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Record W4409184114 · doi:10.1111/phpr.70002

Is Kant's critique of metaphysics obsolete?

2025· article· en· W4409184114 on OpenAlexaff
Nicholas F. Stang

Bibliographic record

VenuePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicPhilosophical Ethics and Theory
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsMetaphysicsPhilosophyEpistemologyPhilosophy of mind

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract I raise a problem about the possibility of metaphysics originally due to Kant: what explains the fact that the terms in our metaphysical theories (e.g., ‘property’, ‘grounding’) refer to entities and structures (e.g., properties, grounding) in the world? I distinguish a meta‐metaphysical view that can easily answer such questions (‘deflationism’) from a meta‐metaphysical view for which this explanatory task is more difficult (which I call the ‘substantive’ view of metaphysics). I then canvass responses that the substantive metaphysician can give to this Kantian demand for an explanation of reference in metaphysics. I argue that these responses are either inadequate or depend, implicitly or explicitly, on the idea of ‘joint carving’: carving at the joints is part of the explanation of referencefacts quite generally and our metaphysical terms in particular refer because they carve at the joints. I examine Ted Sider's recent work on joint carving and structure and argue that it cannot fill the explanatory gap. I conclude that this is reason ceterus paribus to reject the substantive view of metaphysics. Kant's critique, far from being obsolete, applies to the most cutting‐edge of contemporary meta‐metaphysical views.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.016
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.016
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.016
Threshold uncertainty score0.089

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0160.016
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0030.003
Science and technology studies0.0050.064
Scholarly communication0.0090.012
Open science0.0030.006
Research integrity0.0100.012
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0060.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.288
GPT teacher head0.416
Teacher spread0.128 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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