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Methodological naturalism in the sciences

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Abstract

Creationists have long argued that evolutionary science is committed to a dogmatic metaphysics of naturalism and materialism, which is based on faith or ideology rather than evidence. The standard response to this has been to insist that science is not committed to any such metaphysical doctrine, but only to a methodological version of naturalism, according to which science may only appeal to natural entities and processes. But this whole debate presupposes that there is a clear distinction between the natural and the supernatural, and thus that naturalism is a meaningful doctrine. I argue that this assumption is false. The concepts of the natural and the supernatural are in fact hopelessly obscure, such that the claim that science is committed to methodological naturalism cannot be made good. This is no victory for anti-naturalists however; explicitly supernaturalist theories, such as Creationism, can be ruled out of scientific consideration as a priori incoherent, given that they presuppose for their intelligibility that there is a meaningful natural-supernatural distinction. This is not the case for standard scientific theories however, as they are not explicitly naturalistic theories; they do not postulate natural or physical entities or processes as such.

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Notes

  1. While this is the standard response, some (e.g. Forrest 2000; see Dilley 2010) argue there is a tighter connection between ON and MN, in that the success of naturalistic science—science done in accordance with MN—strongly supports the truth of ON. So they do not deny the Creationists’ charge of a commitment to or belief in ON, but deny that it is based on faith or ideology: it is based, rather, on the past success of naturalistic inquiry.

  2. What I am calling PMN is not always presented as a version of MN; Koperski (2008), for instance, defends the view that I am calling PMN, but clearly does not think of it as a version of MN, essentially identifying MN with IMN. Indeed ‘MN’ is often used to mean ‘IMN’: the idea that, as PMN allows, supernaturalist theories can in principle be a legitimate part of science, would be thought by many to be a denial of MN, not a version of it. This is arguably just a terminological issue however.

  3. It should be noted that one can reject MN, and hold that science today can and should be considering and testing (at least some) supernaturalist hypotheses, without being committed to the truth of the latter the way that Plantinga and the creationists are: one could even hold this view while endorsing ON, since from the fact that God and other supernatural entities do not exist, it only follows that theories that appeal to such entities cannot be true, it doesn’t follow that they cannot or should not be considered and tested within contemporary science; see Dilley (2010).

  4. Thank you to an anonymous referee for suggesting I frame my project in this way.

  5. I discuss this ‘paradigm case’ approach to distinguishing the natural and supernatural below.

  6. In order to exclude the supernatural, the laws in question would have to be strict, universal, exceptionless laws. Weakened or probabilistic laws will allow for exceptions, and why couldn’t these be the very places where God or other supernatural forces act? Draper (2007, 283) notes, for instance, that theists such as Alston accept that sufficiently weakened or qualified laws or regularities are consistent with God’s acting in the world. So holding that the universe is law-governed in this attenuated sense is seemingly not sufficient for naturalism. Thank you to an anonymous referee for pressing me on this point.

  7. Schellenberg’s (2007) law-based definition of ‘nature’, as he admits, has naturalists committed to the very strong and implausible view that there are no chance or chaotic events at all in the actual world. Since Schellenberg means to reject naturalism, he is open to the charge of constructing a straw man here. Thus, he argues: naturalism is committed to there being no chance events; but there are obviously are chance events; hence naturalism is false (ibid, 156). The obvious response is to reject the first premise: naturalism is not committed to there being no chance events. Chance events can be part of nature (e.g. quantum indeterminacy): this is what all sensible naturalists should and will say.

  8. In the final section I will consider (and ultimately reject) a way of defining naturalism that may be independent of the connection with physicalism.

  9. As Hellman notes, ‘…we lack any general criterion of ‘physical object, property or law’ framed independently of existing physical theory’ (quoted in Melnyk 1997, 623).

  10. Some have tried to avoid Hempel’s dilemma altogether by pursuing the ‘via negativa’ strategy of defining physicalism, according to which the physical is defined negatively in terms of what it is not, in particular that it is not mental (e.g. Montero and Papineau 2005). This approach has been criticised by several authors (e.g. Gillett and Witmer 2001). The main problem seems to me to be that it assumes that the mental is not physical by definition, but of course some argue the mental is reducible to or identical with the physical; in order to establish that the mental is not physical we would need some independent criterion of the physical, such that the mental fails to qualify as physical, other than just ‘to be physical is to be non-mental’.

