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Moderately naturalistic metaphysics

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Abstract

The present paper discusses different approaches to metaphysics and defends a specific, non-deflationary approach that nevertheless qualifies as scientifically-grounded and, consequently, as acceptable from the naturalistic viewpoint. By critically assessing some recent work on science and metaphysics, we argue that such a sophisticated form of naturalism, which preserves the autonomy of metaphysics as an a priori enterprise yet pays due attention to the indications coming from our best science, is not only workable but recommended.

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Notes

  1. Abstract disciplines such as mathematics are likely to constitute an exception, given their a priori nature and their object of study. We will ignore them here. Apart from this, our focus in what follows will be on the natural sciences, especially physics, but this is merely due to personal preferences and expertise. In particular, we do not wish, nor need, to formulate any verdict here concerning the methodological continuity or discontinuity between the natural and the social sciences. It may well be that all of our claims equally apply to the natural and the social sciences.

  2. We will ignore here clearly implausible candidates such as, for instance, the view that both science and metaphysics are entirely a priori in their methodology.

  3. Besides the views we will discuss, Nolan (2015) has recently put forward an interesting analysis of armchair methods as a posteriori rather than a priori.

  4. In connection to this, it is important to stress again that we will not pursue other lines of argument that have been pursued with a view to defending some ‘liberal’ or moderate forms of naturalism: in particular, we will not deal here with considerations concerning abstract entities, normative concepts or items having to do with consciousness/subjective experience. Although the case against the more radical versions of naturalism can certainly be made stronger by pointing at the peculiarity of mathematical knowledge, the seeming irreducibility of the normative, or the depth of the so-called ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, we think a good case for non-radical naturalism can already be made at the level of the typical objects of inquiry of, say, physics or chemistry. More generally, our contribution is intended to be to the discussion concerning methodological, not ontological, naturalism.

  5. For instance, Paul says that “After a theory is selected from the mix as providing the best explanation, if one is a scientific realist, its class of models is supposed to give us the truth about the nature and structure of certain features of the world: i.e., we accept the theory as a representation of these features of the world” (Paul 2012, p. 12).

  6. In science, instead, whether or not one believes in the link between empirical success and truth, the former is an unquestionable fact and a fundamental guide in theory development and theory-choice.

  7. Consider the following example. Paul argues (2012, p. 15) that a counterexample to the claim that causation is necessarily a relation of counterfactual dependence between events would require finding a metaphysically possible world with a case of causation between events not exhibiting counterfactual dependence. But how can we (fail to) find such a world if whether it exists at all depends on what we take to remain fixed across possible worlds?

  8. For Lowe’s account on ontological categories, see Lowe (2006).

  9. As rightly noted by a referee, it is in fact undeniable that outside of mathematics and physics scientific definitions in terms of essences are often hard to come by.

  10. For instance, Lowe rejects the idea that there is a special form of metaphysical intuition concerning essences (see, e.g., Lowe 2014).

  11. For instance, observations of the perihelion of Mercury formed part of the evidence that led to the abandonment of Newtonian physics. We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for the objection and the example. Again, remember that we are not interested here in issues—concerning the abstract, the normative and the contents of subjective conscious experience—that may well require solutions going against the idea of a primacy of physics.

  12. See Tallant (2013) for an interesting discussion of the role played by intuition in physics.

  13. For an attempt to clarify what is at issue, see Jenkins (2014).

  14. This last point is of course controversial, and one may suggest that a very important difference between science and metaphysics is constituted by the fact that scientists, unlike metaphysicians, never use intuitions for justifying their claims—rather than just reaching their formulation. Our response is that, even if we grant this difference, it doesn’t follow that metaphysics is worthless, for it has not been shown that metaphysicians always use mere intuitions to justify their claims, nor, a fortiori, that they cannot but do so.

  15. An interesting question that is worth mentioning at least in passing concerns the status of allegedly scientific theories which are however, not amenable to empirical testing, such as, for instance, string theory. Many thinkers do regard string theory as a piece of metaphysics (more often than not, intending this in a pejorative sense). We do agree that the lack of direct testability makes string theory and similar constructions strictly speaking non-scientific. However, we also stress the fact that string theory is not a fully metaphysical hypothesis either, at least on our construal. For, it lacks at least two fundamental features: first, being formulated in a non-scientific vocabulary; secondly, being at least potentially the basis for the interpretation of other hypotheses and theories that clearly qualify as scientific.

