Preface
This is a polemical book. One of its main contentions is that contemporary
analytic metaphysics, a professional activity engaged in by some extremely
intelligent and morally serious people, fails to qualify as part of the enlightened
pursuit of objective truth, and should be discontinued.We think it is impossible
to argue for a point like this without provoking some anger. Suggesting that
a group of highly trained professionals have been wasting their talents—and,
worse, sowing systematic confusion about the nature of the world, and how to
find out about it—isn’t something one can do in an entirely generous way. Let
us therefore stress that we wrote this book not in a spirit of hostility towards
philosophy or our fellow philosophers, but rather the opposite. We care a great
deal about philosophy, and are therefore distressed when we see its reputation
harmed by its engagement with projects and styles of reasoning we believe bring
it into disrepute, especially among scientists. We recognize that we may be
regarded as a bit rough on some other philosophers, but our targets are people
with considerable influence rather than novitiates. We think the current degree
of dominance of analytic metaphysics within philosophy is detrimental to the
health of the subject, and make no apologies for trying to counter it.
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1
In Defence of Scientism
The revival ofmetaphysics after the implosion of logical positivismwas accom-
panied by the ascendancy of naturalism in philosophy, and so it seemed obvious
to many that metaphysics ought not to be ‘revisionary’ but ‘descriptive’ (in Peter
Strawson’s terminology, 1959). That is, rather than metaphysicians using ratio-
nal intuition to work out exactly how the absolute comes to self-consciousness,
they ought instead to turn to science and concentrate on explicating the deep
structural claims about the nature of reality implicit in our best theories. So, for
example, Special Relativity ought to dictate the metaphysics of time, quantum
physics the metaphysics of substance, and chemistry and evolutionary biology
the metaphysics of natural kinds. However, careful work by various philosophers
of science has shown us that this task is not straightforward because science,
usually and perhaps always, underdetermines the metaphysical answers we are
seeking. (See French 1998, 93). Many people have taken this in their stride and
set about exploring the various options that are available. Much excellent work
has resulted.⁹ However, there has also been another result of the recognition that
science doesn’t wear metaphysics on its sleeve, namely the resurgence of the kind
of metaphysics that floats entirely free of science. Initially granting themselves
permission to do a bit of metaphysics that seemed closely tied to, perhaps even
important to, the success of the scientific project, increasing numbers of philoso-
phers lost their positivistic spirit. The result has been the rise to dominance of
projects in analytic metaphysics that have almost nothing to do with (actual)
science. Hence there are now, once again, esoteric debates about substance,
universals, identity, time, properties, and so on, which make little or no reference
to science, and worse, which seem to presuppose that science must be irrelevant
to their resolution. They are based on prioritizing armchair intuitions about the
nature of the universe over scientific discoveries. Attaching epistemic significance
to metaphysical intuitions is anti-naturalist for two reasons. First, it requires
ignoring the fact that science, especially physics, has shown us that the universe
is very strange to our inherited conception of what it is like. Second, it requires
ignoring central implications of evolutionary theory, and of the cognitive and
behavioural sciences, concerning the nature of our minds.
–
1.2.1 Intuitions and common sense in metaphysics
The idea that intuitions are guides to truth, and that they constitute the basic
data for philosophy, is of course part of the Platonic and Cartesian rationalist
tradition.¹⁰ However, we have grounds that Plato and Descartes lacked for
thinking that much of what people find intuitive is not innate, but is rather a
developmental and educational achievement. What counts as intuitive depends
partly on our ontogenetic cognitive makeup and partly on culturally specific
learning. Intuitions are the basis for, and are reinforced and modified by,
everyday practical heuristics for getting around in the world under various
resource (including time) pressures, and navigating social games; they are not
cognitive gadgets designed to produce systematically worthwhile guidance in
either science or metaphysics. In light of the dependence of intuitions on species,
cultural, and individual learning histories, we should expect developmental and
cultural variation in what is taken to be intuitive, and this is just what we find. In
the case of judgements about causes, for example,Morris et al. (1995) report that
Chinese and American subjects differed with respect to how they spontaneously
allocated causal responsibility to agents versus environmental factors. Given
that the ‘common sense’ of many contemporary philosophers is shaped and
supplemented by ideas from classical physics, the locus of most metaphysical
discussions is an image of the world that sits unhappily between the manifest
image and an out of date scientific image.¹¹
While contemporary physics has become even more removed from common
sense than classical physics, we also have other reasons to doubt that our common
sense image of the world is an appropriate basis for metaphysical theorizing.
