Redirecting the incredulous stare: contemporary metaphysical complacency and the flanking manoeuvre of developmental scepticism

Abstract

With development understood as improving change, and working at the macroscale or species level, I sketch the conceptual background for a new, developmental form of scepticism. Then I use developmental scepticism to critique a proposition that functions as a presupposition of the popular contemporary rejection of unconventional metaphysical propositions (MUPs) and specifically of panpsychism: namely, that we have experienced enough relevant development as a species to make it reasonable for the community of enquiry to treat such ideas as obviously false. Finally, I briefly suggest a possible step beyond developmental scepticism toward a more general orientation in enquiry which might naturally follow such scepticism once its motivating ideas are absorbed.

Suppose we define development as improving change – improvement over time.¹ And suppose we notice that one can think about human development at both the everyday, microscale level of human life and at the macroscale or species level. Then we can think of a developmental scepticism, which, mobilizing a large-scale diachronic approach, questions whether there is (epistemic) justification to believe certain propositions treated as worthy of belief among us by reference to the small extent of human development in emotional, social, moral, or intellectual domains at the species level.² The developmental sceptic will target some specifically developmental proposition or propositions (that the species is fully developed in way w, or that it is almost fully developed in way w, or that it is far enough developed in way w to generate such-and-such a result, and so on) – commonly these will be propositions functioning as presuppositions in one or another branch of current human enquiry. Its questioning can be both backward-looking, with a focus on human developmental shortcomings, and forward-looking, with an emphasis on our developmental potential.

Let me say right up front that this form of scepticism, on my conception, is enquiry-based: it arises within enquiry and works for enquiry. It can affirm enquiry’s best-supported results and indeed makes use of them, drawing especially on science and the history of culture. This is not at odds with its talk of species potential, of improving changes that may await us. After all, one experiences important learning in the early grades of school even though many additional years of learning stretch ahead. Unusually among scepticisms, developmental scepticism sponsors high intellectual hopes – at any rate for anyone willing to identify with the species instead of preoccupied with personal intellectual concerns begging to be satisfied in the present. This ensures that what we have here is not just a different way of talking about commonly discussed human limitations or the familiar scepticisms based thereupon.

In the present piece I employ developmental scepticism to target a quite specific proposition about development that has been inhibiting progress for what we might call unconventional metaphysical propositions (MUPs is my acronym rather than UMPs: I am not quite as gung-ho about these propositions as ‘UMPs’ would suggest). MUPs are propositions sporting a certain quality of speculative daring unsupported by contemporary science. This class of propositions includes a variety of religious propositions and also panpsychism, on which I will often focus for the sake of concreteness.

Here is how I will proceed. I will begin by sketching a bit more of the conceptual background for developmental scepticism. Then, working against this background, I will use developmental skepticism to critique a proposition that functions as a presupposition of the popular contemporary rejection of MUPs and specifically of panpsychism: namely, that we have experienced enough relevant development as a species to make it reasonable for the community of enquiry to treat such ideas as obviously false. The popular rejection of MUPs just mentioned sponsors the ‘incredulous stare’ of my title. As I see it, an incredulous stare should rather be directed to the developmental proposition in question. Finally, I will briefly suggest a possible step beyond developmental scepticism toward a more general orientation in enquiry which might naturally follow such scepticism once its motivating ideas are absorbed.

I am generally not very fond of military metaphors, but since presuppositions like the one at issue here ‘lie behind’ beliefs more conspicuously put into action, the metaphor of a flanking manoeuvre, which attacks the enemy from the side or the rear, suggests itself; and this explains my subtitle.

Developmental scepticism: the conceptual background

Just as, say, a religious group or political group can persist over time and renew its members without ceasing to have its identity as a group, so our species Homo sapiens, the group of modern humans, has existed and evolved across 300,000 years and will continue to do so, perhaps far into the future. We can speak of facts about the species, such as its territoriality or sociality, intending to indicate properties of the modern human group, and also of facts indicating properties of the group as it exists at some time, such as facts about religiousness, genetic mixture, or technological sophistication obtaining then.