  16. Dyke and Maclaurin (2013) offer a response, specifying that they had in mind a much stricter sense of ‘auxiliary hypothesis’ than McLeod and Parsons, namely, only those hypotheses that are best supported by current science. But the upshot they draw from this is the one already familiar from Ladyman and Ross: ‘non-naturalistic theories are those that, when conjoined to our best theories about the way the world is, do not make any novel predictions about what we should observe’ (p. 180). We have already addressed this type of objection above, and will get back to it shortly. The main point is that before any predictions can be made, we must be aware of and able to understand the assumptions and claims that a theory makes, and this means that non-empirical elements are also required. We mentioned the case of individuality above—what sense can we make of the claims about the individuality or lack thereof of electrons based on the results of quantum mechanics if we do not understand what individuality is?

  17. Of course, this is something that a scientific anti-realist such as van Fraassen could deny. Notice, however, that we are not taking issue here with the overall coherence of those anti-metaphysical stances that are based on scientific anti-realism—we just want to discuss the more specific claims, listed above, that van Fraassen makes about metaphysics. The acceptance of scientific realism might, we think, lend further plausibility to our arguments and/or be itself supported by those arguments. The idea is that, on the one hand, scientific realists believe that there is some structure to reality that science tracks, hence aptly naturalistic metaphysicians may hope to be after the same structure; and, on the other hand, that the definition of coherent scientific-cum-metaphysical views of reality may lend support to the basic intuition underpinning the realist stance, i.e., that there is indeed a structure of reality that we have the possibility to gain a progressively more accurate knowledge of. However, it may also be that scientific anti-realists are metaphysical anti-naturalists, or that they are naturalists about metaphysics but take metaphysical hypotheses as mere fictions. The issue is complex and we need not, hence will not, discuss this further here.

  18. An interesting thing to notice in this connection is that Ladyman and Ross—in harmony with their endorsement of a non-eliminativist form of naturalism—put forward a positive metaphysical proposal in their book: so-called ontic structural realism, i.e., the view that reality is ultimately constituted by relations only. As the ongoing controversy about the strength and even meaning of ontic structural realism shows, such a conjecture is far from being a more or less direct consequence of contemporary science. In fact, it would seem that it can only be defined by first looking at the available possibility space through metaphysical—not physical, or at any rate scientific—glasses, and making choices that are by no means exclusively based on empirical data.

  19. It is also worth mentioning here a possible precursor to this type of view—of metaphysics and science both engaged in a study of the possibility space—kindly pointed out to us by an anonymous referee: Hooker (1987).

  20. Notice that the same holds also for ‘purely’ metaphysical issues: for instance, speculations about universals, tropes, substrata and the like may plausibly be said to arise from reflection on everyday facts of qualitative similarity and dissimilarity.

  21. If the world is gunky there is at least one proper part of it that is such that every proper part of it has a further proper part.

  22. Which clearly entails, among other things, that (1) and (2) above do not mean that scientific inquiry comes later. To the contrary, as shown by our reference to ‘scientific input’ in (1), we believe that, starting from the human amazement in front of the complexity and mysteriousness of reality, practical and theoretical work get started together.

  23. The concept of gunk is explicitly indicated as an example of bad metaphysics, for instance, by Ladyman and Ross (2007, p. 20). It is interesting to notice, in passing, that they seem to employ something like it themselves when arguing for the viability of a version of ‘ontic structural realism’ whereby reality is ‘relations all the way down’.

  24. To avoid ambiguities, we are not arguing here for the necessity of metaphysics for the progress of science (although we think there is in fact such a necessity); rather, we are claiming that the most progress in our knowledge of reality broadly understood is achieved by using the a priori tools of metaphysics and the a posteriori tools of science together rather than as exclusive alternatives.

  25. It goes without saying that, as argued by many in the past, the demarcation between the metaphysical and empirical elements of this methodology is not sharp, and it is plausible to think that one blurs into the other at the boundary. This does not affect our view, which relies on the fact that at least extreme cases can be sharply distinguished one from the other; and that both aspects are in any case equally indispensable, independently of how fuzzy or sharp the dividing line between the two is. (As a matter of fact, it is not difficult to see that the idea of moderately naturalistic metaphysics is, if anything, rendered more plausible by the vagueness of the dividing line between science and metaphysics.)

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Acknowledgments

We’d like to acknowledge the helpful feedback from Travis Dumsday, Donnchadh O’Conaill, and audiences at Helsinki, Hong Kong, Rome, Urbino and Singapore, where previous versions of this paper were presented. Tahko’s research for this paper was supported by Academy of Finland grants no. 266256 and no. 274715. Morganti’s work on the paper was supported by the Italian Ministry of University and Research FIRB grant no. F81J12000430001.

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Morganti, M., Tahko, T.E. Moderately naturalistic metaphysics. Synthese 194, 2557–2580 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1068-2

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