Ontology and Naturalized Metaphysics

Quine’s theory of ontological relativity holds that in the realm of discourse, there are several ways of painting and picturing reality, where each picture of reality could go for an acceptable or likely picture of how things are. In defending ontological relativity, Quine moves against foundationalism in Philosophy. He seems to follow the notions of relativism, pragmatism and libertarianism which virtually all post-modernist philosophers are enamoured of.
In trying to undercut foundations, Quine’s theory implicitly posits background theory as an epistemic-determining foundation, which is fulfilled on the premises of naturalised epistemology. Again, while he sought to pattern naturalised epistemology after the methodology of the natural sciences, the foundational nature of the natural sciences also stare it at the face.  This essay deploys critical analysis to argue that contra Quine and some scholars like Richard Rorty, Quine’s theory does not imply the demise of foundationalism, for foundations are indispensable for progress, rather, it provides a framework for re-working and re-defining foundationalism along new lines. If this be so understood, then false assumptions about Quine’s programme would be dispensed with, and, the hope of an epistemology that guides knowledge acquisition, would be reached.

If successful scientific inquiry is to be possible, there must be a world that is independent of how we believe it to be, and in which there are kinds and laws; and we must have the sensory apparatus to perceive particular things and events, and the capacity to represent them, to form generalized explanatory conjectures, and check how these conjectures stand up to further experience. Whether these preconditions are met is not a question the sciences can answer; it is specifically philosophical. This is why the myriad forms of scientistic philosophy in vogue today (neurophilosophy, experimental philosophy, naturalized metaphysics, evangelical-atheist reductionism, etc), are all hollow at the core. Does this mean we must return to the old, a priori analytic model? No! What is needed instead is scientific philosophy in the sense Peirce articulated more than a century ago: philosophy motivated by a genuine desire to discover the truth, and relying not solely on reason but also on experience-only not the special, recherché experience required by the sciences, but close attention to aspects of everyday experience so familiar we hardly notice them.

This project investigates naturalized metaphysics as a recent trend in analytic
metaphysics originating in the naturalist attitude of James Ladyman and Don
Ross in their seminal work Everything must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized (2007).
The primary focus, however, will be the more recent article “Neo-Positivist
Metaphysics” (2012) by Alyssa Ney that originates in this tradition. The project
will conclude that naturalized metaphysics is an unsuccessful attempt at an
answer to the question ’how is metaphysics possible’. More precisely, the project
will establish that any answer to this question must instruct how to succeed at
attempts at assertions about the Kantian thing in itself. This requirement is
the result of an argument that no other conception of ’reality’ is robust enough
to accommodate an ambitious metaphysics. Subsequently, it will be argued
that naturalized metaphysics is conceived by its proponents as an attempt at
such an answer, but that naturalized metaphysics does not provide the required
instruction. This problem occurs because of Carnap’s challenge to metaphysics.
Carnap observes that no assertion can be made outside a linguistic framework
which has the consequence that metaphysical assertions must be about the
conceptual conventions of the linguistic framework rather than the thing in
itself. It is the view of Ney and the other proponents of naturalized metaphysics
that metaphysics is possible as a naturalized metaphysics; a metaphysics that
appropriately defers or yields to the findings of science. The project argues that
this requirement does nothing to ensure that Carnap’s challenge is avoided. The
challenge is equally significant to naturalized and non-naturalized metaphysics, so
long as both require that successful attempts at metaphysics must be assertions
about the thing in itself.
The project concludes that until or unless Carnap’s challenge is refuted, naturalized
metaphysics remain impossible, just like the metaphysics it is supposed to
replace.

O filósofo Xún Kuàng 荀況 (310-211 AEC) viveu durante o final do período chamado  de  Estados  Combatentes  (403-221  AEC),  em  que  a  disputa  bélica  por  poder e a busca por justificativas às escolhas políticas e pessoais era intensa. Xún 荀era seu sobrenome, e zǐ 子 significa “mestre” ou “filósofo” na antiguidade chinesa. Ele recebeu esse reconhecimento por fazer parte da primeira experiência de “ensino superior” na China antiga, a Acadêmia Jixia ( Jìxià Xuégōng 稷下學宮), onde foi aluno e depois professor e diretor.  É considerado o terceiro maior filósofo da “Escola dos Eruditos” (Rújiā 儒家, Confucionismo), depois do próprio Confúcio (Kǒngzǐ 孔子) e de Mêncio (Mèngzǐ 孟子), escola que defendeu de forma argumentativa e sistemática, diferente dos diálogos breves dos seus antecessores (KNOBLOCK, 1988). Sua  obra  recebeu  o  mesmo  nome  do  autor,  Xúnzǐ 荀子,  e  é  constituída  de  32  capítulos  de  tamanhos  médios  ou  grandes,  com  diferentes  linguagens  que  variam entre discursos argumentativos, diálogos dialéticos, poesias e recomendações de  ações.  O  capítulo  17  faz  parte  de  uma  fase  mais  madura,  em  que  ele  já  tinha  estudado,  trabalhado  como  ministro,  e  provavelmente  estava  como  diretor  e  professor da Acadêmia Jixia (KNOBLOCK, 1982-1983, p. 38 e 46). Aqui  apresentamos  uma  tradução  direta  da  língua  chinesa  antiga  para  o  português  brasileiro  desse  capítulo  17,  “Discurso  sobre  o  Céu”  (Tiān  Lùn天論).