How should we talk about developmental properties of the species? I have indicated that to develop in my sense is to improve. And there are various ways to construe what it is for the species as a whole to be at some point in its life and in some respect developed or undeveloped in this sense. Of course we’d have a sufficient condition were every single one of us to exhibit the relevant features. But there are other sufficient conditions as well, such as a dominating majority exhibiting them. In some circumstances, and for some developmental features, even a dominating minority would do, since the effects of a developmental feature – say, some stunted social belief – can percolate through a population even when many members of the population do not share it. Imagine that this minority controls all major institutions and is in a position to chart the course of humanity for the foreseeable future in the way that the aristocracy and the monarchy charted the course for all England in the sixteenth century. Whatever the approach, we should expect that species-level developmental properties will be supervenient on properties of the same type at the smaller-scale level. There cannot be a change for humans at the species level that involves a furtherance of – say – social or emotional development unless there are changes of the same type among individuals at the smaller scale.

Measuring species-level development might seem to present insuperable difficulties. But very important at the species level, just as at the ordinary everyday level, is the role our own values and ideals may play. Broader cultural ideals such as those associated with the diminishment of warlikeness rightly exert pressure. If we accept such ideals, how far we have developed as a species can be measured against them. Many of us do accept such ideals, with a shudder at the extent to which they remain ideals instead of present realities. To generate a final or fuller form in relation to which the present condition of the species can be seen to reflect an early or earlier developmental stage, it is therefore sufficient to be able to point to certain relevant values or ideals of this sort. And cultural evolution is conspiring to provide more of them – what we have here is a way of filling out and rationalizing (though sometimes also moderating) what we’re hearing from those who call themselves humanists, pragmatists, or progressives.

At this point someone may wonder whether talk of progress towards our ideals doesn’t carry with it the assumption that humans are continually progressing, in a linear fashion, to ever better states of being. This assumption is of course implausible. For example, much current morality in relation to homosexuality seems closer to the ancient Greeks than to anything in the intervening centuries. But my argument, fortunately, will not require the assumption in question. I assume instead that species-level progress can be messy and circuitous, embodying regression as well as periods of stasis. And of course I will be emphasizing how little we have developed in various respects rather than how much. People in the still-influential nineteenth century sometimes thought differently, with notions of a steady and highly productive movement toward predetermined ends reflecting laws of human progress. But we can look for a better notion instead of assuming that all talk of development must mimic theirs. Allen Buchanan and Russell Powell, who published a fine book on moral development (Buchanan and Powell 2018), are clear on this: ‘the notion of an inexorable, continuous march of moral advance is certainly not an essential feature of the idea of moral progress, let alone one that is empirically supported given the staggered historical trajectory of moral progress’ (5).

This seems like a good time to speak about time – in particular, about deep time, which immediately becomes relevant when we try to gain a realistic perspective on species-level development or underdevelopment. Homo sapiens is now about 300,000 years old. That may sound ancient, but it would take another 200,000 years – one hundred times the length of the period separating us from Jesus of Nazareth – just to get us halfway to the average lifespan of mammal species on our planet. The same goes for hominin species more specifically. If we compare this hominin/mammal average to the lifespan of an individual human who lives eighty years, our species is now just twenty-four years old. Much more of our life, potentially, lies ahead than behind. And of course our species might very well exceed the hominin/mammalian average. If it does, how much more time will it claim from the billion years we are told remain for constructive activity on our planet? Though it is not a fact that gets much attention, even in these days after Darwin, by evolutionary standards we are still a youthful species, at an early stage of human existence.

The obviousness of science’s support for the temporal facts I’ve briefly mentioned may not add up to a verdict in favour of the idea that our species is developmentally challenged, but it is certainly relevantly provocative. At the very least it is an important imagination-booster. If the temporal picture set out here is right, and if we assume that it is at least epistemically possible that the species will survive a good deal longer, then we can say that only a small portion of the period of time that we or our main pursuits will possibly have to be developed is behind us. A related point is that we may then set aside two of the four main possibilities one initially faces with respect to how the facts about our age and the extent of our development are combined:

1. 1. The species is young and undeveloped.

