ontology. Ontology includes no organisms or what J. L. Austin called ‘medium-sized dry goods’. I'll sketch out Alex Rosenberg's somewhat popularized eliminative view here; a more sophisticated eliminative view may be found in Everything Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized. Footnote ³

You might suppose that physics is no longer the hegemonic science, that evolutionary biology has caught up with physics. But according to Alex Rosenberg, Darwin's famous discovery of blind variation and natural selection is just ‘the foresightless play of fermions and bosons producing, in us conspiracy theorists, the illusion of purpose’.Footnote ⁴

The ‘thermodynamic noise among the molecules present on the Earth about three billion years ago every so often randomly produced molecules that combined stability with replication, the first sliver of an adaptation, produced from zero adaptation’.Footnote ⁵ The process of piling on adaptations upon adaptations is temporally asymmetrical, driven by the second law of thermodynamics – the law that entropy increases almost everywhere almost all the time. Repeat the process of thermodynamically random variations enough times ‘and the rest is history – natural history. That's how physics fakes design.’Footnote ⁶

Moreover, since the second law of thermodynamics is the only law that has a direction (from earlier to later), according to Rosenberg, physics shows that Darwin's mechanism, is the only one that could drive adaptational evolution in a universe like ours. ‘If the 2d law makes Darwinian natural selection inevitable, then the notion that Darwinian natural selection naturalizes purpose has to be surrendered’ – not just in biology, but tout court, even ‘in the sciences of man’.Footnote ⁷ So, Darwin did not just naturalize purpose, Rosenberg says, he annihilated it.Footnote ⁸

Since, ontologically speaking, eliminative naturalism disavows everything but the laws and entities recognized by microphysics, there is a single way around any of life's questions about values, meaning, love or purpose: the questions make no sense because they have false presuppositions. Values, meaning, love, and purpose are illusions. Physics has ruled them out.

Unsurprisingly, eliminative naturalism leaves us with pervasive nihilism. Rosenberg says, ‘Science has to be nihilistic about ethics and morality… There are no moral facts, or right morality, just adaptations.’Footnote ⁹ Moreover, on Rosenberg's view, there is no more to mind than what is discovered by neuroscience (which is replaceable by physics). Rosenberg warns that introspection misleads us into supposing that we represent facts about the world in our brains, perhaps in a language of thought; but in fact, Rosenberg says, neuroscience has disproved any such thing.Footnote ^{10 ,} Footnote ¹¹

Rosenberg offers what is, in effect, an error theory about everyday life. He says that our ‘plans, projects, purposes, plots, stories, narratives and the other ways we organize our lives and explain ourselves to others and ourselves’ – indeed, everything that requires intentionality – are all illusions.

Rosenberg does not tell us how it is even possible that we could ever think that we were planning a picnic or writing a narrative if plans and narratives are illusions. Illusions paradigmatically are episodes of thinking that things are one way when they are really some other way. If there were no intentionality, you could not direct your thoughts toward anything at all – you could never think, even mistakenly, that things are one way rather than another. How could there be any illusions if there were no intentionality?

I want to leave eliminative naturalism with a challenge to its advocates: If nature extends no further than bosons and fermions and the like, advocates of eliminative naturalism should tell us (in terms of bosons and fermions, the laws of microphysics, etc.) how such illusions are even possible. An error theory should show us, with only the resources of microphysics in its eliminativist arsenal, how we ever could have made such an error, or indeed, how we could have language at all.Footnote ¹² What is it about bosons and fermions and the like that can give rise to all these illusions? Eliminative naturalists give us no clue. Now, let's turn to reductive naturalism.

