Combining Science and Metaphysics

Contemporary Physics, Conceptual Revision and Common Sense

M. Morganti

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137002693
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Filosofía y ética en la ciencia

Offering a new perspective on the debate concerning naturalism in philosophy, this bookdefends the autonomy of metaphysics while also making science centre stage. Three independent case studies provide a clear introduction to, and discussion of, key philosophical issues.

1

Metaphysics and Science

1. Philosophy and science

What we now call science appeared in its primitive form as early as the period during which the first Western civilisations flourished. By collecting observational data, elaborating upon them and employing them as a guide for gaining control of things, Babylonians and Egyptians started the study of astronomy, mathematics and medicine. In ancient Greece, knowledge began to be pursued for its own sake and not just for practical purposes. But while it is legitimate to say that the distinction between what one may call the ‘pure’ and the ‘applied’ – i.e., between abstract knowledge on the one hand and technical/practical knowledge on the other – was clear already in the Greek culture, the separation between science and philosophy was at that time far from sharply drawn. As a matter of fact, for the Greeks, all those seeking knowledge for its own sake were to be classified as ‘philosophers’ (lovers of wisdom). And the later Latin term ‘scientia’ – from which ‘science’ originates – corresponded to the Greek ‘episteme’, a concept referring to certain, reliable knowledge in general. Even in the Middle Ages, when philosophy and metaphysics were more precisely defined and systematically developed, those of science and philosophy continued to be more or less interchangeable notions with a rather broad meaning.

In the modern era, however, things changed quite considerably. First of all, what was known as ‘natural philosophy’ (roughly, the study of nature broadly understood) tended to be based progressively more on experiment and systematic testing of hypotheses. Secondly, the study of reality grounded in experience, as well as the progressive mathematisation of nature, became functional to a general rejection of knowledge sanctioned by dogma and authority. Overall, a distinction, and even opposition, emerged between allegedly ‘good’, modern philosophy and supposedly ‘bad’, ancient philosophy – the former emphasising the capability of individual human beings to ‘read the book of nature’ on their own, and the latter praising the great thinkers of the past and regarding truth as something only a few experts can achieve. The new attitude was most clearly expressed by the British empiricists. Francis Bacon (1526–1626) harshly criticised the Scholastics and, more generally, the Aristotelian tradition for being unable to engage in a truly rational investigation of nature. John Locke (1632–1704), by limiting all our knowledge to two sources, sensation and reflection, excluded the possibility of speculation beyond the facts of experience and consciousness. And this line of thought was taken up by David Hume (1711–1776), who declared it impossible to go beyond experience and systematised in an admirable way this fundamental assumption. Similar ideas were expressed by the thinkers associated with the Enlightenment (around the 18th century) and by positivists in the 19th century, thanks to whom the idea became more and more widespread that the only genuine knowledge comes from experience and lends itself to empirical verification. Auguste Comte (1798–1857), elaborating on Henri de Saint-Simon and Pierre-Simon de Laplace, explicitly presented the scientific method as the supreme guide to knowledge, and science as the most important of human activities. Not surprisingly, around the 1830s, in particular in the work of William Whewell, the word ‘scientist’ started to connote the systematic natural philosopher following a precise methodology, as opposed to those relying only on a priori intuition or on the unsophisticated collection of data of observation. By then, science and philosophy were separated more or less along the lines they are nowadays.

Between the 19th and the 20th century, the praise for science and its method merged with a critique of traditional Aristotelian/Scholastic philosophy (generally labelled ‘metaphysics’) as based on the improper use of language. George Edward Moore (1873–1958), for example, stated that metaphysical questions arise from misunderstandings due to the bad use of language; and that, consequently, metaphysics is to be regarded as a mere obstacle to the proper inquiry into the nature of things. The anti-metaphysical tendency reached its climax with the development of the neopositivist strand of philosophy (also known as ‘logical empiricism’) in the first half of the 20th century. Neopositivists put strong emphasis on the verifiability of propositions on the basis of observation. This emphasis implied ruling out the possibility that substantive claims about the world could be formulated without relying on experience, with which the empiricist, positivist and ‘proper language’ strands of thought came to be fused into one larger system.¹ Proceeding from Kant’s treatment of the ‘antinomies or reason’, for example, Alfred J. Ayer [1936] argued that, exactly because they are in principle detached from experience and cannot be verified, metaphysical propositions must be deemed meaningless. Similar pronouncements were made, as is well known, by Carnap and others.