2. 2. The species is young and developed.

3. 3. The species is middle aged or old and undeveloped.

4. 4. The species is middle aged or old and developed.

If either of the last two possibilities were realized, then a developmentalist position of the sort I shall defend would be a good deal less plausible than it will in fact turn out to be. Starting from the back, with 4: if we were, as a species, middle aged or old and developed, then talk of living and philosophizing in a manner appropriate to questionable development would obviously be out of place. But the facts about our age nix this possibility. On the other hand, if 3 were true, if our species were middle aged or old and still undeveloped, then some of the pathways of further development I assume are open to us might instead be closed. Then we might be right to give up on seeing much further development – in part because we’ve had lots of time to see it but rather little has been forthcoming. As it is, we don’t have that inductive evidence. Instead, given our place in time – and with development viewed like probability, as a matter of degree that leaves the subject (to some degree) undeveloped up to a certain point and (to some degree) developed thereafter – we can say that the conjunctive fact we face is either that specified by 2 or that specified by 1: the species is either young and undeveloped or young and developed. As it happens, we often behave as though the truth is expressed by 2. But could it be that this is only another way in which the truth of 1 is manifested? We should wonder just how developed we are at the species level and how much we have neglected or overlooked here. Do we casually assume a lot more than is appropriate when it comes to how much of our development is in the past, just as we often assume a lot more than is appropriate when it comes to how much of the total history of our species is in the past? Are we perhaps, though without really recognizing it, still at an early developmental stage as a species?

As a matter of fact, there is good evidence that just this is the case. When from a large-scale perspective we allow ourselves to imagine the various improvements to a human condition that the species could attain and then ask how much of this development has already been undergone, we will find every reason to answer ‘relatively little’. At this point in the human saga we are still undeveloped in a variety of entangled ways: emotional, social, moral, and intellectual ways prominent among them.

I can offer only a few examples here, along with some of the concepts which allow me to treat them as examples. Certain areas of human life, including those just mentioned, are properly called central. And obviously we have not passed an early developmental stage of human life taken generally unless we have done so in all its central areas. My examples suggest that this necessary condition is not satisfied. On the emotional front, think of the extent to which, around the globe, we still have impulsive violence, the angry blaming of others for the problems of one’s group, uncritical attachment to ideologies favouring one’s own group over others, and resentful preoccupation with past hurts. For a social and moral example we might listen to Martin Rees (2018) on climate change; he says that human shortcomings include our difficulty with the long-term thinking that will be needed to do well by future generations and, relatedly, our discounting of future benefits that we ourselves will not experience. As much writing on emotional and social and moral issues illustrates, great effort towards development in the relevant areas is already being exerted by reformers around the world. And it has not been entirely unproductive, lending hope that more development may yet be achieved. But much more is needed. More, ironically, is desirable among reformers themselves, since unhappy social and moral conditions are sometimes visible even in their reform efforts (consider, for example, the unreflective sexism that was part of some civil rights efforts of the 1960s, or the authoritarianism that sometimes accompanies current efforts to change views on race or gender).

And then we also have the intellectual department of human life. Despite the triumphs of science, rather a lot remains to be done. We can see this just from the apparent incompatibility of general relativity and quantum theory. Writing in the New York Times, Adam Mastroianni, an experimental psychologist, recently offered some other examples: ‘Even in basic science, mysteries abound. Physicists still aren’t certain whether cold water freezes faster than hot water. Astronomers hypothesize that invisible “dark” matter and energy fill the universe, but they don’t really know what it is.’ Alluding to the lack of any consensus on how the bilaterian tubular gut with mouth and anus evolved, Mastroianni adds: ‘Nobody even knows where butts come from’ (Mastroianni 2023). And what about the unsolved so-called hard problem of consciousness, or the undeveloped condition of relevant brain research associated with it? It is not uncommon to hear commentators saying that we will need to know much more about the brain before completing our work on the mind. That’s what the eminent evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers had to say, in the only comment on the mind-body problem that the journalist John Horgan was able to coax from him for a book ostensibly on that topic published online: ‘He said he didn’t see how the mind-body problem could be solved any time soon, given how little we know about the brain’ (Horgan 2020). In a Princeton volume on The Future of the Brain (Marcus and Freeman 2015), collecting, as the book’s subtitle has it, Essays by the World’s Leading Neuroscientists, the editors report that at present, ‘neuroscience is a collection of facts, still awaiting an overarching theory; if there has been plenty of progress, there is even more that we don’t know’ (xi). The essays collected confirm this view. Over and over one reads about infusions of new data but also about our limited ability, so far, to make sense of it.