Reductive Naturalism: Reductive naturalism aims to show how ‘higher-level’ items (theory, property, entity, law) may be replaced by ‘lower-level’ items (theory, property, entity, law), where the lower-level items are privileged by being ‘closer’ to physics. For example, when heat is identified with the motion of molecules, the property of being heat is reduced to the property of being motion of molecules, where the property of being motion of molecules is a property found in physics. A reductive naturalist, like John Searle, holds that here is just one world, and that is the world of physics and chemistry.Footnote ¹³ ‘We know independently’, says Searle, ‘that the world consists entirely of physical particles in fields of force…'.Footnote ¹⁴ So Searle's ultimate ontology is physicalistic: it comprises only entities, properties, and what have you that are recognized by physics. Nevertheless, Searle also endorses what he calls ‘social ontology’. Overlooking the ambiguity of the term ‘derived’ (is it explicative or ampliative?), I think that it is fair to say that on Searle's view, everything that genuinely exists either is recognized by physics or is reducible to items recognized by physics.Footnote ¹⁵ [I believe that physicalistic ontology logically precludes social items as such from ontology, but I can't discuss that point here.] Another example of a reductive naturalist is David Papineau, who takes all causally efficacious macroproperties to be reducible to properties of physics.Footnote ¹⁶ Now, let's turn to nonreductive naturalism.

Nonreductive Naturalism: Nonreductive naturalism is the least stringent variety of scientific naturalism: it affirms that there are genuine properties, appealed to by one or more of the sciences, that do not reduce to local microphysical properties.Footnote ¹⁷ I'll consider the views of Hilary Kornblith, a noted nonreductive naturalist.

Nonreductive naturalists are open to pluralism about the sciences and hence to pluralism about ontology. Kornblith includes biological, psychological, social and historical sciences among the successful sciences, whether they are reducible to physics or not. He rejects the idea that physics is the sole determinant of what there is; the suggestion that physics is the sole determinant is not derived from science itself, and, says Kornblith, the naturalist should not appeal to extrascientific restrictions like limiting ontology to the ontology of physics.Footnote ¹⁸ However, Kornblith says that the history of the cognitive sciences over the last fifty years seems ‘to show very clearly that the phenomenology of mental processes is not even roughly reliable in producing an understanding of the mechanisms which actually operate’.Footnote ¹⁹ Note that, according to Kornblith, what is really going on when you, say, decide to paint a landscape are the operations of mechanisms – which can be understood without appeal to painting or landscapes.

Although nonreductive naturalism is much broader in its outlook than its eliminative and reductive cousins, it still limits nature to what is disclosed by one or more of the sciences. ‘For the naturalist’, as Kornblith says, ‘there is simply no extrascientific route to metaphysical understanding’.Footnote ²⁰ The view of nature presupposed is that all reality is in the purview of science, that everyday life can be exhaustively understood in terms of scientific theories. Quotidian events – like making a selection from the dessert tray, or looking for lost car keys, or accepting an invitation, etc. – must be understood in terms of ‘mechanisms that actually operate’, and not in terms of what we think that we are doing. Science itself becomes a closure principle on reality.

2. How Scientific Naturalists Conceive of Nature

One thing that seems agreed on by naturalists is that nature is wholly objective. This is so because science is wholly objective. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ‘Scientific objectivity is a characteristic of scientific claims, methods and results. It expresses the idea that the claims, methods and results of science are not, or should not be, influenced by particular perspectives, value commitments, community bias or personal interests, to name a few relevant factors. Objectivity is often considered as an ideal for scientific inquiry, as a good reason for valuing scientific knowledge, and as the basis of the authority of science in society’.Footnote ²¹ That is to say, science is nonpersonal, and without any perspective. It is, in Thomas Nagel's memorable phrase, ‘the view from nowhere’.Footnote ²²

Daniel Dennett, for example, holds that any theory of first-person phenomena ‘will have to be constructed from the third-person point of view, since all science is constructed from that perspective’.Footnote ²³ Dennett has an old piece on the internet called ‘The Fantasy of First-Person Science’. Conventional wisdom agrees: First-person phenomena must be eliminated or reduced to third-person phenomena. There are no genuine first-person phenomena in nature, and hence none in reality. So, a scientific naturalist must get rid of the appearance that there are irreducible first-person phenomena.Footnote ²⁴ Indeed, in his attempt to explain consciousness, Dennett's first step is what he calls ‘heterophenomenology’, which paraphrases a subject's first-person expressions as third-person reports of the subject's experience, thus leaving no place in science for anything first-personal.Footnote ²⁵ If nature is exhausted by science, as scientific naturalism claims, then ‘no place in science’ implies ‘no place in nature’, which it turn implies ‘no place in reality’.