“Dalla filosofia dell’azione alla filosofia della mente” è stato il percorso di alcuni filosofi di nazionalità varia degli anni 1980 – come Paul Churchland negli Stati Uniti o Ansgar Beckermann in Germania – che prima si sono interessati agli aspetti più teorici nella filosofia dell’azione, come il modo di funzionamento delle azioni e la loro spiegazione scientifica, e che poi, con l’arrivo e la diffusione dei personal computers e delle scienze cognitive, hanno ampliato e approfondito questo interesse di ricerca e si sono dedicati alla filosofia della mente più in generale e in particolare alla spiegazione scientifica e filosofica del mentale. Sandro Nannini faceva parte di questo movimento ed è stato uno tra gli inizialmente pochi filosofi italiani che si sono occupati di questi argomenti; successivamente ne è diventato uno dei maggiori specialisti in Italia, proponendo una sua particolare versione di naturalizzazione del mentale. Subordinata agli interessi teorici è stata la sua iniziativa accademica di fondare e promuovere il primo dottorato italiano di ricerca in Scienze Cognitive. Il presente volume tratta dell’opera di Sandro Nannini in contributi che sono riflessioni più o meno specifiche sulle differenti tappe del suo percorso, affrontando temi come l’analisi dell'azione, il libero arbitrio, la discussione di Nannini di vari classici della filosofia, la tendenza del naturalismo a dissolvere la filosofia in un enciclopedismo empirico e la sfida dei qualia e della fenomenologia all’approccio naturalistico alla mente. Il volume contiene inoltre un saggio dello stesso Sandro Nannini, nel quale espone l’ultimo sviluppo della sua filosofia della mente nonché le risposte agli interventi degli altri autori: Mario De Caro, Sara Dellantonio, Rosaria Egidi, Roberta Lanfredini, Christoph Lumer, Paolo Parrini, Pietro Perconti, Claudio Pizzi, Emanuela Scribano e Giuseppe Varnier.

This thesis inquires what it means to interpret non-relativistic quantum mechanics (QM), and the philosophical limits of this interpretation. In pursuit of a scientific-realist stance, a metametaphysical method is expanded and applied to evaluate rival interpretations of QM, based on the conceptual distinction between ontology and metaphysics, for objective theory choice in metaphysical discussions relating to QM. Three cases are examined, in which this metametaphysical method succeeds in indicating what are the wrong alternatives to interpret QM in metaphysical terms. The first two cases failed in doing so due to different kinds of underdetermination. In the third case, unlike underdetermination, where there are many choices to be made, a “null-determination” is proposed where there may be no metaphysical choices in the available metaphysical literature. Considering what has been discussed, an agnostic philosophic position is adopted concerning the possibility of interpreting QM from a scientific-realistic point of view.

Key-words: Metaphysics. Metametaphysics. Ontology. Scientific realism. Non-relativistic quantum mechanics.

This is the published version of Haack's Agnes Cuming Lectures at University College, Dublin, downloadable free. The first lecture ("Science, Yes; Scientism, No") shows why, while the achievements of the sciences deserve our respect and admiration, undue deference to anything and everything bearing the label "scientific" is inappropriate. The second lecture ("Scientific Philosophy, Yes; Scientistic Philosophy, No") first shows what's wrong with various recent forms of scientistic philosophy, and develops Haack's own approach to the hard questions about human mindedness that these cannot answer.

download FREE: https://roundedglobe.com/html/038f7053-e376-4fc3-87c5-096de820966d/en/Scientism%20and%20its%20Discontents/

The relevance of analytic metaphysics has come under criticism: Ladyman & Ross, for instance, have suggested do discontinue the field. French & McKenzie have argued in defense of analytic metaphysics that it develops tools that could turn out to be useful for philosophy of physics. In this article, we show first that this heuristic defense of metaphysics can be extended to the scientific field of applied ontology, which uses constructs from analytic metaphysics. Second, we elaborate on a parallel by French & McKenzie between mathematics and metaphysics to show that the whole field of analytic metaphysics, being useful not only for philosophy but also for science, should continue to exist as a largely autonomous field.