Now we cannot be sure that these or other challenges in the intellectual department of human life will ever be met, but clearly much more progress is epistemically possible. AI may take off in a big way, whatever you think its status to be right now, and with big consequences for intellectual development. The development of technology may in this and other ways lead to enlarged human capacities or to a richer output for our present capacities. At the very least, we can pull up our socks, producing progress just by attending to ameliorable shortcomings from the past such as those involving sexism or the influence of once undetected cognitive biases.

These, then, are some examples of the sorts of thing a developmental scepticism will attend to, drawn from various areas of human life, when seeking to defend the claim that our species is still at an early stage of development. But why speak so broadly about human development, including such things as issues involving our emotions, when the bottom line for us in philosophy is purely intellectual? In part because undeveloped conditions in other areas of human life can leave traces in philosophical work. Just for example, some reactive attitude relied on in the context of the free will debate, on the assumption that it is unavoidably human, might in fact signal a form of emotional underdevelopment, an early-stage human condition that we should seek to transcend. And other examples are coming in the second half of this article.

A version of developmental scepticism: against the popular rejection of MUPS

Let’s consider now how such thinking might be applied to matters of concern in the discussions springing up among us about commonly ignored metaphysical ideas – often ideas reflecting or having a bearing on religious thought. Many of the propositions being debated, including panpsychism, pantheism, and panentheism, are unconventional metaphysical propositions in the sense I gave that phrase before: they are MUPs. For thinkers who respond to MUPs with an incredulous stare, such propositions appear laughably outmoded or out of touch with the elevated intellectual status to which science has brought us. But right here we see how developmental scepticism can be brought to bear. For a presupposition of the popular contemporary rejection of MUPs, either already believed or ready to crystallize into belief for anyone whose attention is drawn to large-scale developmental matters but who persists with the incredulous stare in reaction to, say, panpsychism, is that we humans have experienced enough relevant development as a species to make it reasonable for the community of enquiry to treat MUPs as obviously false. And this belief must seem poorly grounded for anyone who reflects properly on the relevant developmental facts. It is, in an epistemic sense, quite possibly false, prone to give way under the force of the flanking maneuver of developmental scepticism. (Notice that since it is a developmentalist claim, the claim in question, which I will sometimes call the ‘anti-MUP’ presupposition, is not just the denial of panpsychism or of any other MUP. Notice also that even if the behaviour it sanctions is inappropriate, it could be perfectly fine to treat a MUP as false within the context of one’s individual intellectual practice, if one has undertaken to explore some other MUP incompatible with it.)

To see the questionableness of the anti-MUP presupposition, think with me for a minute specifically about panpsychism, the idea that consciousness is in some way fundamental in nature.³ Panpsychism has recently experienced a slightly greater degree of positive attention due to the work of philosophers such as Thomas Nagel, Galen Strawson, and Philip Goff, and it is seen by its proponents as generating illumination on various matters in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, including the so-called hard problem of consciousness. But the view is still widely rejected, and has been in this condition for the better part of a century. Many have thought it would be crazy to take any such thing seriously. Hence the incredulous stare. But now let’s introduce some relevant developmental facts. Science has gone from strength to strength in the twentieth century, and the intellectual interests of many have been correspondingly narrowed. People have come to realize that science is achieving great things. But not only that. Without much reflection, under the influence of a desire for swift results – for quick if not immediate gratification – that humans have displayed over and over in many different areas of human life and also an all-too-human lack of due humility, a sense has arisen that for virtually anything important to know or be done, human science as we have it now will point the way. At the same time – and not unrelatedly, since these two factors are mutually reinforcing – we’ve seen a stronger impression with respect to how much scientific development has already been undergone than the available evidence can support. As physicist David Deutsch puts it, ‘a persistent assumption remains that our existing theories … are nearly there’ (Deutsch 2011, 444).