I want to argue, on the contrary, that nature, and hence reality, has a personal aspect that is irreducible and ineliminable. There are genuine first-person items – indeed, first-person properties – that belong in ontology. If so, then the conception of nature presupposed by scientific naturalism is faulty, and hence scientific naturalism is incorrect.

Here's an Argument Against Scientific Naturalism. I'll use the word ‘items’ as a generic term that applies to anything that exists – entities, properties, kinds, aspects, or elements.

Argument Against Scientific Naturalism

1. (1) All science is objective, nonpersonal: There are no first-personal items in any scientific ontology. That is, science does not recognize first-personal phenomena in nature.Footnote ²⁶

2. (2) If first-personal phenomena are neither eliminable nor reducible to naturalistically acceptable properties, then there are genuine first-personal phenomena in nature. (Argument by Elimination)

3. (3) First-personal phenomena are neither eliminable nor reducible to naturalistically acceptable phenomena. (to be argued for at length)

4. (4) There are genuine first-personal phenomena in nature. (2,3 MP)

5. (5) If (1) & (4), then scientific naturalism is false. (construal of scientific naturalism)

6. (6) Scientific naturalism is false.

Line (1): Insofar as sciences treat first-personal phenomena at all, they treat them as only pragmatic or epistemic, not ontological, and they get bleached out by science to reveal scientifically-acceptable mechanisms and other third-personal features. That is to say, reality, as science reveals it, is wholly objective. Hence, line (1).

Line (2) is supported by the idea is that if we cannot eliminate first-personal phenomena altogether, and we cannot make them naturalistically acceptable, then there is nothing else that they can be but genuine first-personal items. We can turn this idea into an argument. Naturalism is either true or false. If true, then all genuinely real items are either eliminable or reducible to naturalistically acceptable properties. If false, then some genuinely real items are not eliminable or reducible to naturalistically acceptable properties. If some genuinely real items are not eliminable or reducible to naturalistically acceptable properties, then these items are in nature, but outside the purview of naturalism. So, line (2).

The heart of the argument is line (3): Many first-personal items are neither eliminable nor reducible to naturalistically acceptable phenomena. I'll argue for line (3), first by showing that certain first-personal items cannot be eliminated from nature without loss, then by arguing against reducing first-personal items in some naturalistically acceptable way.

Line (4) is just an intermediate conclusion. Line (5) is supported by the construal of scientific naturalism as recognizing all and only the properties that are in nature. So, the weight of the argument rests on line (3).

3. Argument Against Eliminating First-Personal Items

My utterance, ‘I am a member of the club’ may be considered just a linguistic variation of ‘LB is a member of the club’. Both utterances have the same truth conditions: There is no difference in reality between ‘I am a member of the club’ said by LB, and ‘LB is a member of the club’, said by anybody.

That may be, I would respond. But suppose that, instead of saying, ‘I am a member of the club’, I had said, ‘I'm glad that I am a member of the club’. The first occurrence of ‘I’ in the sentence ‘I'm glad that I am a member of the club’ is the familiar indexical, for which any co-referring word – such as ‘LB’ – may be substituted without loss or change of meaning. But the second occurrence of ‘I’ is not just an indexical for which ‘LB’ may be substituted without loss or change of meaning. The second occurrence of ‘I’ also refers to the speaker, but not transparently; it refers to the speaker-conceived-of-as-herself, in the first person. (My point here is an extension of what Hector-Neri Castañeda dubbed ‘quasi-indexicals’.Footnote ²⁷ ) Moreover, the second occurrence of ‘I’ expresses a self-concept which is satisfied only by the speaker. A self-concept expresses a dispositional property – a capacity to think of oneself as oneself in the first person.Footnote ²⁸

