Book Club: Scientific Metaphysics, 2, What prospects for a naturalized metaphysics?
There are two types of metaphysics in contemporary philosophy: analytic, sometimes referred to as first philosophy, and naturalized, or “scientific.” A volume entitled Scientific Metaphysics, edited by my colleagues Don Ross, James Ladyman, and Harold Kincaid, attempts to make the case that analytic metaphysics is pretty much a waste of time, and that metaphysicians should embrace and articulate some version of naturalized metaphysics. As I wrote in the previous installment of this series, I am broadly sympathetic with this project, even if not necessarily in agreement with every author that writes in this vein.
This time I’m going to tackle the second chapter of the Ross et al. volume, authored by Anjan Chakravartty and entitled “On the Prospects of Naturalized Metaphysics.” It’s a complex essay that requires a significant degree of familiarity with issues in philosophy of science, so I will not attempt a blow-by-blow summary. Instead, I will pick on a number of insightful comments made by Chakravartty and add my own commentary, with the intent of making as clear as possible for the lay reader what the debate is about.
Chakravartty begins by correctly pointing out that sensible discussions in both science and philosophy of science simply cannot do without metaphysics:
“Philosophical defenses of the reasonableness of believing in the sorts of scientific entities and processes that are not generally considered metaphysical today, such as genes and gene transcription, often make recourse to views about things that are regarded as falling under the purview of metaphysics, such as causation, modality, and so on.”
This is a very good and important point. Take the concept of “gene,” which is deployed without trouble in thousands of scientific papers every year. Not long ago, the notion of invisible (to the naked eye) particles that carry information to make biological molecules, cells, and organisms would have been considered metaphysical, in the literal sense of beyond physics. Genes were postulated by Greg Mendel during the second half of the 19th century to explain certain empirical results concerning the inheritance of measurable physical characteristics in pea plants.
