Does Scientific Naturalism Exclude Metaphysics?

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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Ok guys.

Last year a university in my area hosted a philosophy conference with the same title as this thread.

The list of speakers was as follows:
J.T. Ismael, University of Arizona, “Freedom, Natural Law, and the Humanization of Physics”
Michael Friedman, Stanford University, “Wandering Significance and the Dynamics of Reason”
Mark Wilson, University of Pittsburgh, “What Can Contemporary Philosophy Learn from Our “Scientific Philosophy” Heritage?”
James Ladyman, University of Bristol, and Don Ross, UAB, “Before and After Science (With Apologies to B. Eno)”
Paul Humphreys, University of Virginia, “Metaphysics for Metahumans”
Daniel Dennett, “Kinds of Things”
Andrew Melnyk, University of Missouri, “Summary and Going Forward”

I have been charged with the task of fleshing out and then condensing this information into something consumable by undergraduate philosophy students, and with taking the technical aspects of the arguments and pointing out the ethical implications of them to create a class that relates the elements of this debate specifically to ethics.

Now the first part is easy. Determine what’s necessary for each position in the debate, take note of the relevant points of each argument, then remove the jargon and replace with plain language, seal it, put a price on it and traffic it in the philosophy department to unsuspecting students who thought they were just going to get to argue about abortion and racism and the death penalty, thus startling them into the world of philosophy.

The second part may be a bit more fun, (because I hardly, in my own opinion see a connection between a conception of metaphysics which is immutable and one that’s necessarily connected to morality and ethics).

Conveniently enough…these lectures were recorded and posted on youtube.

So…if anyone has any interest in this particular subject, feel free to use this thread as a place to disseminate your ideas, and possibly I might gain some insight that would make the job I do better.

Here are the lectures as I promised: youtube.com/results?search_q … llmer&aq=f

Thanks to all who participate in advance.

And to get this started, I’ll throw out one possible answer to the question of whether or not science can dispense w/ metaphysics. Here we go…

Scientific naturalism, like most sciences, has a system of proofs which relies heavily on mathematics.
Mathematics doesn’t seem to function very well without assuming some kind of identity theory as a most basic axiom.
Even if two objects in the physical world share the maximum number of properties, it is impossible for them to share the property of spatiotemporal location.
Because there is no 100% identity in the physical world. Mathematics must postulate identities in order to be able to process data at all.
Postulating non-physical entities, (like identities), is what you do when you’re doing metaphysics.
Science therefore cannot dispense with metaphysics.

Now I’m not saying that you can’t push metaphysics into a corner, or redefine it so narrowly that it’s hardly relevant, I’m just saying you can’t properly dispense of it.

That may or may not be my actual view. I’m interested in hearing yours.

Thoughts? Comments?

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identity is something entities posess once we label them as entities - everything we know has an identity - i would argue that where there is the trait of being an entity there is also the trait of having an identity - so there’s no sense treating the two as ontologically distinct things - they share a common semiotic origin . . . or something.

in any case i second the OP with regards to whether or not scientific naturalism excludes metaphysics. it doesn’t - the two merely talk past each other. metaphysics isn’t a branch of science, but we can still understand things from a metaphysical perspective without offense to science.

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Ok I think you attacked the particular term I chose to use rather than the point I was trying to make but that’s fine. I could equally say, “the postulation of mathematical structures which themselves are not physical onto the physical world by way of quantification”.

But that’s not actually the point I’m trying to make. It was more of a hairbrained example I pulled out just to guide the understanding of the material.

The more pressing matter, and the purpose for this thread was to assimilate some of the philosophical arguments in the videos into an ethical framework, or to go from the abstract to the concrete by way of analogous arguments. I’d like to come up with examples of why Darwinism means that we should act a certain way, or why the variances in levels of empirical proof in different kinds of sciences effect our overall reasoning and how that trickles down into the way people live their lives, (not the scientific evidence, but the variances in proof which seem to give rise to different epistemological camps like the science vs. religion thing).

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The whole maths/indentities thing is beyond me. I’ll just have to take your word for it that you need them for maths.

Anyway, what I wonder is, what does ‘science can dispense w/ metaphysics’ entail? I think it can mean two things. First would be the weak conclusion that science can operate without metephysics, second would be the strong conclusion that science negates the need for metaphysics altogether. I, for one, don’t believe that proving the first entails the second.

Metaphysics, by and large, is the study of concepts in language more than it is the study of physical realiaties. For example, the question of whether indentities are ‘entities’ really is a question of whether we can successfully construct a coherent concept of non-physical entities or not. And questions about reality don’t so much dig in to what can be disvoered in the physical world, but how what is discovered is to be framed conceptually. I asking and answering these questions can have its own value, apart from science. To highlight this, imagine a point at which science has given us a final theory. Even then, there will probably still be questions about whether ‘identities’ exist or not. Science may not need metaphysics, but that doesn’t mean that it is going to answer all the questions that mp is trying to answer.

If though, the question is purely ‘can science operate without metaphysics’, then I guess you are looking for a more narrow set of arguments such as the one you gave. In that case, all I’d say is that I agree that the narrowness of these examples doesn’t ‘push metaphysics in to a corner’.

