Abstract
In recent years, it has become common to defend science against charges of bias against the supernatural by explaining that science must remain methodologically natural but does not assume metaphysical naturalism. While such a response is correct, some details about the distinction between methodological naturalism and ontological or metaphysical naturalism have been lacking, as has a clear understanding of the distinction between the methodological restriction of science to natural explanations and naturalistic claims about the scope of those methods. We still require an account of the natural that explains well why science is restricted to giving naturalistic methods, and why the pursuit of natural explanations is not tantamount to the assumption that only natural causes exist. I suggest that the distinguishing characteristics of the natural are not metaphysical at all but broadly epistemological, concerning goals of intersubjectivity and predictability. I argue that by focusing on naturalistic goals we can better explain why the pursuit of natural explanations need not presume any purely natural metaphysics. But I also suggest that the adoption of natural methods is not entirely metaphysically neutral, as it is associated with values that may be more closely associated with some metaphysical views than others.
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Notes
As far as I can tell, the first published use of the term “methodological naturalism” in this internal sense limiting science to natural explanations is E. S. Brightman’s 1936 APA presidential address (Brightman 1937).
But note the potential problem with naturalistically grounding any domain-extending naturalism that defines naturalism via reference to current scientific practice.
Today we might include dark matter, dark energy, and space–time itself as part of the natural world.
The role of law here may sound like a claim about ontological status; however I think the focus on “law” itself is a red herring. As Plantinga (1997) has charged in his critique of Ruse’s (1982) descriptions of natural, many have argued that many sciences may not have laws per se. What matters about law-likeness is not any ontological account of them, but rather their regularity. We expect the truly supernatural to be beyond our ability to incorporate into any sustainable, empirically confirmable regularities.
I use prediction to refer to a range of activities. Prediction is needed even for historical theories, with which we make predictions about observations. Even in a science that is does not engage in paradigmatically predictive testing, one’s models must be well-specified and constrained enough that, e.g., fitting a model to one set of variables of interest limits the possible values in the model of some other set.
The sense in which magic may be nonlocal also need not make it non-natural, as we have nonlocal interactions in current physical theory.
We also need not search for a general line of demarcation of practice or discipline. That the phenomena being described are intersubjectively accessible and support predictions may be a necessary condition for the rational pursuit of a science of them, but that condition does not imply much of anything else about demarcating science in general.
Car mechanic examples have been used by others, e.g., Piggliucci, for discussing methodological naturalism.
E.g., a believer in divine creation of the universe might also believe that shortly after the actual creation no further divine interactions occurred, and that the future of the universe was determined by its physical state at that moment.
See Moser and Yandell (2000) for similar reasoning suggesting that science cannot justify an exhaustive domain-extending, external methodological naturalism that claims that scientific methods ought to be applied to other (or all) currently non-scientific domains.
Even in the case where one actually rejects the pursuit of scientific explanation, one ought to retain methodological naturalism about those pursuits—that is, one ought not reject the methodological restriction, but one may reject the pursuit of the natural goals.
References
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Acknowledgements
I thank Bruce Glymour for conversations on the topic which have strongly influenced the views presented here. I also thank Andrew Arana, Amy Lara, Jon Mahoney, and Donald Wilson for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper, Jody Azzouni and Gillian Barker for their discussions on related topics while they were visiting Manhattan, KS, and Eric Martin for commenting on the paper at the 2009 pacific APA.
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Tanona, S. The pursuit of the natural. Philos Stud 148, 79–87 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9497-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9497-0