Under the influence of these two factors it is easy to see how panpsychism could come to appear absurd to many in our intellectual communities. We have the well-known dominance, over a considerable period in philosophy of mind, of reductive physicalism, which has sought to explain consciousness in terms of things that are not conscious, and we have the well-known aversion to metaphysics that comes with a strong emphasis on empirical procedures and results. We should certainly expect that a bold metaphysical view with not much obvious empirical support and – perhaps most important – the impulse to make what science does not conspicuously utilize central and fundamental in nature, will be widely scorned under these circumstances.

But under the influence of a small dose of developmental scepticism, one can see that such scorn is misdirected. For it presupposes that we humans have experienced enough relevant development as a species to make it reasonable for the intellectual community to treat panpsychism as obviously false. And it is epistemically possible that this presupposition is itself false. In other words, we do not know, nor do we reasonably believe, that it is true. Now one can imagine being in circumstances where things are otherwise. But they are not our circumstances. Imagine what it would be like if enquiry had in the last few centuries become greatly broadened and deepened, with people working together successfully towards a wide and representative human consensus on whatever answers seemed promising to serious thinkers in many different areas of human investigation. Perhaps then, if panpsychism were still on the outs, our epistemic situation would be relevantly different. But we don’t have this in the world as it is. As we saw a moment ago when considering the history of panpsychism-related enquiry, things have narrowed in recent cultural history instead of broadened, and human developmental shortcomings have had something to do with this. Now it is epistemically possible that we will undo the effects of these and other shortcomings, not all of them intellectual, whose contrary effects have accumulated over generations. But again, this is a future possibility, not a present actuality. In the same vein we might note that the species will keep adding to and deepening its picture of nature as long as new regions of nature are being explored. And many more regions of nature will open up to us in the deep future if we survive into it, as we may. Wouldn’t we learn a great deal more if, for example, we were to travel successfully to other planets or develop telescopes far more powerful even than the James Webb? And of course we may make much more progress in our studies of the brain, and relatedly in our explorations of consciousness. All of these things, too, are epistemically possible. Probably not in the short term, which microscale experience influences us to give much more importance than it ought to receive, but if, as is possible, we live on for thousands of years more?

Many more such changes might indeed occur in our future. And if they do, and if from the perspective thus reached we can see that panpsychism is no better off, intellectually, than it is today, we might well have experienced enough relevant development as a species to make it reasonable for the community of enquiry to treat panpsychism as obviously false. But our situation today is far different. And thinking about what might come to be in the future, we can see that there is just far too much that might change for us, intellectually, if we manage to develop further, for us to take the presupposition of anti-panpsychist scorn we are examining seriously.⁴ If anything deserves an incredulous stare, it does!

Here’s another way to develop the argument that the developmental confidence of the anti-panpsychist and anti-MUP developmental presupposition is misplaced. With an appropriate large-scale sensitivity to species potential will come a recognition that a host of future scenarios such as the following, in which the anti-MUP presupposition is false, cannot be ruled out – that is, there is no good reason to believe, of any of them, that it will not obtain. Accordingly, anyone who reflects on these things is left without a good reason to believe that presupposition. (This doesn’t imply, of course, that believing MUPs is ok – more on this later.) Again I will focus on panpsychism, taking it as representative of the MUP clan.

