Abstract
The relevance of analytic metaphysics has come under criticism: Ladyman and Ross, for instance, have suggested do discontinue the field. French and 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 and 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.
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Notes
Here, we do not take stock on the nature of the relation between analytic metaphysics and naturalized metaphysics (e.g. the question of whether the latter is actually a part of the former according to some definitions of the fields), although we will argue at the end that analytic metaphysics should not be discontinued and can evolve largely independently from metaphysics of science.
One could argue that metaphysics has intrinsic value, but that this intrinsic value has nothing to do with truth—see for instance Benovsky (2016) who defends the claim that metaphysical views do have values grounded in their beauty. But we will not consider these forms of value not grounded in truth within the scope of this paper.
Our only disagreement with Ladyman & Ross in this article is about their claim that analytic metaphysics should be discontinued. We are otherwise sympathetic to their claim that special sciences must be taken into account in order to address metaphysical questions. They raise in particular another interesting issue, that we do not address here, about the status of folk metaphysics and what they call “notional worlds”.
“Philosophy of contemporary physics” will denote here the set of philosophical investigations on our most fundamental empirically confirmed physical theories since the quantum and relativistic revolutions (general relativity, quantum field theory) and all the philosophical investigations on the research programs aiming at making at least a step towards a theory of quantum gravity (string theory, loop quantum gravity, non-commutative geometries, causal set theory, etc.).
Special sciences played a crucial role in this debate since Ladyman and Ross (2007) includes a chapter devoted to special sciences (see Ross et al. chapter 4). The crux of its content is that special science ontologies always have, in fine, to be consistent with the ontology of physics. As they write (Ross et al. 2007a, 190): “failure of an interpretation of special science generalizations to respect negative implications of physical theory is grounds for rejecting such generalizations”. In this perspective, the role of metaphysics, according to them, is to offer a general unification of sciences, being granted that physics rules out some otherwise possible ontological interpretations of special sciences.
In this text, we use “category” and “class of entities” as synonymous, with a broad understanding of the term “entities” that covers structures.
The compatibility of an ontology of particles with QFT is still debated—cf. for instance Halvorson and Clifton (2002) and Baker (2009). Also, Le Bihan (2015) argued that if we accept the reality of dispositions, then a description in terms of particles seem to be redundant with a description in terms of dispositions. In this section, we do not take stance on the reality of particles.
In the sense that the process to which an object participates can have a well-defined instant velocity process profile (Smith 2012). Note however that BFO does not require positions and velocities to be well-defined – so quantum mechanical constraints could be integrated in the future.
Any solution to Einstein’s equations of general relativity is a triple <M, g, T> , M being a manifold of points with coordinates and some weak topological structure, g being the metric field (which carries the information about the metric, i.e. the spatial, temporal and spatio-temporal relations between spacetime points, and the local curvature of spacetime) and T the stress-energy tensor that relates in particular the metric field g to the matter field Φ (the distribution of matter, from which we may derivate the gravitational field). In this framework, it is not clear whether spacetime should be identified with the manifold, with the metric field, or with the conjunction of the manifold and the metric field. In fact, there are two distinct debates, one about the relationship between the manifold M and the metric field g or, moving from the mathematical level of description to the physical level, between spacetime points and the physical metric field described by g (cf. for instance Esfeld and Lam 2006), the other one about the relationship between the manifold M and the metric field g on the one hand, and the matter field Φ on the other hand (see Pooley 2013).
Note however that contrarily to Mumford who sees a disposition and its categorical base as identical at the token-level, Röhl and Jansen would see them as different entities that belong to two different categories, namely (set of) qualities versus realizable entities.
We are thereby complementing French and McKenzie’s work, who seem to be sympathetic to the idea of justifying the toolbox approach with applied ontology (private correspondence).
Another statement reflecting the somewhat ambivalent attitude of F&M towards the heuristic justification of analytic metaphysical practice is that “analytic metaphysics should not take place in a disciplinary vacuum”. Prima facie, this appears to suggest that a change in methodology is required, namely that metaphysical practice should be constrained by other disciplines. However, the rest of F&M’s article suggests instead that this statement should be interpreted as concerning the justification of analytic metaphysics, which lies in other disciplines, such as philosophy of physics (as emphasized by F&M) or applied ontology (as emphasized by us). Indeed, they say elsewhere that “all that metaphysicians have to accept is the occasional raiding party from philosophers of science, keen (we hope) to see what they’re up to and what they can use for their own purposes”—suggesting that no methodological change is required for metaphysicians. Finally, they explicitly state their ambivalence when they recognize that “the picture [they] have painted is a complicated one, and that there are considerations pulling from both sides”, and call for “more nuanced positions on the basis of which more productive engagement between the two factions might be achieved”.
Note that they remain very careful about the kind of support that the heuristic approach does indeed provide to the type I and type II metaphysics (and specify that this support is significantly conditionalized). But the mere consideration that type II metaphysics could be given some support is problematic, given the fact that type II metaphysics is defined as being normatively defective.
Note that by fulfilling this heuristic purpose, type II metaphysics can help other disciplines (such as philosophy of physics, or applied ontologies of special sciences) to describe reality adequately once its tools are appropriately contextualized by those disciplines. Therefore, in definition 2*, “if it is aimed at describing reality adequately” should be understood as “if it is directly aimed at describing reality adequately”.
Again, we do not take stock here on whether analytic metaphysics is valuable for other reasons, unrelated to the toolbox approach.
In this approach, this actual value is arguably intrinsic, since it holds even though it might never be used by another field. This actual present intrinsic value thereby depends on a potential future extrinsic value.
A reviewer objected that this argument could be “used to defend the allocation of academic resources to any fanciful speculation at all”, such as “formal semantics for Klingon and Romulan. (After all, someone might someday decide to use Klingon for some currently unimagined purpose)”. We have two replies to this argument. First, Klingon (to take one of these two fictional languages drawn from Star Trek) might indeed have some applications someday; for example, it might provide some insights in linguistics. If the study of Klingon would start to bring such insights (the same way that analytic metaphysics has brought important insights to philosophy of physics and applied ontology), then it might be justified, indeed, to allocate some academic resources to its study (in proportion to the magnitude of its expected results). Second, it seems to us intuitively more likely that the purported study of the general structures of reality (which is the object of analytic metaphysics), because of its highly general scope of inquiry, would bring more insights to other fields than the study of the structure of an imaginary language (such as Klingon) would. However, and as noted by the reviewer, a specific account of the circumstances in which a high degree of generality would maximize utility for other fields is still lacking, and could be investigated in future works.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful and detailed comments, as well as Jiri Benovsky, Michael Esfeld, Steven French, Kerry McKenzie, Barry Smith, Fumiaki Toyoshima and Christian Wüthrich for valuable comments on an earlier draft. This work was partly performed under a collaborative agreement between the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Geneva and made possible by Grant Number 56314 from the John Templeton Foundation; its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the John Templeton Foundation. AB acknowledges financial support by the “bourse de fellowship du département de médecine de l’université de Sherbrooke” and the CIHR-funded Quebec “SPOR Support Unit”.
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Le Bihan, B., Barton, A. Analytic Metaphysics Versus Naturalized Metaphysics: The Relevance of Applied Ontology. Erkenn 86, 21–37 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-0091-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-0091-8