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“There is no general metaphysical picture that our best science supports”

Brian Leiter

The quote is from Jack Ritchie's Understanding Naturalism, which I learned about from this informative review.  A bit more context:

Ritchie's brand of naturalism takes a stand against analytic metaphysicians such as Armstrong, Jackson and Lewis, who appeal to science as a basis for their constructive metaphysical programs. His main claim is that if we are honest in our appeal to actual scientific practices rather than merely paying lip-service to such an aspiration, or misguidedly employing mythical or ideological conceptions of science then we will find there is, on balance, no scientific support for substantial metaphysical conclusions embodied in such prominent '-isms' as physicalism, scientific realism, modal realism and mathematical Platonism….

Ritchie's discussion does…suggest a more useful distinction, that between metaphysically inflationary and metaphysically deflationary naturalisms. Ritchie takes seriously that for the consistent naturalist there is no first philosophy. In so far as metaphysics is extraneous to actual science then the "good naturalist should . . . be suspicious of such metaphysics" (153). Ritchie's general criticism of allegedly naturalistic analytic metaphysics is that it gains an unearned cachet from presuming to follow the results and methods of the successful sciences. Regarding metaphysically inflationary naturalists, the commitment to naturalism is really just window dressing since "there is no general metaphysical picture that our best science supports" (158). The attitude Ritchie recommends for the genuine or serious naturalist is metaphysical agnosticism (cf. 104, 143, 148, 158). Like Fine's Natural Ontological Attitude, the naturalist should not take sides in the metaphysical debates between physicalists and nonphysicalists, or between "realists" and "antirealists" about theoretical posits, universals, possible worlds, numbers, and the like. Metaphysics wants to tell us how things must be, or can be, once and for all, but "science forces us to revise our conceptions of what is and is not possible, of where a concept can be meaningfully deployed and where it can't" (147). Further, it is idle speculation to try to foresee how our future science might develop. Philosophy should purge itself of scientific soothsaying. In light of these considerations Ritchie interestingly suggests a reconception of metaphysics as metaphor: "Thinking of metaphysical theories as inspirational pictures or metaphors strikes me as . . . perhaps the best way to understand how science and metaphysics relate to one another from a deflationary naturalist perspective" (158).

Ritchie's deflationary methodological naturalism takes the sciences "at face value" (109). From this perspective the "strong disanalogy" between the standards of ontological commitment of the sciences and those of metaphysically inflationary naturalists (e.g. Quine, Armstrong and Lewis) is disastrous for these metaphysical programs (109). A naturalist is enjoined to stick as closely as possible to the results and methods of the sciences. When pondering the existence of some entity scientists themselves do not rest content with considerations of indispensability and explanatory worth. They also demand the right kind of empirical confirmation. We are asked, for example, to consider the experiments of Jean Baptiste Perrin in the aftermath of Einstein's work on Brownian motion, which allowed us for the first time to "see" atoms and thereby settle widespread skepticism about their existence. Ritchie suggests that science itself is more empirically minded than many naturalists suppose. [Aside: how would this appeal to empirical support help when it comes to the existence of abstract entities such as numbers or concepts?] In general, for the deflationary naturalist there is no unified story to tell about what exists: all he can do is to endorse "the many different things that our many empirically well-supported sciences say about the world" (158)….

In Ritchie's eyes, metaphysically inflationary naturalists are not naturalistic enough by their own lights. Although they claim to be naturalists opting for a properly scientific philosophy, they actually subscribe to false or outdated or mythic views of science. To make matters worse, they have a too loose sense of what it is to follow the results and methods of the sciences. A consistent naturalism must hold more closely to the sciences — their variety and the multiplicity of their results and methods. This is not something that can be done from the armchair. It requires adopting an empirical attitude to the sciences themselves and learning from actual scientific case histories and examples (cf. 71, 90). However, "taking science on its own terms is not something philosophers have had much practice at" (5). Studies of "the history of science refute . . . the most popular methodologies of science", namely, inductivisim and hypothetico-deductivism (81). They also undermine constructive metaphysical programs, including philosophical speculations about the relation between mind and matter, at least within a naturalistic setting.

Discuss.

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18 responses to ““There is no general metaphysical picture that our best science supports””

  1. John K.

    "Metaphysics wants to tell us how things must be, or can be, once and for all, but "science forces us to revise our conceptions of what is and is not possible, of where a concept can be meaningfully deployed and where it can't" (147)."

    It is at least conversationally implied by the above that science does not aim to tell us how things "must or can be", once and for all. That's a tendentious position about what science does. (Don't scientists try and find laws? And don't laws tell us how things must and can be?) It does not seem to me to be useful in contrasting science with metaphysics – both our scientific and metaphysical theories are open for revision. If anything, one would think that our scientific theories were less open to revision than our metaphysical theories. I am certainly much more likely to revise my views on the nature of time or universals than I am on the atomic theory of matter or the curved nature of space.