(i) Alternative Sorting. Consider the following proposition: ‘There are very many alternatives to the deepest theories of mind presently proffered by scientists and philosophers, and the larger proportion of deep truths humans have it in them to discover about the mind, including some friendly to panpsychism, will emerge only after, and as a consequence of, the discovery, sorting, and discussion of these alternatives over a much longer period.’ In other words, we have managed in a relatively short period to pluck the low-hanging fruit, but the rest will require a lot more work than with our developmental insensitivities we have been able to imagine. And the rest might be friendly to panpsychism. In connection with this point we may notice that a full understanding of ourselves, of our species, cannot be reached until our further life, whatever it may include, has come to be, and remember that this further life may be far longer than our past life. More generally, a full understanding of nature, and in particular of how it evolves over the next millions of years (include here whatever changes will be wrought in it by technologically more sophisticated humans or by machine intelligence), cannot be achieved until after those years have passed. And recognition of the vital panpsychism-friendly facts about consciousness may depend on the attainment of just such an unavoidably delayed fuller understanding on other matters.

(ii) New Methods. Another possibility draws on how things may have gone for us in relation to methods: ‘Some ideas eventually to be discovered will allow for the development of new methods for the study of consciousness that will lead to relevant insights, friendly to panpsychism; just by luck we have missed the most powerful and productive methods so far.’ The point is that we might at any time be subject to a relevant form of intellectual bad luck, as disconcerting in its effects as any other. (Evolutionary studies reveal that luck has a great deal to do with the fact that we and the other mammals exist at all.)

(iii) Inaccessible Causal Path. Another candidate emerges from the awareness that we are subject to a sort of inevitable investigative bias: ‘Discovery by us of the most important insights about the mind we ever discover, including some friendly to panpsychism, will require entering one or more unique and – until late in the game – inaccessible causal paths.’ When pursuing enquiry we are perforce following one or another path instead of others. Those others can, as a side-effect, become quite inaccessible to us, at least while we continue on as we do – and this even if what we would find, were we to follow them, would require for its discovery no more in the way of capacities or concepts than is required or employed in the pathways we do follow.

(iv) Positive Neurological Alteration. Nick Bostrom (2014) suggests that possible natural evolutionary changes involving organic beings such as ourselves – say, another innovation of comparable impact to the spoken language that emerged at some point in evolutionary history – would be sufficient to realize something worthy of the label ‘superintelligence’ in humans. Both Bostrom and other authors have argued that relevant neurological alterations might also be achieved by human design, and, given the speed of present technological development, this is not implausible: biotechnology leading to cognitive enhancement is already foreseeable. Now the 200,000 years required to get us just halfway to the average lifespan of mammal and hominin species on our planet is more than enough time for such more impressive alterations to occur, on the most conservative estimates as to how long that might take, whether naturally or by our design – perhaps more than once. So here’s the present possibility: ‘Positive neurological alterations will occur in a form that allows us to do much more with human reasoning in the future in response to questions about consciousness than we have done in the past, either by allowing us to transcend some present limitations, or by revealing to us whole landscapes of intellectual opportunity we had not foreseen even at the heights of present scientific accomplishment; and some of what we see will be friendly to panpsychism.’

Each of the four propositions I have here identified is epistemically possible; there is no good reason to believe any of them to be false. And if any is true then we humans have not yet experienced enough relevant development as a species to make it reasonable for the community of enquiry to treat MUPs as obviously false. Hence each provides a way of seeing how the anti-MUP presupposition might – in an epistemic sense of ‘might’ – be false, and thus is unworthy of belief. And another way of showing this emerges once we have all of the distinct ways of doing so out in the open. For now we can also refer to the disjunction of those ways, and so provide an even stronger, fifth basis for this conclusion.

From developmental scepticism to developmental relativism

Of course we haven’t cleared the ground for an endorsement of panpsychist belief or belief of any other MUP. Indeed, what I’ve said might be thought to lead quite naturally toward a shift in orientation that removes our impulse in many regions of enquiry – and I mean organized and systematic enquiry – to claim a justification for believing our results, on the basis that other impulses are better adapted to the fact that human life is still at an early stage both temporally and developmentally. Although time moves on and developmental change continues, that we are talking about human life at the species level in the context of deep time suggests we shouldn’t expect a different assessment to be warranted anytime soon. And so we should settle down – not to a long winter’s nap, but to a possibly long springtime demanding a special sort of wakefulness.