On the other hand, the neopositivist project² turned out to be a failure for various reasons. Among these, the critique of the sharp distinction between the observable and the theoretical; the Quinean attack on the analytic/synthetic distinction; the Kuhnian and post-Kuhnian views on the history of science and its discontinuities; and, most importantly, the realisation of the fact that verifiability constitutes an inadequate criterion for establishing what counts as meaningful and, thus, what qualifies as a scientific (as opposed to pseudo-scientific or non-scientific) statement. Because of this, not surprisingly, the neopositivist condemnation of metaphysics turned out not to be conclusive. In particular, Karl Popper – while granting that metaphysical statements do not lend themselves to empirical testing – denied that they are meaningless, and instead took them to express ideas and conjectures about reality that it is reasonable to devise and evaluate. Indeed, for Popper, metaphysical views play a constructive role for science itself, at least in heuristically guiding it in its formulation of ‘proper’ hypotheses and theories.

In general, metaphysics continued to be alive throughout the entire 20th century: first, during the very period in which neopositivism flourished – with thinkers such as Roman Ingarden and Gustav Bergmann;³ and, afterwards, with the decline of logical empiricism. In the second half of the 20th century, metaphysics even experienced a progressive resurgence. Peter Strawson’s “Individuals” [1959] is often regarded as a milestone in this process of revival. There, the distinction was drawn between ‘descriptive’ and ‘revisionary’ forms of metaphysics and the relevance of the former – i.e., of metaphysics as the study and clarification of our way of categorising reality in our thought and language and of its necessary preconditions – was defended. Starting from that moment, metaphysics gradually gained popularity, even – if not especially – among the so-called ‘analytic’ philosophers who can be considered the direct descendants of the neopositivist tradition; and even in its revisionary form, aiming to tell us how we should conceive of reality.

The opposition between supporters and detractors of metaphysics, however, continued, and no uncontested winner emerged. In fact, up to today, no consensus has been reached as to what (if any) the relationship between science and metaphysics should be – not even within empiricist⁴ circles. In particular, it is true that in recent times, there have been attempts at reconciliation and compromise between science and traditional metaphysical inquiry or, alternatively, attempts to show conclusively that metaphysics is not worth doing, as it is nothing but a remnant of bygone ages not yet illuminated by science and its methodology. And it is true that all these attempts have often been made from a renovated empiricist perspective, now free from the constraints set by the criterion of verifiability. But it is also a fact that a well-defined, shared basis of explicit assumptions and definitions is lacking, and it is therefore not surprising that, so far, the contenders have been unable to truly solve the problematic tension. In particular, metaphysics seems to have been defined only implicitly, via a somewhat vague reference, for instance, to Aristotle and medieval philosophy. Thus, it appears necessary to say something more about science, metaphysics and their mutual relationship. Before undertaking this project, though, it is advisable to introduce another theme, directly relevant for a proper evaluation of the issues we will be interested in.

1.1 Naturalism?

Modern-day empiricists are often self-proclaimed naturalists. By ‘naturalism’, philosophers generally mean the view that ‘philosophy must be continuous with the sciences’ and ‘there is no first philosophy’. That is, great systematic thinking such as that of, say, Kant or Hegel must give way to philosophy as a reflection on our best knowledge of reality, which is one not based on armchair speculation but, rather, on the experience-based methodology distinctive of the sciences. This sounds good. Nonetheless, it remains unclear how exactly this requirement of continuity between science and philosophy and rejection of abstract philosophical constructions should be understood and put into practice. In this sense, as we already mentioned, an imprecise characterisation of metaphysics as ‘whatever Aristotle and the Scholastics were doing’ seems to be often implicitly at work, which is certainly unsatisfactory.