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  2. Mark S

    Maybe I'm not as well-versed in these matters (I probably should remove the "maybe"), but I don't see anything new or particularly striking/revealing about this analysis. After things like Carnap's internal/external distinction, Quine's ontological relativism, Kuhn's notion of paradigms, etc., I don't see how the so-called "analytic metaphysician" gets off the ground. I realize, of course, that there must be a plethora of ways (of which I am completely ignorant), since there appears to be a lot of "analytic metaphysics" going on.

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  3. Ammon Allred

    I suppose one crucial question becomes exactly how far Ritchie wants to take his claims about metaphor. Is this a nice way of dismissing all metaphysics (saying that different kinds of metaphysicians, including metaphysically inflationary naturalists, are really not doing much more than "poetizing" on certain themes in the sciences), or is this a claim that the kinds of entities which metaphysicians talk about, such as possible worlds or numbers or concepts are best understood as entities with a metaphorical relation to the natural world (metaphysicians who think they are Platonists are often really fictionalists)? That strikes me as an interesting claim, one I'd be inclined to accept for a number of reasons that would take much longer than a blog comment to flesh out but which have to do with a belief that metaphysics and aesthetics are close to one another than either group might be inclined to admit…

    Looks like an interesting book.

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  4. chauncey

    John K:

    I think the phrase "once and for all" is important in the quotation you cite. Ostensibly, metaphysics carries this as a constitutive commitment, whereas empirical science does not. Plausibly, science is a "self-correcting enterprise" in a way that metaphysics is not.

    Moreover, suppose we are "more likely to revise" our metaphysical views than to revise our scientific views. It remains open that the goal of metaphysics is to settle things once and for all and is thereby closed to a certain kind of revision.

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  5. Bryan

    Thanks for drawing my attention to this book; I had not planned on reading it, but after checking out David Macarthur's review, I think I will take a look at Ritchie's book.

    That having been said: "His main claim is that…we will find there is, on balance, no scientific support for substantial metaphysical conclusions embodied in such prominent '-isms' as physicalism, scientific realism, modal realism and mathematical Platonism."

    Its hard to see how this could be true. Case in point: in one of my favorite papers of all time, (the eminent biologist) Ernst Mayr's "Typological vs. Populations Thinking", Mayr argues that Darwin's greatest contribution was precisely a metaphysical one. Darwin showed that species could not be thought of as types into which particular animals belonged if they had the characteristics necessary for membership in that type, but rather were groups of animals ("populations") that were extended in time. This does support at least a range of metaphysical positions about what species are (like, for instance, David Hull's theory that species are individuals), and does rule out certain metaphysical positions about what species are (such as a view that would treat species as universals). Perhaps this is a counterexample to Ritchie's claim.

    Maybe ontological questions about species are too parochial, and what Ritchie meant is that there is no scientific support for "big" metaphysical views (I'm not sure what a "big" metaphysical view is, but if there are such things I guess physicalism would certainly count as one). If this is the case, then this also seems to be false. Consider presentism (this certainly seems like a "big" metaphysical view about time, just as "big" as physicalism is about matter). Some have argued that presentism is inconsistent with some of the implications of the special theory of relativity. If this turns out to be true, then it seems that commitment to naturalism rules out taking presentism seriously as a metaphysics of time. Maybe this is another counterexample to Ritchie's view?

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  6. Carl

    I'm a little concerned about the claim that "a naturalist is enjoined to stick as closely as possible to the results AND methods of the sciences." I see a lot of space for naturalists to rely on the most current results of the sciences without sticking just to their methods. It should be possible to do that while still being metaphysically deflationary, shouldn't it? After all, different sciences follow different (and perhaps inconsistent) methods, but presumably the worldview they develop is mutually consistent, even if a little lumpy. Why can't naturalist philosophers have their own methods, or at least select them as needed from the toolbox of the scientists, without falling into the metaphysical excesses that Ritchie is so concerned about? Of course, extrascientific methods would have to be justified on their own merits. Furthermore, it seems likely that scientists working in a particular field might agree more about results than about methods, so requiring naturalists to stick to "scientific methods" might be a little simplistic in any case.

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  7. Jonathan Birch

    I wonder about "seeing" atoms. It's in scare quotes for good reason: you obviously cannot see atoms in a Brownian motion experiment. You can only infer their existence by IBE. But this is good enough evidence in physics, so I don't see why comparable inferences should be outlawed in metaphysics.