What’s coming into view here under the impetus of developmental scepticism is the plausibility of a kind of developmental relativism – a species-level early-stage relativism – which bids us adjust all our expectations and procedures, not least in enquiry, to those appropriate at an early stage of human development. I think there’s a lot to be said for such a relativism, also in other areas of philosophy; we may have a lot more success figuring out what’s best to think and do at an early developmental stage than in the attempt to gain some timeless philosophical understanding. There’s a lot to be said about early-stage relativism too, though I’m only able to say a little about it here, with what I say quite narrowly focused on certain epistemic matters.

One early-stage adjustment I would propose is this. The property of justification for beliefs obtained from enquiry, which we tend to think our individual investigations suffice to bring within reach, should indeed be obtained from enquiry, taken in the broadest sense, and from enquiry in which progress against relevant developmental shortcomings has been made. Belief justification in enquiry ought to wait for a consensus among enquirers representative of the general human population, not just a consensus in our own minds – a broader consensus, emerging from shortcoming-resistant enquiry, that reflects a shared position. This requirement might be unduly onerous, at least when taken as a requirement, at more advanced stages of human development, but it fits our relatively undeveloped condition quite well. It allows us to do justice to two important considerations: that rather a lot of human intellectual (and other relevant) underdevelopment is bound up with our disagreements and, more positively, the fact that science’s best results reflect consensus. It would be an appropriate disciplining of all systematic enquiry at our stage to require, across the board, conformity to a structural feature of its (so far) most impressive exemplification.

Now I’ve only suggested that developmental relativism will ask us to make the right sort of consensus a necessary condition of justified belief from enquiry. We can leave open whether it is a sufficient condition at our stage, though I am attracted to the idea. Of course one might wonder whether whatever unanimity we achieve won’t be superseded still later, by some future consensus. And indeed it might be. In that case we would naturally be inclined to say that the earlier consensus did not represent knowledge, but why say the same about justified belief?⁵

I have been talking about the project of obtaining justified beliefs from enquiry, as it would be seen by the early-stage relativist. Results in this project may be in short supply for some time if the criteria for a good consensus are made sufficiently demanding. But I hasten to add that there are other enquiry-related beliefs about which we may feel differently, even under the influence of developmental relativism. I am thinking of beliefs we could, because of their purely instrumental role, call beliefs for enquiry instead of beliefs from enquiry. These are beliefs, needed to participate in enquiry, that are of the same or of similar types as ordinary beliefs from outside enquiry that are the immediate deliverances of (or inferentially in fairly close proximity to beliefs that are the immediate deliverances of) perception or introspection or memory or some other such cognitive process omnipresent in everyday life. (Note well that beliefs ‘for’ inquiry are not beliefs about how to pursue enquiry, methodological beliefs of the sort one might hope to glean from methodological enquiry. We are talking about a much humbler commodity here.) Think of the belief I form that the numeral I’m looking at on a scientific instrument is ‘3’ or – more interestingly though also more distant from everyday life – the belief that p is more probable than all relevant alternatives or makes best sense of the available evidence or has achieved consensus support in the community of enquiry. Innumerable token beliefs like this, which we will unavoidably form in the relevant circumstances and in quick succession, are, I suggest, also quite unavoidably utilized by enquirers for the purposes of enquiry, and so are appropriately sanctioned by our standards even at an early stage when regarded as stepping stones to the results from enquiry that we hope to realize. This is why I have called them beliefs ‘for’ enquiry.

