If science gets the final say about reality, should we treat intentionality and objective meaning as comforting illusions, as Alex Rosenberg argues in defense of ‘scientism’ and a sober ‘nice nihilism’?
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1. Guest
Alex Rosenberg is the R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. His research focuses on the philosophy of biology and science more generally, mind, and economics.
2. Interview Summary
Alex Rosenberg opens by defending a robust ‘scientism’: he takes the standard two-part characterisation (science as our most reliable route to knowledge, and science as giving the “last or best word” about reality) and says the only mistake is calling either part “unreasonable.” He treats this as one strong species of naturalism—an approach that gives science pride of place and aims to reconcile (or, at the limit, revise) our everyday “manifest image” in light of the “scientific image,” in something like Wilfrid Sellars’s famous framing. On Rosenberg’s version, when reconciliation proves stubborn, the pressure should run mostly one way: let science “trump” common sense and be willing to treat parts of the manifest image as superstition or error.
From there, the interview turns to Rosenberg’s eliminativism about intentionality. He argues that if you start from a deep commitment to intentionality, he may not be able to “rationally disabuse” you—but he thinks that move typically over-trusts introspection, which he treats as a problem to be explained rather than a premise to build on. He also addresses the classic worry that eliminativism is self-refuting (can it even be stated as true?): his response leans on unresolved disputes about theories of truth (e.g., disquotational vs. correspondence) and the general difficulty of self-reference, suggesting it’s premature to declare the view incoherent just because it faces familiar reflexive puzzles. When the conversation shifts to naturalistic accounts of content (including views associated with David Papineau), Rosenberg grants that Darwinian/teleosemantic approaches are about as close as we can get, but he doubts they deliver the fine-grained, semantically evaluable propositional attitudes many philosophers want. Still, he resists eliminating consciousness: he thinks cognitive science has made progress by analysing consciousness in terms of attention and awareness, he rejects David Chalmers-style “hard problem” rhetoric as a shortcut to dualism, and he points to theorists like Michael Graziano and Paul Carruthers as offering more promising scientific strategies.
A later stretch engages debates around Jerry Fodor and natural selection. Rosenberg argues that natural selection is good at selecting adaptive behavior but not at selecting for true belief, so we shouldn’t assume our everyday predicates reliably carve nature at the joints; at best, selection explains why certain ways of classifying are useful for us. He recommends turning Fodor’s style of objection “backwards,” and he suggests that we shouldn’t let controversies about language or individuation hold biological explanation hostage. The closing themes are meta-philosophical and existential: Rosenberg describes philosophy as “very abstract and very general science,” valuable insofar as it helps extend human understanding and guides inquiry until the sciences can answer those questions directly. At the same time, he embraces a kind of “nihilism” about value “under the aspect of eternity”: we do have motivations and emotional drives that make us pursue inquiry, but that doesn’t add up to objective worth or cosmic meaning—and he presents that as a sober, non–self-deceiving outlook (“nice nihilism”), even when thinking about bleak long-run trajectories.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:53 - Scientism
04:22 - Naturalism
07:14 - Methodological or substantive?
08:46 - Eliminativism about intentionality
10:56 - Moorean shift
12:34 - Arguments against eliminativism
20:25 - Papineau on intentionality
24:49 - Consciousness
28:35 - Companions in guilt
30:36 - Fodor and natural selection
36:32 - No selection for?
37:22 - Properties
38:27 - Selection for/against
39:40 - Selection for long necks in giraffes
41:32 - Speaking with the vulgar?
43:32 - Selection against as intensional
46:18 - Function and selection for
48:17 - Skepticism
50:05 - Example
51:12 - Mereological nihilism
52:29 - Value of philosophy
54:28 - Nihilism?
59:09 - Conclusion
