Adams, Elie Maynard (1919-2003)



Adams, Elie Maynard (1919-2003)

Life and Accomplishments

E. M. Adams, metaphysician, epistemologist, and philosopher of culture, developed a humanistic realism defending the reality of both value and meaning and challenging philosophical naturalism. He was born in Clarkton, Virginia, was educated at the University of Richmond (A.B., 1941; M.A., 1944), Colgate-Rochester Divinity School (B.D., 1944), and Harvard University (M.A., 1947; Ph.D., 1948). He taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1948 until a few years before his death. After 1971 he was Kenan Professor of Philosophy; after 1990 he taught part-time as N. Ferebee Taylor Professor. Adams chose to teach in the South to address social issues and raise the educational level; he rejected other job offers. He was honored with the Thomas Jefferson Award, the university’s highest faculty honor, the Outstanding Educator of America Award, honorary doctorates from Wake Forest University and the University of Richmond, and a Festschrift. At UNC-CH a professorship, an annual lecture series, and a departmental graduate fellowship bear his name; his bronze bust stands on campus.

As department Chair from 1960-65, he created a major research department. He proposed and directed the Curriculum on Peace, War, and Defense from 1970-72 (bringing academic scrutiny to issues fueling Vietnam War protests), served as Faculty Chairman, proposed and organized the Program in the Humanities and Human Values (a continuing liberal education program for out of school adults), authored almost 100 scholarly articles, devoted countless hours to students, and supervised many theses and dissertations. Beyond UNC-CH, he helped lead the American Philosophical Association and other philosophical organizations. He served on journal editorial boards. Departments and universities consulted him about their programs and tenure/promotion decisions. Beyond the academy, Adams was a public philosopher and intellectual, effectively advancing racial equality, democracy, peace, rational inquiry, liberal education, and the humanities. His last book, A Society Fit for Human Beings, was written to reach the broader public and articulates a vision of a humanistic civilization in which knowledge of value and meaning is as important as scientific knowledge. He and his wife Phyllis raised two children and were deeply involved in their community. He even taught himself house construction, renovating and adding rooms to their house.

Early Philosophical Development

Though Adams’s dissertation was on scientific explanation and anticipated developments in philosophy of science, he turned to the work of his Harvard teachers. He concluded that both C. I. Lewis’s sense datum theory of sense experience and Ralph Barton Perry’s interest theory of value failed to escape phenomenalism, the view that we are aware only of private phenomenal states. Adams became convinced that the “of” in “sensory experience of x” indicates an intentional or semantic content that constitutes and individuates the experience. This semantic content is internally related to the experience; it identifies the experience. Not only can physical object discourse be of or about sensory experience, sensory experience can be of or about an objective physical realm. The content of the experience can be expressed in language having the same semantic content, leading Adams to characterize an experience as a “structure of meaning.” In sense experience, some object is “taken up semantically” and taken to obtain in the world existentially. A veridical experience is one in which the object that is the semantic content of the experience also has an existential status in the world. Adams contended that the semantic could neither be explained nor explained away; semantic intentionality is categorial, a basic way reality can be structured, how we must understand the world.

Adams conceived of philosophy as an a priori discipline, fundamentally metaphysics and epistemology, in which we discover the basic structures of reality, the categories. Influenced by his colleague, Everett W. Hall, Adams came to a fuller account of philosophy as the program of categorial analysis. Categorial analysis of ordinary discourse about some subject examines not only what it does and doesn’t make sense to say about it, but also if categorial conclusions in that area fit within a comprehensive categorial system, if that categorial system accounts for the entire culture, and if dialectical ad hominem arguments establish that denial of that system ultimately leads to insoluble logical perplexities that reveal inconsistency with the necessary presuppositions of experience, thought, knowledge, and action. Philosophy is systematic and objective, though there is no theory-neutral methodology. This conception of philosophy as a kind of linguistic analysis (with a nod to phenomenology) placed Adams broadly within the analytic movement.

Adams discovered that his account of sensory experience applied to emotive experience too, opening up an epistemology of value: value discourse is of or about emotive experience, and emotive experience is of and about a value reality, a position developed in Ethical Naturalism and the Modern World-View. Influenced by Hall’s metaphysics of value, and building on C. I. Lewis’s analysis of contrary-to-fact conditionals, Adams proposed that the basic structure of a value sentence is “If X is F, then X (or Y) ought to be G.” That is, given some context or situation, some normative requirement obtains in the world. The “ought” is part of the connective; the entire “If…then…ought…” is the semantic content of an emotive experience and indicates a value structure in reality. Something is good if it is as it ought to be and bad if not. A normative requirement arises in a context; if that context changes, the value might change. Values are objectively real but contextual. Normativity is categorial, a form of intentionality that stands in an internal relation to a context. Something can be real through being constituted by an inherent normative requirement.

