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Should Methodological Naturalists Commit to Metaphysical Naturalism?

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Abstract

It is widely supposed that methodological naturalism, understood as a thesis about the methodology of science, is metaphysically neutral, and that this in turn guarantees the value-neutrality of science. In this paper we argue that methodological naturalism is underpinned by certain ontological and epistemological assumptions including evidentialism and the causal closure of the physical, adoption of which necessitates commitment to metaphysical naturalism.

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Notes

  1. Philosophers including Pennock (2011), MacMullin (2001), Halvorson (2016), Ruse (2005) and Boudry et al. (2010) have defended this view.

  2. Halvorson asserts that even an appeal to concepts like matter, energy, space and mass is not fruitful in drawing a distinction between the natural and the supernatural, since there are cases of scientific terms which don’t possess some of these properties (Halvorson 2016, 139); but this idea also has its opponents. In view of the challenges of defining “natural”, and for reasons of brevity, we characterize the natural simply by reference to the agreed examples.

  3. In this section, by “scientific explanation” we mean informal explanation, not formal deductive explanation.

  4. For example, causation is the key concept in the “Causal-Mechanical” model of Salmon (1984), and in the “Unification Theory of Explanation” suggested by Kitcher (1989) it has an implicit role.

  5. This principle is borrowed from philosophy of mind; in that field it concerns the relation between a physical brain and a non-physical mind. But here we apply it to the domain of supernatural entities which are non-physical.

  6. INUS is the abbreviation of “an Insufficient but Necessary part of an Unnecessary but Sufficient set of conditions” for an event (Mackie 1965).

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Correspondence to Zahra Zargar.

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Zargar, Z., Azadegan, E. & Nabavi, L. Should Methodological Naturalists Commit to Metaphysical Naturalism?. J Gen Philos Sci 51, 185–193 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-019-09464-8

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