We can mark the difference between the ‘I’ used as an indexical, and the ‘I’ that expresses a self-concept, by flagging the ‘I’ that expresses a self-concept with an asterisk, pronounced ‘I-star’. Both occurrences of the ‘I’ and the ‘I*’ refer to the same person – the speaker or thinker, the whole embodied person (not to a self, or a soul, or a mind); although they co-refer, the indexical ‘I’ is transparent and the ‘I*’ is not. ‘I’ and ‘I*’ have different linguistic roles: ‘I’ directly refers to the speaker or thinker; ‘I*’ refers to the speaker by means of a self-concept, the vehicle by which the speaker or thinker conceives of herself as herself. The difference between ‘I’ and ‘I*’ captures the difference between making a first-person reference (by direct reference) and attributing a first-person reference to oneself (by means of a self-concept). The ‘I*’ attributes a first-person reference to the speaker or thinker. An I*-utterance is an utterance of a first-personal psychological or linguistic sentence with a first-person reference in the ‘that’-clause – for example, ‘I am glad that I (I*) am a member of the club’. I call this capacity to conceive of oneself as oneself in the first-person the ‘robust first-person perspective’. Use of a self-concept insures that the speaker or thinker has a robust first-person perspective.

Someone may suppose that we would not need any ‘I*’ if we eliminated ‘I’. There is a fairly longstanding line of thought that the use of ‘I’ is eliminable, at least in soliloquy.Footnote ²⁹ For example, Peter Geach said that the use of ‘I’ in ‘soliloquies… is redundant and has no special reference; “I am very puzzled at this problem” really says no more than “This problem is puzzling.”’Footnote ³⁰ And Moritz Schlick attributed to Lichtenberg the view that ‘Descartes had no right to start his philosophy with the proposition “I think”, instead of saying, “it thinks”.’Footnote ³¹ Similarly, Russell said that Descartes's ‘I think’ could be paraphrased as ‘there is thinking’.Footnote ³² Perhaps so, but ‘I regret that I* find this problem puzzling’ cannot be adequately paraphrased without first-person reference.

To suppose that eliminating ‘I’ would eliminate the robust first-person perspective is a pipedream. Whether or not ‘I’ is eliminable in simple first-person sentences, ‘I*’ is not eliminable from I* sentences. ‘I'm glad that I am a member of the club’ is not equivalent to ‘I'm glad that LB is a member of the club’. Either may be true when the other is false. If I had amnesia, I may still be glad that I am a member of the club, without being glad that LB is a member of the club. Alternatively, having read about LB as, say, someone who is an ideal club member, I could be glad that LB is a member of the club without being glad that I am. So, we would still need the first-personal ‘I*’. The robust first-person perspective is essential to what you were saying or thinking.

Consider how pervasive the robust first-person perspective is in human life. One central feature of our lives is that we perform actions like signing contracts, pledging allegiance to the flag, making marriage vows, swearing to tell the truth, making commitments.

If you make a promise by saying, ‘I promise that I will stay with you to the end’, you have performed an act that commits you to certain kinds of future behavior. Your utterance cannot be considered as a wholly indexical utterance, with two occurrences of the indexical, ‘I’, which can be replaced by any non-first-personal codesignator. If I were the speaker, the second occurrence of the first-person pronoun, the ‘I*’, could not be replaced by my initials, ‘LB’, or by any other non-first-person designator of me, without changing what I had done. The ‘I*’ is essential to what I had done, to the act that I had performed. For this utterance to commit me for the future, for it to be my promise, I have to be willing to assent to ‘I promise that I* will stay with you to the end’. No non-first-person utterance – like ‘LB promises that LB will stay with you to the end’ – could be my promise or my vow. In short, a promise manifests a robust first-person perspective that has genuine effects in the world.

If first-person phenomena were not manifested in nature, there would be many fewer kinds of actions and events in reality than we actually have. To take some random examples, volunteering for a suicide mission, suing the landlord to retrieve one's property, changing one's mind, knowing exactly what one is doing – the list of actions and attitudes that presuppose the robust first-person perspective is endless. So, I do not think that naturalists can vindicate a non-personal conception of nature by eliminating first-person elements. Moreover, a third-person account of I*-phenomena (perhaps in terms of neural mechanisms) would be tantamount to eliminating such phenomena.