Adams explored implications of value realism: Anything real must be causally efficacious, implying real teleological causation; there is logical room for objective essences, how a kind of thing ought to be by nature; the functions of biological organisms and their parts cannot be explained away by Darwinian evolutionary theory; and the mind functions teleologically and has a value structure both through its constitutive governing principles and the ethics of thought.

Adams started off in the dominant movement in modern Western thought called “scientific naturalism,” a world view based on the metaphysical categories of modern science. Developing his ideas dialectically against contemporaries and the broad history of philosophy, he concluded naturalism is indefensible. Naturalism’s categories and its empiricism are too narrow, distorting philosophy and other disciplines and even generating destructive misconceptions of philosophy. False naturalistic metaphysical and epistemological assumptions deep in modern Western civilization put it partly out of touch with reality, deranging it. In such a culture, lived experience reveals a growing inability to live life with inner strength, wisdom, and happiness. Many philosophers work uncritically within their culture’s basic metaphysical and epistemological assumptions. But Adams came to believe that meaning and value are categorial. These are the central categories of the humanities, since the humanities study the structures of meaning and value in humanity, society, and culture. Adams argued we need a systematic philosophy of the humanities, a realistic humanism; he set out to develop one. So began his break with the main direction of contemporary philosophy and modern Western thought.

A New Humanistic World View

Philosophy and the Modern Mind and The Metaphysics of Self and World further develop his systematic philosophy. Dispositional knowledge requires taking P to be real, having good reasons for so taking P, being correct, and having those reasons be responsible for being correct. Two more conditions are needed for episodic acts of knowing, encounters with objective reality. In an “epistemic encounter,” one’s taking P to be real is “partially self-warranting”; the occurrence of the experience is some evidence for its veridicality. Also, P’s being real must help explain why the experience occurred; what makes the experience veridical must cause the experience to occur. The mode of experience is then a source of original ideas about the world.

For Kant, categorial truths reveal the world only as it is present to the mind and not the world in itself. Adams argued for categorial realism over Kant’s categorial idealism. If we cannot discover the categorial structure of experience and thought as they are in themselves (not merely as they are present to the mind), then how they yield knowledge and how we can act in and on the world would be unintelligible. Also, within categorial realism and value realism it makes sense that the mind evolved with the function of giving us knowledge of the world in itself. Categorial truths, then, formulate the transcendentally necessary structure of the world; they are true of any world in which knowledge and experience and action are possible. Adams was a foundationalist about epistemic encounters and categorial truths. Philosophy appeals to them to critically assess, and if necessary to correct, the culture’s world view; philosophy is our most fundamental level of cultural criticism and reconstruction.

Adams held that the mind is a dynamic system of semantic states and acts organized under a value structure (all embodied biologically) so that as a system it functions to produce further states and acts. But he rejected mind/body dualism. Expressions of the mind in language and action also are constituted by a semantic dimension. Along with semantic realism, this semantic theory of the mind and the entire subjective realm places the mind, action, and language in the world as real structures of meaning. We grasp the meaning of others’ actions and expressions by “perceptual understanding.” We are conscious of the contents of our own mind and actions and expressions not by reflection but by our mental states and acts being the focus of the mind so that we can recall, avow, reflect on, critically assess, and correct them. The entire mind, though, is not consciously present. The contents of the mind—beliefs, values, intentions, and the like — and its expressions are constituted both by a semantic content and logical form. Logical form, logical properties, and logical relationships are the particular forms, properties, and relationships of structures of meaning. In emotive reasoning, we feel the normative requirements grounded in the logical structure of the mind. Given some belief, we feel required to form some other belief, even if unaware of the reasons why. Reflective reasoning directly grasps the logical form of our mental states and acts, their logical properties, and the logical relationships. Given some belief, we reflectively grasp that it functions as a reason for some conclusion.

Regarding any epistemic power of the mind, a knowledge-yielding experience is identified and unified by a semantic content with a logical form. This experience is expressible in language having the same content and logical form as the experience, stands in logical relationships with other experiences, makes a truth-claim, and can be epistemically assessed as veridical or non-veridical. Adams concludes that our epistemic powers include sensory perception (internal and external), emotive experience, perceptual understanding, and reflection (reflective awareness). Our epistemic powers are broader than what naturalism acknowledges.

