'Naturalism, Agency and the Metaphysics of Science' by Alison Fernandes

Abstract: Methodological naturalism is a plausible approach to the metaphysics of science: we should use the methods of science when giving accounts of what science says there is and what it is like. Methodological naturalism is particularly appealing when giving accounts of scientific relations such as time, causation, laws and probabilities. But adopting naturalism in the metaphysics of science turns out to have surprising results. It suggests that agency should play a role even in the metaphysics of fundamental physics. Considerations of agency are required to explain why we reason using the posits of fundamental physical theories and the role such entities play in our lives—which, on naturalistic grounds, is as important as explaining how we come to have knowledge of them and how we come to have certain experiences or intuitions regarding them. While the focus of the talk will be on methodology, I’ll suggest how a functionalist approach has consequences for particular debates in the metaphysics of science: favouring attempts to explain the temporal orientation of relations such as causation in broadly statistical-mechanical terms and disfavouring attempts to reduce modal relations to the non-modal.