Someone may object: ‘Science can account for all these things in terms of, e.g. neural mechanisms. So science does not leave them out.’ I reply: This is a nonstarter. Neural mechanisms, whatever their causal role, are not first-person perspectives; nor is an account in terms of neural mechanisms an account of a robust first-person perspective: A neural mechanism is located in the brain, but a robust first-person perspective is a dispositional property of a whole person. It would be impossible for a person in a world without civil suits, landlords or property to sue the landlord to retrieve her property, no matter what neural mechanisms she may have. Whether or not a dispositional property – like a robust first-person perspective – can be manifested in a certain way depends in part on what world you are in, not just on neural mechanisms.Footnote ³³

Since reality would not be what it is without the robust first-person perspective, first-person items cannot be eliminated from nature without loss. On my view, the robust first-person perspective expresses the second stage of a two-stage dispositional first-personal property – the disposition to conceive of oneself as oneself in the first person. Elimination of that first-person dispositional property would render the ontology incomplete.Footnote ³⁴

To cement the claim that first-person items are indispensable to reality in its fullness, let's turn to two attempts to reduce first-person phenomena to non-first person phenomena that are naturalistically acceptable.

4. Arguments Against Reducing First-Personal Items

First, consider John Perry's famous case of the messy shopper, who – unbeknownest to himself – is leaking sugar from his basket in the grocery store. Perry imagines following the messy shopper's trail until it dawns on him that he – he himself in the first person – is the messy shopper, and that realization changes his behavior to cleaning up his mess.

Perry, who claims to have an entirely non-first-personal ontology, explains the situation by saying that the messy shopper had two unlinked notions of himself – his self-notion (a pragmatic/epistemic concept) and his messy-shopper notion. He changed his behavior when the two notions of himself became linked; however, Perry offers no non-first-person account of how they became linked. On the contrary, Perry presuppposes a first-person perspective when he explains the linkage between the messy-shopper's two notions of himself: Perry says that before the messy shopper can use his objective information about himself, the messy shopper needs ‘to recognize [himself], to associate the information with [his] self-notion’.Footnote ³⁵ Perry does not show us how recognizing oneself and associating the information with one's self-notion can be anything but irreducibly first-personal.

Not only does Perry not give an objective account of how self-notions and third-person notions become linked, but also, on his view, self-notions tell us nothing about reality: they have only a pragmatic/epistemic role in how one obtains information; the information so obtained has no first-person ontological significance. We shouldn't be misled by Perry's calling the messy-shopper phenomenon a case of an ‘essential indexical’.Footnote ³⁶ On his view, ‘all facts are objective facts’.Footnote ³⁷ In short, on Perry's view, the significance of the first-person for psychological explanations is not ontological, but is only ‘epistemic/pragmatic’. It comes out in the ontological wash of science.

Second, consider David Lewis's analysis of de se belief as self-ascription. Lewis aims at a wholly third-personal ontology, and so provides an account of objects of belief that is to account for I*-beliefs. On his view, the objects of belief are not propositions but properties. To have a belief is to self-ascribe a property. For example, to believe that many people live in the US is to self-ascribe the property of inhabiting a world in which many people live in in the US, and to believe that I live in the US is to self-ascribe the property of living in the US. Lewis says, ‘The de se content of my belief that I have F is just the property F itself.’Footnote ³⁸

By burying the first-person reference in the idea of self-ascription, Lewis may seem to have found a way to construe the content of a self-belief that eliminates the first-person reference. But this is not the case: In the first place, on Lewis's account of self-ascription, any belief whatever – e.g. one's non-first-personal belief that many people live in the US – entails that the believer conceive of herself as herself in the first-person. Otherwise, she cannot self-ascribe any property at all. In the second place, self-beliefs or what I called I* beliefs are beliefs whereby, Lewis says, I ‘self-ascribe the properties I think myself to possess’.Footnote ³⁹ But this paraphrase – ‘properties I think myself to possess’ – obviously entails a first-person reference. Lewis has not reduced first-person phenomena to naturalistically acceptable phenomena. The phrase ‘properties I think myself to possess’ uttered by Lewis is not equivalent to ‘properties Lewis thinks Lewis to possess’. Neither Perry nor Lewis gives a genuinely non-first-personal account of I* phenomena. Indeed, I know of no successful attempt to construe complex first-personal phenomena naturalistically. So, I conclude that complex first-personal phenomena are neither eliminable nor reducible to nonpersonal phenomena.