So beliefs for enquiry and beliefs from enquiry. In between we might locate a belief-independent cognitive attitude which will play an important role, especially at an early stage like ours. What I have in mind are belief-independent positions, and a conversation among such positions aimed at achieving the broader consensus. Though focused more narrowly on theoretical acceptance, my notion of a position is not far distant from L. Jonathan Cohen’s conception of acceptance, which involves being disposed to rely on a proposition when making theoretical and practical inferences, whether one believes it or not (Cohen 1992). Let’s say that S has (or holds or takes) the position that p if and only if S theoretically accepts that p in the Cohen sense and is disposed to mobilize and defend p in any discussion among competing views about an issue or issues to which p can be seen as a response. Notice that the move from beliefs to positions doesn’t imply that at an early stage we should always somehow put off having the beliefs that are in fact generated by our enquiries. Because of the psychology of belief, putting off having beliefs based on enquiry will often be impossible. Recognizing that this is so, we can still shift our emphasis in enquiry from beliefs to positions. Should an appropriate consensus be reached in our lifetime, and if we remain enquiry-sensitive in our believings, any beliefs we have prematurely formed that do not match the consensus will naturally be replaced by beliefs that do and so perhaps (depending on how we close the issue left open before) become epistemically justified.

Notice that we can still think of a position as itself emerging from enquiry, if it represents a response to what appears to be the available evidence on some topic, a stance taken in conversation with other position-holders about that topic based on how the available evidence looks to one. One might quite unavoidably also form the corresponding belief on the basis of available evidence, but on the early-stage approach we will find ourselves very interested in both the available and the unavailable evidence, and by working with one’s position, for the sake of enquiry resisting the influences of any corresponding belief, one seeks to move discussion forward, promoting the discovery of more evidence. Boundaries of race and gender and style must all deliberately be crossed, in the spirit of overcoming our past shortcomings and with the aim of continually increasing the impressiveness of that evidence.

My reference to the available evidence raises an interesting question: Is it essential to having a justified position that it reflect one’s view as to which among relevant propositions is best supported by the available evidence? Might one occasionally take on, when forming a position, a proposition that one thinks is not best supported by the relevant available evidence? It seems possible that one might want to do so, especially at a stage of enquiry one regards as early, and also that it might be quite appropriate to do so. For one may think that the available evidence fails to support the proposition one has taken on board only because the relevant matters have been insufficiently investigated, and one may further think that taking on board the proposition in question, developing and defending it in conversation with other positions, is the best way of helping to bring it about that the evidence is better investigated.

Someone may now wonder whether it is a consequence of early-stage relativism, if these are parts⁶ of the picture one gets when applying it to enquiry and to our beliefs, that the anti-panpsychist’s developmental presupposition which I have criticized in this article can rise again, just not as a belief? The answer is no – or at any rate it is hard to imagine the presupposition lasting very long as a position. And this for two reasons. First, to become a position it must be brought to the forefront of one’s thinking, instead of remaining largely uninspected as presuppositions tend to do, and by the same token the force of the available evidence will – perhaps for the first time – be explicitly assessed. And it is hard to imagine someone today on careful consideration concluding that the available evidence favours the view in question. (One might, as I have suggested, make an exception to the ‘available evidence’ constraint for neglected views, but this would favour many MUPs, including panpsychism, rather than hindering them by supplying ammunition to the opposition.) Second, and more important, someone who makes a shift motivated by developmental relativism from belief to position could hardly fail to notice that they have assented to a view about our early stage of species-level development favouring an openness to MUPs rather than their rejection.

So much for the possibility of a move from developmental scepticism to developmental relativism, given what the former has revealed, and what such a move entails. From the little that I have been able to say about this here, two things should be clear: that for anyone who makes such a move the anti-MUP presupposition must continue to appear problematic, and that my approach in this article can follow its own advice and so avoid self-refutation. Looking ahead to what would follow for my own work here from the application of this advice, we can say that what I have been offering are my own positions and the arguments that seem to me to support them, not propositions proposed as worthy of belief. It is interesting to note that were the move to developmental relativism to be made in any comprehensive manner, skepticisms including developmental skepticism that are focused on believing states would be left with little work to do. Indeed, what for a time has appeared as scepticism and a concession to scepticism would reappear as normal and appropriate operating procedure for anyone defending an affirmative stance at the present stage of enquiry, a stage at which we might hope that incredulous stares everywhere – or at any rate most incredulous stares – will give way to wonder.