  11. Crane and Mellor (1990), Wilson (2006), and Brown and Ladyman (2009), suggest that ‘materialism’ was refuted by these developments, and contemporary ‘physicalism’, which was more ontologically permissive, arose to replace it. This seems to be just an alternative way of expressing the basic historical trajectory described by van Fraassen.

  12. It is possible to maintain an older version of physicalism, and attempt to paraphrase or explain away physicists’ later apparent reference to problematic entities. This is the strategy of Hacking’s materialist who is a realist about atoms, but an anti-realist about (for example) ‘immaterial’ fields of force (1983, 24). There is of course a respectable philosophical tradition that aims to paraphrase away apparent reference to ontologically objectionable entities in scientific theories, for example the attempts of nominalists such as Field (1980) to paraphrase away reference to abstract entities. As Ellis (1996, 171) notes, ‘On a naïve interpretation, we must suppose that there are Hilbert spaces, perfect gases, inertial systems… for it is to things like these that many of our laws seemingly refer… But my impression is that most scientific realists do not really want to take the ontological commitments of laws or theories of science in such a naïvely realistic way, but only to those which can be so understood conformably with their ontology. The rest would have to be suitably reduced, and the apparent references parsed away, to avoid any unwanted commitments.’ The idea is not that some theories in physics actually quantify over non-physical entities and processes, but rather that they only appear to, and that this appearance can be paraphrased or explained away. The prospect of success for such a project appear dim however.

  13. It is often suggested that a primary desideratum of a definition of physicalism is that the position so defined has a good chance of being true, but it is not clear why this should be so; cannot anti-realists participate in the debate about how to define realism, or semantic internalists participate in the debate about how to define externalism?

  14. Vicente bites the bullet, suggesting that while satisfying the continuity demand is a desideratum of a definition of physicalism, it may be outweighed by other considerations: the continuity intuition may be traded off against others, that are satisfied by currentism. But I agree with van Fraassen that satisfying the continuity requirement is absolutely indispensable for any adequate characterisation of physicalism (and, incidentally, that only the stance-construal of physicalism is capable of satisfying it). It is worth noting that, as I have pointed out elsewhere (Boucher 2015), the existence of the backward-looking continuity problem means that currentism would be inadequate even if the current ontology of physics was never replaced, and current physics turned out to be by-and-large correct. Currentism would still fail due to its violation of the backward-looking continuity demand.

  15. Several authors have argued that, in light of the pessimistic induction, the view Melnyk is defending will almost certainly turn out to be false.

  16. Not to be confused with ‘currentism’, which is the view that physicalism can be defined in terms of present physics. ‘Present physics-alism’ is just the view that all that exists is, or reduces to, or supervenes on, entities, forces, processes and structure quantified over in contemporary physics, leaving open whether physicalism can be so defined.

  17. It is important to see that this would not be the correct definition of physicalism even if the current ontology of physics is never in fact overturned, that is, if present physics-alism turned out to be true, even setting aside the backwards-looking continuity problem. So long as there are possible worlds in which that ontology is different, but this alternative ontology of physics intuitively counts as physical, we have a counterexample to the definition.

  18. It is noticeable that attempts to positively characterise immaterial entities usually resort to expressions such as ‘spooky’ (Ladyman 2011, 87), ‘ghostly’, etc., (‘wonder tissue’—Dennett 1991, 40) which are of no help, since we are as much in the dark about what it is to answer to these concepts as we are about what it is to be nonphysical.

  19. Draper (2007) defends a version of this view. He suggests that the natural can be defined in terms of the physical, and that which is ontologically or causally reducible to the physical. The physical, for Draper, is to be understood in terms of paradigm cases: things like ‘atoms, molecules, gravitational fields’ (2007, 277). His selection of the paradigm examples shows that this is a version of currentism (as he admits): the physical is to be identified with the entities, processes and forces referred to in physics as presently constituted. Thus, Draper’s definition of ‘physical’ (and, by extension, ‘natural’) is vulnerable both to the critique of the paradigm case approach that I offer below, and to the critique of currentism that I offered above (Schellenberg (2007) rejects Draper’s account because of its commitment to currentism).