Since the robust first-person perspective – the capacity to conceive of oneself as oneself in the first person – is ineliminable and is seemingly irreducible to a naturalistically-acceptable capacity, I take the capacity to conceive of oneself as oneself in the first person to express a genuine dispositional property that is manifested in thought, speech and action. Thus, at last, we have a strong defense of line (3) of the Argument Against Scientific Naturalism, and we can conclude that the argument is sound.

If I am right, then nature (nature itself!) has a personal aspect, and the objective conception of nature presupposed by scientific naturalists is inadequate. (It is important to note that the personal aspect that I find in nature is not at all Cartesian.Footnote ⁴⁰ Perhaps naturalism can be saved by a non-scientific version of naturalism, liberal naturalism.

5. Liberal Naturalism

Liberal naturalists – e.g. Mario De Caro and Alberto Votolini – reject what I called the methodological or epistemological thesis of naturalism. They are willing to admit as philosophically legitimate entities that are ineliminable but that are not investigated by science (presumably including first-personal properties). So, unlike scientific naturalism, liberal naturalism has room for irreducible and ineliminable first-personal properties, which, as we have seen, are ‘implicit in sound and successful ordinary transactions of ours’.Footnote ⁴¹

Liberal naturalists want to go beyond scientific naturalism by ‘extending the notion of nature beyond scientific nature to fully include the various aspects and normative dimensions of human nature’.Footnote ⁴² However, like other naturalists, they balk at anything supernatural. They aim to carve out logical space between scientific naturalism and supernaturalism, where ‘supernaturalism’ applies not just to divine beings or to entities putatively known by revelation, but to ‘any special modes of understanding that would be irreconcilable with rational forms of understanding’.Footnote ⁴³

De Caro and Voltolini argue strenuously that liberal naturalism does not collapse into any sort of supernaturalism. I agree that it is intuitive to oppose the natural to the supernatural, and all varieties of naturalism share this assumption. This assumption is really no more than the original characterization of naturalism generally as a philosophical outlook that takes nature to be exhaustive of reality, with a more expansive idea of nature. Since rejection of the supernatural is assumed from the outset, however, the exclusion of the supernatural seems to be another unargued-for closure principle on reality. Let's turn to my own view.

6. Near-Naturalism

Whereas liberal naturalism rejects the supernatural altogether, near-naturalism – my view – brackets questions about anything supernatural. If God created the world, he created it to be intelligible to human beings on its own terms. Near-naturalism takes as its domain what I call ‘natural reality’, which includes entities, properties and kinds that came into being through the processes of nature or through the intentions of human beings.Footnote ⁴⁴ Near-Naturalism simply does not raise any questions about anything transcendent or supernatural.

There are several important differences between my near-naturalism and genuine naturalism of any stripe:

1. (i) Genuine naturalism is a metaphysical view that takes what I'm calling ‘natural reality’ to be the whole of reality; near-naturalism is a metaphysical view limited to natural reality and is quiet about anything transcendent. So, the domains of scientific naturalism, liberal naturalism, and near-naturalism are similar, (i.e. natural reality, construed differently by each). However, as we have seen, both scientific naturalism and liberal naturalism impose closure principles on reality. Near-naturalism, by contrast, imposes no closure principle on reality. My view leaves open the question of whether natural reality is all that there is.

2. (ii) Unlike Scientific Naturalism, near-naturalism incorporates the first-person perspective as ineliminable and irreducible, and thus as part of fundamental reality; it is a (dispositional) property belonging in ontology. So, near-naturalism takes reality to have an irreducible personal aspect.

3. (iii) Near-naturalism is a form of what I call ‘Practical Realism’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Practical Realism takes the world of medium-sized objects – persons, animals and artifacts – to be basic entities, as genuine as electrons. While accepting science, near-naturalism (like liberal naturalism) does not take science to be the exclusive arbiter of reality. Near-naturalism aims to be a metaphysics that includes the commonsense world that we all encounter and interact with everyday.

Near-Naturalism is naturalistic in an old-fashioned way. Although it is consistent with the known laws of nature, it is not guided by or derived from science. To say that I accept science is to say that I take any established claim of any of the sciences to be true. This is not to say that I am beholden to any particular philosophical interpretation of such claims. Although near-naturalism has room for inquiry into reality beyond what is natural, it does not appeal to anything supernatural. The world pictured by near-naturalism is notably humane and expansive.