Adams defends moral realism. Our moral feelings embody moral judgments telling us what is fitting or unfitting for any person in a given context. Moral discourse presupposes a conception of personhood. A person is the kind of being who ought to have a normative self-concept under the imperative to “define and live a life of one’s own”; that life must be justifiable under rational and moral criticism. Personhood is a natural social kind; in a social kind, the concept of the thing is internal to and shapes the inner dynamics of the thing. The imperative to define and live a life has the status of a responsibility; it must be known in order to be fulfilled. Adams characterizes personhood as a natural social office, constituted by that inherent natural responsibility and by natural human rights, the freedoms and means needed to carry out that responsibility. A society with sufficient resources has an inherent normative requirement to help people function well as persons. A person first develops a culturally generated identity but should come to critically examine oneself and thus the internalized culture to reach a rationally defensible identity and culture. Liberal education crucially aims for such cultural freedom. In A Society Fit for Human Beings, Adams critically examines various sectors of the culture under a humanistic world view.

Persons, society, and the organic realm, must be conceived humanistically, using concepts indigenous to the humanities. But a naturalistic world view cannot account for humanistic subject matters, even by the theory that real structures of meaning and value emerged from a naturalistic universe. Adams concluded that humanistic realities require a humanistic world view. We explain structures of meaning and value by appealing not atomistically to their parts but wholistically to their larger contexts of meaning or value. This wholism pushes outward toward an Ultimate context, which must be real but that is beyond our literal conceptual grasp. In a humanistic world view, with meaning and value as categorial, Ultimate Reality must be ultimate in meaning and value; this is what belief in a Divine Reality amounts to. So, a humanistic world view provides rational grounds for faith in a creative power or dynamic (not a Being) in the universe working towards what ought to be and thus manifesting a “wisdom”. In Religion and Cultural Freedom, Adams argues that we can understand religion in a way consistent with cultural freedom; one can have religious faith and a commitment to a culture free under reason.

(Number of Words: 2199)

Selected Works:

Ethical Naturalism and the Modern World-View. Chapel Hill, N.C.: The UNC Press, 1960; reprinted Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973 (Greenwood archival series of classics in their respective fields, 1985).

Adams, E. M., ed. Categorial Analysis: Selected Essays of Everett W. Hall on Philosophy, Value, Knowledge and the Mind. Chapel Hill, N.C.: The UNC Press, 1964.

------, ed. Common Sense Realism: Critical Essays on the Philosophy of Everett W. Hall. Chapel Hill, N.C.: The Southern Journal of Philosophy 4, no. 3 (Fall, 1966).

Philosophy and the Modern Mind: A Philosophical Critique of Modern Western Civilization. Chapel Hill, N.C.: The UNC Press, 1975; reprinted Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1985.

Adams, E. M., ed. The Idea of America: A Reassessment of the American Experiment. Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger Publishing Company, 1977.

The Metaphysics of Self and World: Toward a Humanistic Philosophy. Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1991.

Religion and Cultural Freedom. Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1993.

A Society Fit for Human Beings. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1997.

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References and Further Reading:

Blackburn, Glenn. Maynard Adams: Southern Philosopher of Civilization. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, forthcoming 2007.

Holtzman, Seth. “Science and Religion: The Categorial Conflict.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 54, no. 2 (2003): 77-99.

Weissbord, David, ed. Mind, Value and Culture: Essays in Honor of E. M. Adams. Atascadero, Calif.: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1989.

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author of entry on Adams: Dr. Seth Holtzman, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Catawba College

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See also:

Action

Analysis, philosophical

Argumentum ad hominem

Categories

Cause/causation

Conditionals

Criticism

Culture

Dialectic

Dualism

Emotion

Empiricism

Epistemology

Essence

Essentialism

Ethics

External/Internal Relations

Foundationalism

God

Good

Grammar

Hall, Everett

Human Nature

Intentionality

Internal / External Meaning

Knowledge: a priori

Knowledge: and belief

Lewis, Clarence Irving

Lived experience

Meaning

Metaphysics

Mind

Morality

Natural Kinds

Natural Rights

Naturalism

Necessity

Objectivity

Ontological Commitment

Ontology

Perception

Perry, R. B.

Persons Science: natural

Philosophy, conceptions of Self

Philosophy of Science Society

Public Intellectuals Teleology

Realism Theism Understanding

Responsibility Valuation

Rights Values

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