  20. Compare Ruse (1982, 55): we may not be able to say exactly what it is to be ‘scientific’ (we may not have a clear principle for demarcating science from nonscience), yet we know intuitively that certain things, like Mendel’s first law, are scientific, while other things, like the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, are not scientific. Lemos (2007, 41–2) makes the same point about knowledge. Just as one can pick out tables and men without being able to define ‘table’ or ‘man’, one can pick out instances of knowledge without being able to define ‘knowledge’.

  21. On the other hand, the principle of reflective equilibrium could be invoked in such cases to the effect that sometimes theories have to respect intuitions. Sometimes our intuitions do need to be revised in light of theory, but other times a theory that clashes too drastically with our intuitions is rejected for that reason. The aim is to bring theory and intuitions into balance, as far as possible. If the two conflict, the question of which will prevail, the theory or the intuitions, and which will have to be surrendered, cannot be decided in advance and will depend on the strength of the intuitions, the strength of the theory, the ability of advocates of the theory to explain away the intuitions, and so forth. So in principle it is possible to maintain that our intuitions about which entities are physical and which nonphysical need to be respected by any theory. I think this would be an implausible claim however.

  22. Aside from the paradigm-case approach, the other possible way of understanding ‘physical’ or ‘natural’ in the absence of explicit definitions would be to give a family-resemblance, or ‘cluster’ account of the concepts, according to which we can’t give necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of the concepts, but we can identify a set of features, most of which are possessed by anything answering to the relevant concept; yet no feature (or specified set of features) is such that it must be possessed by anything answering to the concept. In my view the prospects for such a cluster account in this case are dim. The problem is that we just don’t have any idea what the properties are that belong in the cluster. What are the properties that are such that an entity must possess a certain number of them to count as physical, or natural? I don’t think we have the beginning of an answer to this question. Thank you to an anonymous referee for encouraging me to consider such ‘non-definitional’ construals.

  23. Smith suggests that supernatural entities can be defined as ‘causally efficacious disembodied minds or immaterial agents such as ghosts, gods, demons, and hobgoblins.’ (2017; see Fales 2013, who also defines the supernatural in terms of disembodied minds). This won’t work however. Being a disembodied mind is not necessary for being a supernatural entity; ‘supernatural’ or ‘spiritual’ forces or entities have been postulated that are apparently not minds or the products of minds (the elan vital of vitalism may be an example). And if this is the only means we have of distinguishing the natural from the supernatural, our resultant definition of the natural—‘everything that is not a disembodied mind’—is surely too weak. If we consider the second disjunct, we see that since ‘immaterial’ figures in the definiens, which is essentially a synonym for ‘supernatural’, the definition is circular. And even if they are not exact synonyms, given we are as much in the dark about what it is to be immaterial as we are about what it is to be supernatural, the definition is unilluminating.

  24. My claim that supernatural statements and theories are unintelligible invites comparison with positivism, but I am not claiming that such theories are meaningless because empirically unverifiable. Verifiability plays no role in my argument, and it is consistent with my view that unverifiable claims and theories can be meaningful. My view also differs from the widespread view that what disqualifies theories such as IDC from science is that they are in principle untestable (Sober 2000; Pennock 2001, 2011). This is essentially a version of IMN; it accepts that supernaturalist claims and theories are intelligible, and may even be true, but argues they are unscientific because empirically untestable.

  25. Although this paper is about MN in the sciences, not about the philosophy of mind, it is clearly an implication of my view that debates about physicalism and dualism with respect to, say, consciousness, are also ill-conceived.

  26. It is sometimes claimed not just that supernaturalist theories are in principle subject to empirical test, but that some have actually been tested and falsified, for instance young-earth creationism, with its claims that ‘the universe is approximately 6-10 thousand years old, all species of living things were created at the same time, and geographical features of the earth are the result of a great flood’ (Schick 2000, 33). It is indeed the case that these claims have been empirically refuted. But notice that none of them as stated entails any claim about the supernatural. Taken as they are, they are straightforwardly empirical-historical claims, and are certainly not a priori unintelligible. But if they are interpreted in supernatural terms—if, for example, the ‘creator’ responsible for the species of living things, or the flood, is said to be divine or supernatural—then we have transgressed the limits of intelligibility, on my view (see Sober 2011 on the question of whether such ‘mixed’ claims—claims that are about both the supernatural and the empirical world—are testable. He argues that they are, but that is because he does not regard supernatural claims in general as unintelligible). From the fact that certain empirical claims advanced by proponents of supernaturalist theories are intelligible and scientifically testable, it doesn’t follow that the supernaturalist theories themselves are. Thus it is equally true that if we had strong evidence in support of these empirical claims, this would not lend any support at all to the supernaturalist theories with which they are associated.

