Approximative Realism as a Countermodel to Performative Objections Against Reductive Naturalism

Reductive naturalism has been challenged by alleged performative contradictions concerning the theorist and the semantic or epistemic resources required for theorising. A particularly direct form arises when the theorist is pressed to affirm or deny her own existence: the report “I exist” appears to require a singular and irreducible subject that a wholly physical ontology may be unable to support, while the report “I do not exist” appears self-undermining insofar as it is nevertheless produced by the very experiencer whose existence is denied. This paper suggests that the difficulty depends on a usually implicit commitment to exact individuation. Drawing on Approximative Realism (AR), it considers the alternative possibility that sufficiently stable approximate individuation is enough for experience, first-person reference, reasoning, and theoretical articulation, without generating the same difficulty for a wholly reductive ontology as exact individuation does. Under reflexive closure, the same treatment applies to the theorist, her representations, and the reasoning through which the theory is formulated. The resulting perspective provides a coherent way for reductive naturalism to avoid exempting the theorist or semantic and epistemic notions from the ontology merely because they are required for theorising. The principal cost is giving up the intuition that exact individuation is required for intelligibility or for accounting for the apparent stability and structure of reality.