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  8. Chris Hallquist

    @Mark S

    A Kuhnian might think that a lot of analytic metaphysics is trying to work out the commitments of the dominant paradigms of modern science. Kuhn, as I understand him, thought paradigms to not generally make their commitments explicit, but one can believe that and still engage in trying to make those commitments explicit.

    On the other hand, one can simply think that the arguments of Carnap, Quine, and Kuhn were never that convincing in the first place. I think a lot of analytic philosophers would take roughly the following line: "Carnap's logical positivism was a hopeless project, Quine's arguments were terribly unclear, and Kuhn's incommensurability thesis rested on bad philosophy of language." Kuhn especially is not well-liked in contemporary analytic philosophy–lots of analytic philosophers take the ideas of Kripke and Putnam on language as just obviously true, and they were adamant that the terms of the natural sciences do not change meaning.

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  9. Eric Schliesser

    Some of these issues were recently debated (occasionally contentiously) in light of recent work by Ted Sider here:
    http://itisonlyatheory.blogspot.com/2009/11/metaphysics-and-general-philosophy-of.html

    Reply
  10. Ken Taylor

    I think of myself as a naturalist in good standing. And I certainly think that we should try to constrain our philosophizing, as much as possible, by the deliverances of our best ongoing sciences. Nor can I find much use, in my own thinking, for much of what is called inflationary metaphysics in the passage quoted.

    Still, I don't think that philosophy should just let itself be led around by the nose by science as it currently stand as if we could just read off the correct metaphysics of the natural order by carefully attending to the deliverances of science as it currently stands. I'm not sure that this is the suggestion, but it seems on first reading to be.

    On my view, there are still many open "how possibly" questions such that answering them requires philosophers to think, as it were, out beyond the current data of even our current best science. One reason for that is that we don't really currently know how to rationally coordinate certain high level concepts with certain lower level concept. And it seems to me that achieving such rational coordination between higher level and lower level concepts will often require conceptual innovation designed to deliver "new" bridging concepts that, as it were, sit between the higher level and lower level concepts.

    To take a somewhat misleading example, our higher level mental concepts give us epistemic and cognitive access to a whole realm of mental states and properties, while the concepts of neuroscience give us epistemic and cognitive access to many of the goings on in the brain. It is not unreasonable to believe, however, that states of mind just are states of brain ( or are supervenient upon them or …). Yet one can certainly argue that we currently lack the conceptual resources to re-identify the states which we identify (and re-identify) as mental by deploying mental concepts with the states we identify (and re-identify) as neural by deploying the the concepts of neuroscience. We are perhaps getting closer and part of what enables us to do so is the conceptual innovations wrought by cognitive neuroscience.

    Now it seems to me that in many domains we need to do the equivalent of thinking up something like cognitive neuoscience — a domain of new concepts, that partake partly of the higher level and partly of the lower level, thereby enabling us to reduce antecedent conceptual distance and thereby to achieve greater rational coordination. One way to achieve such innovation is to try to gain imaginative acquaintance with a realm of possibilities — possibilities in which the instances of the one bank of concepts are also instances of the other. Once we see how possibly the x's could just be the y's (or not), we may have thereby created a sort of hypothesis generator that enables us to investigate how far the actual world is from the merely possible world of our philosophical imaginations.

    OF course, we should try our best to to constrain our walk through the space of possibilities, by what we know about actuality — and science, I believe, is what tells how things actually are. But I do not think we can simply read off the answers to our how possibly questions from what science as it currently stands tells us about what is actual. And though I think the thinking up of new concepts through the attempt to re-imagine the possible is not entirely distinct from science, I also think that may often involve thinking "out beyond" where science currently stand.

    Of course, the ultimate goal of such theorizing is to turn the investigation of mere possibilities into a deeper understanding of actuality. And that's why I get to insist that it remains naturalistic, even if it isn't just following current science around like a lap dog.

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  11. Michael Drake

    When scientists provide an interpretation for the terms of a theory, what are they doing if they aren't doing metaphysics?

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  12. R.M. Farley

    The "good naturalist should . . . be suspicious of such metaphysics" (153)

    Restricting ourselves to the resources provided by our best current science, where do we turn when asked to *justify* a normative claim like this one?

    I'd like to see an argument for this claim that doesn't smuggle in extra-scientific (whatever, exactly, being extra-scientific comes to) premises/commitments/etc.

    Perhaps Ritchie is willing to allow appeal to the extra-scientific when justifying normative claims but not when trying to justify ontological claims. But if that's so, it seems to me to give the game away. Why give preference to one area of extra-scientific thought over another? Is there an argument for doing so?