The paper compares Ladyman & Ross’s version of naturalized metaphysics, Rainforest Realism, with the comprehensive scientific metaphysics recently articulated by a physicist, David Deutsch. Major similarities of the two positions are described and discussed, illustrating the relevance of metaphysics to science. However, a failure of consistent naturalism on Deutsch’s part is also identified and criticized: Deutsch promotes the Everettian multiverse interpretation of quantum physics on the basis of a philosophical commitment to classical determinism. He also fails to appreciate that a broadly realistic attitude to physical theory does not require denying that some important scientific achievements involve using models and their elements as instruments. Both of these errors are traced to an overly strict dichotomy between pure formalism and empirically interpreted content. In quantum mechanics, Bohr’s version of the Copenhagen interpretation fails to be a fully fledged ‘interpretation’ according to currently dominant philosophical opinion. We criticize this opinion. The deep structure of the world is arguably not mathematical but statistical, and there is no such thing as ‘purely formal statistics’. The principles of statistics are generalizations of recurrent patterns found in data; and such structuring of data is the core business of both science and its metaphysical unification. Contrary to Deutsch’s claims, Enlightenment optimism about the capacity for limitless expansion of knowledge is compatible with the hypothesis that the world is irreducibly and fundamentally stochastic. Among great philosophers, C.S. Pearce anticipated this hypothesis. Ladyman & Ross’s metaphysics can be redescribed in terms of it, as follows: the world is the totality of non-redundant statistics, not of things.

Before going much further, given the engagement with Foucault that occupies much of the early sections of this nomadic exploration, I should address Foucault's (1972) theorizations of History in The Archaeology of Knowledge and his problematization of " the search for a total history, in which all the differences of a society might be reduced to a single form, to the organization of a world-view, to the establishment of a system of values, to a coherent type of civilization " (p. 12) therein as my reading does not fully cohere with Ball's (2013) assertion that Foucault " reject[ed]… essentialisms and universals ".

This paper attacks the modal ontological argument, as advocated by Plantinga among others. Whereas other criticisms in the literature reject one of its premises, the present line is that the argument is invalid. This becomes apparent once we run the argument assuming fictionalism about possible worlds. Broadly speaking, the problem is that if one defines “x” as something that exists, it does not follow that there is anything satisfying the definition. Yet unlike non-modal ontological arguments, the modal argument commits this “existential fallacy” not in relation to the definition of ‘God’. Rather, it occurs in relation to the modal facts quantified over within a Kripkean modal logic. In brief, we can describe the modal facts by whichever logic we prefer—yet it does not follow that there are genuine modal facts, as opposed to mere facts-according-to-the-fiction. A broader consequence of the discussion is that the existential fallacy is an issue for many projects in “armchair metaphysics.”

The paper reflects on whether philosophy can pursue a genuinely naturalistic programme of inquiry, of the kind defended in Ladyman & Ross (2007), and yet avoid collapsing into the various empirical sciences. It is argued first that the relevant question more specifically concerns the autonomy of metaphysics from fundamental physics. Philosophers likely would remain institutionally alone in pursuing the metaphysical project of unifying the special sciences under constraints from fundamental physics, but for no deep reason of special expertise or on account of a special conceptual feature of the problem space; physicists will probably simply never be sufficiently interested in metaphysical questions to take them up. The paper then addresses the more complicated question of whether naturalized metaphysics à la Ladyman & Ross is not coextensive, both methodologically and with respect to its domain, with mathematics. The paper does not attempt to directly resolve this question. However, it identifies a plausible space for naturalized metaphysics in the matrix of the disciplines, which distinctively combines elements of computer science, mathematics and physics in addressing the unity of special sciences through pursuit of highly general principles of statistical inference.

In ontological terms, what can we learn from the current state of the art in Epidemiology? Applying the Quinean criterion of ontological commitment, we can learn that there are several fundamental entities for the theory to work. One is a virus type entity, in which the (in)famous Coronavirus is a particular case. In metaphysical terms, this entity can, in principle, be understood in several ways. One of those ways, apparently, and perhaps intuitively, is the notion of object. Applying the metametaphysical method of Unavailable Metaphysical Stories, we found that Epidemiology is incompatible with an object metaphysics.

ABSTRACT The objective of this study is to discuss the methodology and ontology of general jurisprudence, whose aim is to elucidate the ontological nature of the Law, considering a defense of the naturalized jurisprudence. In opposition to the conceptual approach prevalent in contemporary legal theory, focusing about conceptual analysis and resource to intuitions, some theoreticians have accept empirical approaches that resource to sociological and anthropological insights to advance our understanding about the nature of Law. Among these empirical approaches, there is the defense of the naturalization of the general jurisprudence by Brian Leiter, discussing the Quine’s methodological naturalism whose point is the continuity between philosophy and science.  The naturalized jurisprudence is founded on the resource to the conceptual schemas that are presupposed by our best scientific theories about the social human behavior for advancing the discussion about the real nature of Law. The criticism against these naturalized methodology and the limits of the Leiter’s version for naturalized jurisprudence are discussed and, in order for answer and/or account these objections, I propose a modified version of naturalized jurisprudence that it is more robust than the Leiter’s one, because it begins from less controversial premises and it conforms to contemporary analytic metaphysics and social ontology.

