Scientifically Responsible Metaphysics: A Program for the Naturalization of Metaphysics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There has been much recent work calling for the naturalization of metaphysics, including most famously James Ladyman and Don Ross’ polemic, Every Thing Must Go. But much work remains to adequately articulate and motivate the call to naturalize metaphysics. My dissertation contributes to that work. Its central questions are: What relationship should metaphysics have to current science? Must good metaphysics be responsive to current science, and if so, how? Why should metaphysics be naturalized and what should its naturalization consist in? I argue, first, that for that for epistemic purposes, as opposed to heuristic or pragmatic purposes, theories should be robustly constrained and adequately warranted. The negative portion of the dissertation attacks what I call free range metaphysics — metaphysics, the content of which is constrained not by science, but only by logical, aesthetic, and psychological demands, such as the demands for consistency, simplicity, intuitive plausibility, and explanatory power. I argue that, individually and jointly, the constraints on the content of free range metaphysics are insufficiently robust and their satisfaction fails to secure sufficient epistemic warrant. Therefore, free range metaphysics cannot claim to produce justified theories of reality. The positive portion of the dissertation prescribes scientifically responsible metaphysics — metaphysics conscientiously engaged with the theories and practices of the current sciences. I argue that scientifically responsible metaphysics is better constrained and supported than free range metaphysics and therefore can better claim to justify metaphysical theories. Finally, I consider potential problem cases — cases in which some metaphysical topic is not obviously apt for being made scientifically responsible — including modal metaphysics and grounding. I resolve the problem cases by showing how the topics can be made scientifically responsible. First, I articulate a methodology for scientifically responsible modal metaphysics that takes current science as an evidence-base for the justification of modal claims and as a model of good modal reasoning. Second, I synthesize a list of fruitful uses of science for grounding theorists, including among other things: to help in the identification of putative grounding relata, to show correlations among them, to demonstrate their non-identity, to provide a stock of explanatory patterns, to identify candidate essential properties, and to motivate agnosticism about particular grounding theses where scientific support is lacking. Having resolved the problem cases, I conclude that the prospects for making metaphysics scientifically responsible are bright.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.020 | 0.029 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.057 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".