  27. Boudry et al approvingly quote Edis, who suggests that to find evidence of the supernatural, we would need to ‘seek ways in which the natural order is disrupted, indicating a reality beyond the material world.’ (Edis 2002, quoted in Boudry et al 2010.) It follows from my view that we can attach no sense to the idea of ‘a reality beyond the material world’. ‘Violations’ or ‘disruptions’ of established laws would call for new scientific theories to account for the anomalous phenomena, not supernatural theories.

  28. Proponents of IDC sometimes claim (largely for political reasons) their theory is neutral on the identity of the intelligent designer it postulates, leaving open whether it is a supernatural being or, say, super-intelligent aliens. As Sober points out however, the intelligent-aliens theory just pushes the problem back a step: how are the aliens and their intelligence to be explained (2007)? Sober argues that the theory is compelled to posit a supernatural designer at some point, but I would not want to follow him in this. All we need say is that the theory faces an intolerable regress, and thus is explanatorily inadequate. (I didn’t say the aliens theory was potentially a good theory, just that it was not a priori unintelligible.).

  29. Smith (2017) argues that supernaturalist theories violate MN not in virtue of their ontology of supernatural entities and processes, but in virtue of their form of justification: they are supported using methods, such as faith, divine revelation and so on, that are inadmissible in science. But Smith’s characterisation of the methods that are scientifically acceptable is quite weak: essentially that they involve reason, evidence and rational inference. The problem is that, by and large, creationists—especially ID creationists—at least claim to be employing these methods: they just think that these methods can be used to justify belief in the supernatural. They at least claim not to be relying of faith, divine revelation and so on. Perhaps this is disingenuous, of course. But taken on face value, they are employing the methods of science that Smith says are required by MN (though perhaps not very well) in support of their views. (Dawes points out that Aquinas’ arguments for the existence of God were based on reason, logic, and observation (2011, 9); was he therefore not violating MN? Perhaps Smith would bite the bullet and accept that he wasn’t, but surely arguments for the existence of God violate MN if anything does; if they don’t, MN has been defined too weakly.) So it is unlikely that supernaturalist theories like IDC can be ruled out of scientific consideration using Smith’s fairly weak methodological criteria.

  30. Dawes (2011) argues that science has a provisional ‘working ontology’, a set of entities and forces that prior science and common sense suggest are likely to exist. The working ontology of current science includes only natural entities and forces, but this is open to revision in the light of evidence. This would require scientists to have an independent means of determining, for some newly proposed entity, whether it is natural or supernatural. But there are no such means. Consider the neutrino, one of Dawes’ own examples. As first theorised, it lacked mass and extension. Dawes notes that according to the conception of physical objects accepted at one point in the history of science, such an entity would have to count as non-physical. Yet if Dawes is right about the naturalistic ‘working ontology’ of science, scientists were nonetheless able to determine that the neutrino was a natural, not supernatural, entity, and so consistent with their naturalistic working ontology. How did they do it? What criteria did they use? What is it to be natural, according to Dawes, such that the neutrino counted as natural?

  31. Chalmers argues that while consciousness violates materialism (as it does not logically supervene on the physical), it does not violate naturalism, since on his view, consciousness is part of the natural world of space and time, and is subject to natural (although currently unknown) laws, and thus there is no reason to think it might not one day be fully explained using normal scientific methods (albeit with a large amount of help from philosophy) and fully integrated into our overall picture of the natural world (Chalmers 1996). Van Fraassen notes that angels, demons and the like, though immaterial, have been thought to manifest themselves at certain points in space and time (2002, 52); while the immaterial elan vital, might be thought to, in some sense, occupy space and/or time; and Cartesian egos are supposed to occupy time but not space; though the limits of intelligibility are surely being tested here.

  32. ‘(W)e propose to define ‘supernatural’ as referring to any phenomenon which has its basis in entities and processes that transcend the spatiotemporal realm of impersonal matter and energy described by modern science’ Boudry et al (2010), 233. ‘(T)he ‘natural world’ is understood as the totality of entities, events, and processes that have spatiotemporal location. In general, all fundamental facts or truths have spatiotemporal location.’ Sober, quoted in Dilley (2010), 124.