In practice, the naturalistic credo has led – perhaps unsurprisingly – many once again to seek the elimination of metaphysics along lines similar to those followed and recommended by the logical positivists. In a recent book, for example, Jack Ritchie [2008] defends a sort of ‘deflationary naturalism’ that invites philosophers to limit themselves to scientific claims and hypotheses as much as possible and ends up effectively eliminating metaphysics. According to Ritchie, the general principle that the naturalistic philosopher has to follow is that of only pursuing philosophical projects that can be carried out through a detailed investigation of science [Ib.; 197]. As an example, Ritchie provides the study of the mutual relationships among the different sciences. His view is that philosophers have often been concerned with such a connection, in some cases promoting reduction and unification (see, e.g., Oppenheim and Putnam [1958]), in other cases endorsing a view of science as a fragmented patchwork of relatively independent parts; but the direct observation and study of actual science, and in particular of actual interdisciplinary work, shows (or at least may show) that neither of the two extreme views is correct, and a more flexible account (or, at any rate, further reflection and analysis) is in order, and this is the direction future philosophical analysis should take.

Independently of the interest of the study recommended by Ritchie in this specific case, his attitude is continuous with respectable philosophical stances that preserve and elaborate on the neopositivist idea that grand systematic philosophical thinking should make room for philosophy as an a posteriori reflection on actual science. Indeed, Ritchie overtly acknowledges the closeness of his viewpoint to Fine’s [1984] ‘natural ontological attitude’, the view that science should be taken at face value and no overly ambitious philosophical gloss should be added to it (e.g., realism, antirealism, correspondence theory of truth).⁵ However, without entering into a detailed discussion of Fine’s views, the worry exists that the deflationary attitude recommended by Ritchie, more or less as in the case of neopositivism, sacrifices too much in proportion to the actual strength of the arguments provided in its support. One first obvious thought is that a deflationary view of the sort just described runs the risk of not taking adequately into account the well-known recommendation that metaphysics be preserved in its traditional form because, in that form, it is part and parcel of a lot of what goes on in actual scientific theory-making. More generally, the risk is that one presupposes a sharp divide between science and metaphysics which either does not exist or can only be drawn in ways – yet to be identified – which, as a matter of fact, do not serve one’s intended purposes. In connection to this, it is interesting to notice (following Friedman [2001; 12–13]) that supposedly paradigmatic figures of scientists such as Helmholtz and even members-to-be of the Vienna Circle such as the young Schlick did not see ‘scientific philosophy’ as necessarily grounded on this sort of deflationist stance. Schlick, for instance, argued at one point that we must begin with special problems of the special sciences but then move up “to the ultimate attainable principles ... which, because of their generality, no longer belong to any special science, but rather lie beyond them ... in philosophy” [1978; 335]. Be this as it may, the very definition of naturalism that Ritchie starts from (i.e., the abovementioned requirement of continuity between science and metaphysics) leaves room in conceptual space for alternatives that should be evaluated with greater care. As a matter of fact, Ritchie himself acknowledges the possibility of a more ambitious form of naturalism about metaphysics. He identifies it with what he calls ‘constructive methodological naturalism’, which he characterises on the basis of its appeal to inference to the best explanation to justify metaphysical conclusions. However, that the use of inference to the best explanation suffices in itself for delineating an interesting form of metaphysics, and one that should appear relevant from the perspective of the scientifically-minded philosopher, is unlikely. Is not the use of abductive method the distinctive feature of any attempt (be it scientific or philosophical) to move from the known to the conjectural? Not surprisingly, after briefly examining this option, Ritchie sets aside constructive methodological naturalism in favour of his own, philosophically less ambitious, variety of naturalism. Equally unsurprisingly, not everyone will be satisfied with his assessment of forms of naturalism alternative to the deflationary variety.

Another version of naturalised metaphysics is defended and articulated by Ladyman and Ross [2007]. These authors argue against what they call ‘neo-Scholastic metaphysics’, which they connote as an activity that puts forward abstract claims and hypotheses that only pay lip service to science⁶ and are, in fact, grounded almost exclusively in commonsense intuition. As an alternative, Ladyman and Ross defend a conception of metaphysics as the search for, and promotion of, unification among scientific theories on the basis of physics. (They contend that such unification is best achieved by endorsing a specific revisionary metaphysical viewpoint – more on this in later sections.) Naturalised metap...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• 1.   Metaphysics and Science
• 2.   Naturalism
• 3.   Matter
• 4.   Space and Time
• 5.   Parts and Wholes
• Conclusions
• References
• Index