Evolution has endowed us with a generic theory or model of the physical world.
This is evident from experiments with very young children, who display surprise
and increased attention when physical objects fail to behave in standard ways. In
particular, they expect ordinary macroscopic objects to persist over time, and not
to be subject to fusion or fission (Spelke et al. 1995). For example, if a ball moves
behind a screen and then two balls emerge from the other side, or vice versa,
infants are astonished. We have been equipped with a conception of the nature
of physical objects which has been transformed into a foundational metaphysics
of individuals, and a combinatorial and compositional conception of reality that
is so deeply embedded in philosophy that it is shared as a system of ‘obvious’
presuppositions by metaphysicians who otherwise disagree profoundly.
This metaphysics was well suited to the corpuscularian natural philosophy of
Descartes, Boyle, Gassendi, and Locke. Indeed, the primary qualities of matter
which became the ontological basis of the mechanical philosophy are largely
properties which form part of the manifest image of the world bequeathed to
us by our natural history. That natural history has been a parochial one, in the
sense that we occupy a very restricted domain of space and time. We experience
events that last from around a tenth of a second to years. Collective historical
memory may expand that to centuries, but no longer. Similarly, spatial scales of
a millimetre to a few thousand miles are all that have concerned us until recently.
Yet science has made us aware of how limited our natural perspective is. Protons,
for example, have an effective diameter of around 10−15m, while the diameter of
the visible universe is more than 1019 times the radius of the Earth. The age of
the universe is supposed to be of the order of 10 billion years. Even more homely
sciences such as geology require us to adopt time scales that make all of human
history seem like a vanishingly brief event.
As LewisWolpert (1992) chronicles,modern science has consistently shown us
that extrapolating our pinched perspective across unfamiliar scales, magnitudes,
and spatial and temporal distances misleads us profoundly. Casual inspection
and measurement along scales we are used to suggest that we live in a Euclidean
space; General Relativity says that we do not. Most people, Wolpert reports, are
astounded to be told that there are more molecules in a glass of water than there
are glasses of water in the oceans, and more cells in one human finger than there
are people in the world (ibid. 5). Inability to grasp intuitively the vast time scales
on which natural selection works is almost certainly crucial to the success of
creationists in perpetuating foolish controversies about evolution (Kitcher 1982).
The problems stemming from unfamiliar measurement scales are just the tip of
an iceberg of divergences between everyday expectations and scientific findings.
No one’s intuitions, in advance of the relevant science, told them that white
light would turn out to have compound structure, that combustion primarily
involves something being taken up rather than given off (Wolpert 1992, 4), that
birds are the only living descendants of dinosaurs, or that Australia is presently
on its way to a collision with Alaska. AsWolpert notes, science typically explains
the familiar in terms of the unfamiliar. Thus he rightly says that ‘both the ideas
that science generates and the way in which science is carried out are entirely
counter-intuitive and against common sense—by which I mean that scientific
ideas cannot be acquired by simple inspection of phenomena and that they
are very often outside everyday experience’ (ibid. 1). He later strengthens the
point: ‘I would almost contend that if something fits with common sense it
almost certainly isn’t science’ (ibid. 11). B. F. Skinner characteristically avoids
all waffling on the issue: ‘What, after all, have we to show for non-scientific or
pre-scientific good judgment, or common sense, or the insights gained through
personal experience? It is science or nothing’ (Skinner 1971, 152–3).