I guess many metphysicians might have a problem with my view of them as investigators of language and concepts. I think a lot of metaphysicians want what they are doing to be something more similar to actual investigative science than it actually is, and I think this is a mistake.

And sorry, I really don’t have the time to watch all of those lectures, or even a good few of them! But maybe one day, as they look interesting.

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Thanks Brevel.

If you were only gonna watch one, I’d say check out either the Dennet ones, or the Ross ones. Everyone knows Dennet, plus he’s a funny guy, and Ross is actually one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and smokes alot of cigarettes.

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I would narrow it down, because this is a very wide definition of metaphysics, one that would include allmost all language unless you stick exclusively to particulars. A merchand selling apples would be doing metaphysics.

Maybe it’s metaphysics only when you think non-physical entities are real, and (non-metaphysical) abstraction if you’re just using them because it’s convenient, or something like that.

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So assume that I think a guy selling apples IS doing metaphysics. What’s wrong w/ that?

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If ethics have something to do with actions and their consequences. And if scientific theories, like for example darwinism, have some predictive value, and could inform us better as to what the consequences of certain actions will be, they would influence ethical reasoning…

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Nothing whatsoever, it’s just a matter of definition.

Or maybe the wider your concept the less useful it becomes?

Like, everthing is cool, you know.

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Good observation. I’ll be thinking about predictive values. Maybe something along the lines of: “inasmuch as the predictive theories are aligned with common sense, people should be held responsible for not taking into account things they should have been able to predict given the type of reasoning that they commonly employ”

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There may be an all-or-nothing fallacy here. Do I have to accept all aspects of the social reality in order to survive and function in it? What does it mean to “accept” any aspect of this social reality at all? Is the loony-bin the only alternative to accepting the status quo as it is imposed on us? Will not this acceptance encourage society to become more and more totalitarian?

We have to remember that society will only tolerate dissent up to a certain point. We also have to acknowledge the necessity of surviving in society as we find it. We can talk about alternative societies, fantasize about ideal societies, and speculate endlessly about the future. But we have to survive in this society here and now. This can be conceded. The problem is that there are many things about society as it is that also endanger one’s prospects of survival. If I live in a neighborhood threatened by gang wars, I have to do something about it or get the community to do something about it. Otherwise I risk being shot at the next time. Accepting society as it is may be problematic. Such acceptance could end up strengthening the very mechanism of maintaining the status quo.

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Anyone out there??

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I “think” so!

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I think so too bearded lady.

Lemme ask you something.

Let’s say that scientists somehow proved that everything in the world, as in, the WHOLE FRIKKIN WORLD UNIVERSE AND ALL, was governable by the laws of matter.

Would that change or alter your ethical point of view?

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bump

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What the hell is metaphysics? Postulating a non-physical entity? You mean like the mind you are thinking with? Or purpose or will, or something seeming like something? Could scientific naturalism be a metaphysical position?

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Metaphysics in the service of science… interesting.

What would it take for metaphysics to replace science? A claim to truth? I think so. But certainly metaphysics may be used as a tool, and as with all tools, its use can vary from one application to another. Though some might argue that metaphysics isn’t really metaphysics unless it stakes a claim to truth.

Now what do you mean by this part?

Isn’t morality and metaphysics intertwined like nothing else? I suppose it might have something to do with what you mean by ‘immutable’. Please clarify.

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I’ll have time to check out the arguments after Wednesday.

But my uninformed position is: I don’t see why it would exclude metaphysics. The epistemology of SN is basically a metaphysical appeal – to me it reads like a sort of Logical Positivism, or at least it falls into a similar trap. Why ought we limit our explanations to natural causes and events? It uses a metaphysical assertion to reject other metaphysical assertions.

The only way I could see an argument being made that it excludes metaphysics is by a sort of “subtraction on both sides” where all additional metaphysical propositions fall out of the equation due to irrelevance – but, again, why ought they be excluded absent some broader statement that is either tied to values (and excluding metaphysics from those is damned hard) or the metaphysical assertion that the phenomenal world is, indeed, the only plane of consequence.

And that is without going into the relationship between observed phenomena and the theories describing them!

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Yes, assuming there’s a mind/body distinction, then yes. In the same category as mind, I place things like identities, in the form of x=x, because no two physical objects can be 100% identical. Personally, I think all positions, including naturalism, are beneath the esoteric, completely metaphysical.

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I wouldn’t say it’s in the service of science, but that it’s a prerequisite of any kind of measurement of a physical object or phenomenon. I mean, science can’t do anything w/ out measurements, so to say it’s in the service of it confuses me a bit. I might agree that it’s necessary and essential to science, and that it couldn’t function w/ out it. While it may provide a “service” to science, science needs metaphysics more than metaphysics needs science.

By immutable, I just mean a model of metaphysics which can’t be dispensed with. I think that morality and metaphysics are necessarily intertwined if we talk specifically about religious metaphysics, but I want to establish a connection, or understand the apparent one between metaphysics per se and people’s chosen paths of action.