    Or is Ritchie apt to go for something like Michael Rea's "research programme" account of naturalism, wherein the naturalist's basic commitments (perhaps including normative commitments) are at best pragmatically justified and at worst floating on thin air? Rea may well be right… but it's certainly not a rosy picture he paints.

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  13. Allen Hazen

    About the application to the philosophy of mathematics…
    (in particular about the parenthetical question "Aside: how would this appeal to empirical support help when it comes to the existence of abstract entities such as numbers or concepts?")

    Penelope Maddy, in her more recent, "naturalist," phase, has argued against the Quinean "Indispensability Argument" for the existence of mathematical objects on precisely this ground. As for how to get around it, in her earlier, "realist," phase she tried (article in "Philosophical Review" in I think 1981) to defend the idea that (at least some finite) sets could literally be perceived.

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  14. Christopher

    In short, I couldn't disagree more that there is no metaphysical system that 'our best scientific theory' supports: What about a metaphysic that is realist about wave-functions, defines causation as the transference of energy and defines objects as 'fields of propensities'? This sounds like a metaphysic that our best scientific theory supports to me.

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  15. Doug Keaton

    The quoted passage strikes me as more rhetoric than argument. What there is of substance is awfully . . . ahem.

    The reviewer writes, quoting Ritchie, "Metaphysics wants to tell us how things must be, or can be, once and for all, but 'science forces us to revise our conceptions of what is and is not possible, of where a concept can be meaningfully deployed and where it can't' (147)."

    Well, _realist_ metaphysics "wants to tell us" those things, I suppose. Ir-, sur- and, non-realist metaphysics presumably do not. But just sticking with ordinary realist metaphysics, is Ritchie under the impression that forcing us to revise our conceptions of X is the same thing as forcing us to admit that there is no final or stable way to conceive of X? And so on.

    I trust that there are good arguments to back up the rhetoric. But so far I am not dissuaded from my fondness for metaphysics.

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  16. Darrell Rowbottom

    'When pondering the existence of some entity scientists themselves do not rest content with considerations of indispensability and explanatory worth. They also demand the right kind of empirical confirmation.'

    And how does one get 'the right kind of empirical confirmation' without considerations of indispensability and/or explanatory worth?

    The problem here, in short, is that in order to believe in 'confirmation' (rather than something weaker like Popperian corroboration), at least when it comes to unobservables, one arguably needs to think that IBE is truth-conducive.

    It's better, if one really wants to stick it to analytic metaphysics, to take the line adopted by van Fraassen in _The Empirical Stance_. In short, deny that these inferential strategies are any good. Deny there are evidential reasons for going beyond one's evidence at all. (Following Popper, Van Fraassen rejects induction too. I'm one of those unusual characters who agrees.)

    One need not deny that something like IBE goes on in science; one may say, instead, that 'best explanations' are accepted _on pragmatic grounds_. (And one may say something similar about the significance of Kuhnian theoretical virtues such as simplicity and fruitfulness. It's pragmatic.)

    This said, Ritchie is right to say that (many) naturalists should look more carefully at what goes on in science, especially outside physics. I was amazed by some of the things I found on my last postdoc, where (inter alia) I was asked to look at the differences of approach between condensed matter physicists and molecular biologists (when it came to dealing with the same biological entities). Methodologically, these two camps are worlds apart. (I remember one fantastic interview with a molecular biologist who pointed to a Missouri license plate on his wall, and said something like: "That's up there because it's the 'Show me' state." The physicists, on the other hand, were fond of spherical cows.)

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  17. David Wallace

    Christopher: there are a lot of uses of causal talk in physics that I don't think will be well captured by "causation=transfer of energy"; there's also space to worry that causation per se just isn't playing a role in modern physics, so isn't something that's metaphysically defensible on naturalistic grounds. If wave-function realism just means that the wavefunction represents something physical then that sounds sensible (albeit committed to certain ways of resolving the quantum measurement problem), but I think going beyond that to some metaphysically thick claim about a field on configuration space is difficult to defend. I'm not quite sure what you mean by "objects as 'fields of propensities'" – that seems to be in tension with realism about the wavefunction.

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  18. Christopher

    David: The only kind of causal talk I can think of that doesn't fit this description is perhaps instantaneous events (eg. beta decay, wavefunction collapse) – ones that seemingly cannot involve energy transfer, as they happen at superluminal speeds. But does 'our best scientific theory' declare that these are causal events at all?

    Also, I didn't mean to suggest that fields of propensities are fields operating on configuration space. The suggestion was that if the wavefunction corresponds to something physical, then what it corresponds to is a field of propensities. I don't think this is a very metaphysically thick claim or that it is in tension with wavefunction realism (admittedly, at least, of a certain kind).

    But I'm sending you an e-mail, so as to not take up any more space here.

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