Lewis famously advocated a metaphysical methodology based on subjecting
rival hypotheses to a cost–benefit analysis. Usually there are two kinds of cost
associated with accepting a metaphysical thesis. The first is accepting some kind
of entity into one’s ontology, for example, abstracta, possibilia, or a relation
of primitive resemblance. The second is relinquishing some intuitions, for
example, the intuition that causes antedate their effects, that dispositions reduce
to categorical bases, or that facts about identity over time supervene on facts
about instants of time. It is taken for granted that abandoning intuitions should
be regarded as a cost rather than a benefit. By contrast, as naturalists we are
not concerned with preserving intuitions at all, and argue for the wholescale
abandonment of those associated with the image of the world as composed of
little things, and indeed of the more basic intuition that there must be something
of which the world is made.
There are many examples of metaphysicians arguing against theories by
pointing to unintuitive consequences, or comparing theories on the basis of
the quantity and quality of the intuitions with which they conflict. Indeed,
proceeding this way is more or less standard. Often, what is described as intuitive
or counterintuitive is recondite. For example, L. A. Paul (2004, 171) discusses
the substance theory that makes the de re modal properties of objects primitive
consequences of their falling under the sortals that they do: ‘A statue is essentially
statue shaped because it falls under the statue-sort, so cannot persist through
remoulding into a pot’ (171). This view apparently has ‘intuitive appeal’, but
sadly, ‘any counterintuitive consequences of the view are difficult to explain
or make palatable’. The substance theory implies that two numerically distinct
objects such as a lump of bronze and a statue can share their matter and their
region, but this ‘is radically counterintuitive, for it seems to contradict our usual
way of thinking aboutmaterial objects as individuated by theirmatter and region’
(172). Such ways of thinking are not ‘usual’ except among metaphysicians and
we do not share them.
Paul says ‘[I]t seems, at least prima facie, that modal properties should super-
vene on the nonmodal properties shared by the statue and the lump’ (172).
This is the kind of claim that is regularly made in the metaphysics literature.
We have no idea whether it is true, and we reject the idea that such claims can
be used as data for metaphysical theorizing. Paul summarizes the problem for
the advocate of substance theory as follows: ‘This leaves him in the unfortunate
position of being able to marshal strong and plausible commonsense intuitions
to support his view but of being unable to accommodate these intuitions in
a philosophically respectable way’ (172). So according to Paul, metaphysics
proceeds by attempts to construct theories that are intuitive, commonsensical,
palatable, and philosophically respectable. The criteria of adequacy for meta-
physical systems have clearly come apart from anything to do with the truth.
Rather they are internal and peculiar to philosophy, they are semi-aesthetic,
and they have more in common with the virtues of story-writing than with
science.
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In 1.1 we announced our resistance to the ‘domestication’ of science. It would
be easy to get almost any contemporary philosopher to agree that domestication
is discreditable if the home for which someone tries to make science tame is
a populist environment. Consider, for example, the minor industry that seeks
to make sense of quantum mechanics by analogies with Eastern mysticism.
This is obviously, in an intellectual context much less rigorous than that of
professional philosophy, an attempt to domesticate physics by explaining it in
terms of things that common sense thinks it comprehends. Few philosophers
will regard the gauzy analogies found in this genre as being of the slightest
metaphysical interest. Yet are quantum processes any more like those described
by Newtonian physics than they are like the temporal and spatial dislocations
imagined by mystics, which ground the popular comparisons? People who
know almost no formal physics are encouraged by populists to find quantum
mechanics less wild by comparing it to varieties of disembodiment. Logically,
this is little different from philosophers encouraging people who know a bit
of physics to make quantum accounts seem less bizarre by comparing them
to what they learned in A-level chemistry.²⁸ We might thus say that whereas
naturalistic metaphysics ought to be a branch of the philosophy of science, much
metaphysics that pays lip-service to naturalism is really philosophy of A-level
chemistry.
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and then i got bored with the next parts.