  33. It was subsequently discovered to have non-zero mass (Dawes 2011, 14), but this doesn’t affect the main point.

  34. Ladyman et al (2007, 23) recognize that ‘the fact that contemporary physics takes very seriously the idea that spacetime itself is emergent from some more fundamental structure’ is serious trouble for Armstrong’s definition of naturalism.

  35. We also have another instance of the pattern van Fraassen identifies whereby materialism and naturalism appear to survive the falsification of specific propositions about the world with which they may be identified at certain times. If Armstrong’s scenario in which physics discovered that space and time were not ontologically fundamental came about, the thesis that ‘the world, the totality of entities, is nothing more than the spacetime system’, would be falsified. Yet it is extremely implausible that naturalism would thereby be falsified. Van Fraassen would go on to suggest that this supports his contention that positions like materialism and naturalism are ‘stances’, ‘attitudes’, or ‘spirits’, rather than being identifiable with specific claims or factual beliefs about the world. (Dawes and Smith also argue that naturalism is a stance, not a doctrine (2018, 29).) As I said above, I think that’s correct, but will not pursue the argument here.

  36. Equally clearly, the arguments for believing in the existence of numbers would not carry over to the existence of such a being.

  37. Another, related disanalogy is that while Platonic entities are abstract universals, God, angels, spirits and other divine beings are usually thought to be concrete particulars (Fales 2013, 254).

  38. See Plantinga (1997) for a criticism of this idea from a theistic standpoint. Plantinga interprets it as an instance of ‘God-of-the-gaps’ theology, which he rejects as antithetical to ‘serious Christian theism’.

  39. Thus I disagree with Sober’s suggestion (2011) that ON does not imply MN because even if there is no God, science may have pragmatic reasons to posit him, just as, even if there are no numbers, science may have pragmatic reasons to posit them. Sober overlooks the important disanalogies between Platonism about numbers and theories such as IDC that I am here highlighting. See Dilley (2010) for different arguments for the claim that ON doesn’t imply MN. He argues indeed for the stronger view that that defenders of ON should reject MN.

  40. This point is recognised by Draper (2007). On his account of the supernatural, to be supernatural includes being capable of influencing the natural world. It follows that entities that are not part of nature, but can’t causally influence the natural world, such as numbers and other abstract or Platonic entities, count as non-natural, but not as supernatural. On Draper’s view naturalism rules out the supernatural, but doesn’t rule out non-natural abstract or Platonic entities (naturalism in Draper’s sense is therefore equivalent to what Boudry et al (2010) call ‘philosophical naturalism’).

  41. Boudry et al define define ‘supernatural’ as ‘referring to any phenomenon which has its basis in entities and processes that transcend the spatiotemporal realm of impersonal matter and energy described by modern science’ (2010, 233) (italics added). How processes, which are time-dependent, could exist outside of the spatiotemporal realm is not clear. This seems to be an example of how, when the ‘supernatural’ is imagined, frequently what is imagined is just an enlarged, more inclusive version of our spatiotemporal world that doesn’t really differ fundamentally from it in ontological terms. Sober makes the point that that language of the supernatural existing ‘outside’ of, or ‘beyond’ the natural world, also encourages this conception (2011).

  42. If the objection be urged, ‘of course science has use for numbers!’, recall that the claim that numbers exist is no part of any scientific theory. It is only philosophers who consider and believe or disbelieve such claims. Numbers could fail to exist without any scientific theory or explanation being in any way affected. Fales (2013, 248–9) states that it is hard to see why science should have any quarrel with belief in abstracta; but this is different from the stronger claim that positing them could play any positive role in a scientific theory.

  43. It is important to see that this need not be the view that the physical world is causally closed. The reason is that this view presupposes that we know what the referent of ‘physical world’ is, something I am denying. All that PN implies is that the spatiotemporal world is causally closed.

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Acknowledgements

Thank you to Tiddy Smith, Greg Dawes, Greg Restall, Felicity Joseph and Russell Blackford for helpful comments and suggestions. Versions of this paper were presented at the Australasian Association of Philosophy conference, and the University of New England philosophy seminar. Thank you to those in attendance.

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Boucher, S.C. Methodological naturalism in the sciences. Int J Philos Relig 88, 57–80 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-019-09728-9

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