RESUMO A presente dissertação tem por objetivo discutir a metodologia da Teoria Geral do Direito, cujo objetivo é elucidar a natureza ontológica do Direito, desde a perspectiva de uma Teoria Naturalizada do Direito. Em contraste com a abordagem conceitual predominante na Teoria Geral do Direito, que foca na análise conceitual e no recurso às intuições, alguns teóricos têm endossado uma abordagem empírica que recorre a insights sociológicos e antropológicos para avançar nosso entendimento sobre a natureza do Direito. Entre essas abordagens empíricas, destaca-se a proposta de Brian Leiter de naturalização da teoria jurídica, a partir do naturalismo metodológico de Quine, que favorece a continuidade entre a filosofia e as ciências. A Teoria Naturalizada do Direito baseia-se no recurso aos esquemas conceituais que são pressupostos pelas melhores teorias científicas sobre o comportamento social humano para avançar a discussão sobre a real natureza do Direito. Examinam-se as objeções levantadas contra essa metodologia, bem como os limites da versão de Leiter para a teoria jurídica naturalizada, propondo-se uma versão modificada mais robusta da Teoria Naturalizada do Direito, a qual parte de premissas menos controversas e que fica mais em linha com a metafísica analítica e a ontologia social contemporâneas.

Central to Aristotle's metaphysics is the question of individuality. The individuality of each substance is explained in relation to " matter " because the " form " is universal. Avicenna, as one of the Aristotelian Neoplatonist philosophers, is not content with this explanation and proposes to establish individuality on other grounds. In this paper, I argue that in his perspective it is not the " matter " which determines individuality but rather the principle of existence.

Mi objetivo es mostrar que la filosofía cientificista de moda hoy en día está equivocada y cómo una filosofía científica, en el sentido de Peirce, hace posible un entendimiento de las habilidades humanas, una tarea que las filosofías cientificistas ignoran o por tanto fracasan; y explicar por qué la filosofía cientificista—aunque es tan inadecuada—se ha hecho tan popular en tiempos recientes.
Empiezo con varias formas de filosofía cientificista: la “filosofía experimental”; la metafísica “radicalmente naturalizada”; el auto-llamado “cientificismo” de ateos evangélicos, el cual afirma que la física determina todos los hechos, por lo que todos valores son ilusiones. Continúo con una ex plicación de la concepción de Peirce de “filosofía científica”; y intento explicar, en el marco de esta concepción, lo que es distintivo de la mente humana y nuestra capacidad para formar creencias, teorías, etc.—algo que los filósofos cientificistas no pueden explicar. Concluyo con algunas reflexiones sobre el estado de la filosofía profesional contemporánea.

Abstract: Recently, analytic metaphysics has been attacked from a scientist’s perspective.
In Everything Must Go, James Ladyman and Don Ross argued that analytic metaphysics
should be dismissed and replaced with a naturalized metaphysics. In this paper, I critically
discuss the arguments proposed in the book in order to determine whether this critique
of analytic metaphysics is successful. In particular, Ladyman and Ross elaborate on three
main points: the role of intuitions and the ensuing misunderstanding of science, the demarcation
of science from non science, and the exclusive theoretical authority of science.
I argue that none of their arguments succeeds in excluding analytic metaphysics from the
list of respectable theoretical disciplines.

In her paper “Neo-positivist metaphysics", Alyssa Ney promises a naturalized metaphysics that is acceptable even by positivists’ – and specifically Carnap’s – standards. This neo-positivist metaphysics takes its outset in the findings of our best science and relies on them to inform a metaphysics that can avoid the dependence on linguistic frameworks that is inherent to Carnapian deflationism. Neo-positivist metaphysics attempts to sidestep these problems by inheriting its semantic credentials directly from science itself. This paper argues that such attempts are unsuccessful since science contains no resources with which to answer Carnap’s challenge either, and a science-based metaphysics is therefore just as vulnerable to Carnapian deflationism as traditional metaphysics. Consequently, neo-positivist metaphysics does not provide the promised metaphysics that can avoid Carnapian deflationism. While this conclusion focuses on Ney’s neo-positivist metaphysics, its scope includes any attempt to avoid Carnapian deflationism by a naturalized metaphysics that relies on strict deference to the findings of science. Substantial metaphysics – naturalized or not – is impossible unless or until Carnapian deflationism is refuted, and the resources for such a refutation cannot be found in naturalized metaphysics.