Science and Metaphysics

Metaphysics aims to describe the fundamental nature of reality. A challenge to metaphysics is that it seems to have been displaced by the sciences: if we want to understand the way the world is, surely the best option is not to engage in philosophical speculation but to look at our best scientific theories. This video outlines four approaches to metaphysics that try to find a place for metaphysics as a useful field of inquiry alongside the sciences.

0:00 - The challenge to metaphysics
7:00 - Complementary metaphysics
30:13 - Scientistic Metaphysics
44:54 - Metaphysics of science
1:01:31 - Neo-Kantian metaphysics

[WorldviewDesignChannel]

Nice presentation. Way 1 is especially helpful, in my view -- it's a way I like. I take the problems to point to issues in demarcation, which have no neat solution -- except perhaps to invite those with "metaphysics" and "science" hats to work closer together (and wearing both hats at once is okay...).

[andrebenoit]

These lectures are fantastic and very refreshing to find on YouTube among the surplus of stuff on continental philosophy.

[larianton]

This seems like a good thing to watch to have a better underatading of how physicalist think about metaphysics. Thank you for making this.

[realemaskye]

your videos are so interesting and informative! i cant imagine how long it must take to make something like this :0. im surprised youre not much more popular !!

[Ansatz]

Choosing the best explanation is not an inference; it's just an opinion. There's nothing wrong with having a list of explanatory virtues and preferring those explanations which are more virtuous, but such a preference is akin to preferring chocolate over vanilla. Simpler theories are more easily grasped by the human mind and so they are easier to work with and form a better foundation for engineering projects and for making further discoveries, but these are all a matter of what we find appealing. The explanations that we choose can only tell us about ourselves, not about the world. Sorting explanations by their virtues is a very useful tool, but it doesn't justify belief. Being the best explanation doesn't make an explanation true, especially not when best is being judged by virtues that make no reference to truth.

13:40 "Something is real if positing it plays an indispensable role in the explanation of well-founded phenomena."

By that definition, nothing is real. There will always be more than one way to explain any phenomena, so how can anything be indispensable?

[rustybnana]

chang is my lecturer at cambridge lol, so funny to hear about him on youtube

[squatch]

I've never completely understood what the difference is between metaphysics and ontology. I've always had trouble deciding which to use in a sentence. Have you ever done a video on this?

[mandobrownie]

This is kind of a stretch, but I think it's something that's been explored outside of analytic (and branch offs of analytic) philosophy of science.

One thread that goes through the concerns of each method (maybe minus the complementary method, although I think it applies to that one too) of bringing together metaphysics and science is that metaphysical inquiry about science overinflates the metaphysical commitments of various scientific inquires. What if this turned out to be true? What if, in fact, science is quite non-metaphysical in the sense that it isn't aiming to investigate what fundamentally exists and how such fundamentals can be structured to furnish non-fundamental reality?

I think one consequence would be that we'd have to start seeing science as much more pragmatic, and pragmatic in a sort of normatively ideological sense. If the goals of figuring out fundamental and non-fundamental reality are off the table, what goals are left? I think there's a worry that once we take the metaphysical goals off the table, what we're left with are only normative goals, goals about changing the world to be how it ought to be. Why is this worrisome? Besides any concerns about the value-free ideal of science (which I don't think are that big of a deal per se), what's left is that whoever has control of the institutions of scientific inquiry set the goals of scientific inquiry. And as lots of history of science evinces, many goals of institutions in pursuing scientific inquiry have been kind of shit! Goals such as how to predict and control people to maximize profit, how to kill as many people as possible, etc. I do not doubt that the intermediate goals contain genuinely good goals, but it is definitely an open question whether actual scientific inquiry hitherto has done more good or bad on net. If it turns out that the balance goes toward net bad, then maybe that is a relatively weighty reason to re-inflate the metaphysical nature of science: to avoid the purposing of scientific inquiry for worse!

Now, obviously it can still be the case that metaphysical science can still do much bad. It's unclear if, for example, the research that went into the atom bomb under the guise of finding out the fundamental aspects of reality has done more good or bad for the world on the whole. But if it turns out that metaphysical science such as particle physics and microchemistry turns out to be, say, less wieldy for power and profit than less metaphysical science, such as technological development sciences and possible much medical and material search, then maybe we **should** think that science is namely aimed at figuring out fundamental and non-fundamental reality.

(P.S. I kinda don't really buy this proto argument that science is metaphysically committed through and through, but I think it's an interesting line nonetheless)

[ZoiusGM]

1:09:58 Is the example of place names having different values a good one? Mathematical values are different than multiple linguistic terms, no? Can a place having different names be considered to have different values? If yes, then still we can say that a place gets a single value; a name, *at a given time* .

1:02:06 If Kant thought about conceptual schemes that made empirical data intelligible: this sounds like phenomenology or similar to it, innit? Of Husserl specifically. I don't know Kant's philosophy but from this this seems the case. If so he was like the precursor of phenomenology..?

Anyways, Kane, are you planning to make videos on phenomenology of Husserl or you dislike continental philosophy and don't want to steer towards it? Husserl claims that phenomenology should be the basis of science so it does have heavy relation to it.

[suzettedarrow]

May I ask a question about something you say at around 44:00? You say that inferring metaphysics from science is “a very risky inference”. What is the risk? What are we risking by taking that inference?

When I skydive, I risk death. When I gamble, I risk money. When I infer metaphysics from science, I risk… what? I risk being wrong? “Being wrong” is the best way I can fill in the content of the risk… but now what’s wrong with being wrong?

I avoid risks when losing them would cause too much human suffering. I do t skydive because of the risk it causes my mom to suffer were I to die. There doesn’t seem to be any cash value, so to speak, of being false metaphysics. Does that make sense?

[suzettedarrow]

If I may ask a question about something you say at around 24:00 while discussing objections to complementary metaphysics.

You point to modality as surely substantive. What do you think is the practical value of one metaphysics of modality over the other?

There seems to be no practical value of mereological metaphysics over the other. Regardless of whether there is a cat on the mat or cat-wise particles on the mat-wise particles, my practical relation to it doesn’t change. I still have to feed it food (or food-wise particles) and clean its poop (or poop-wise particles). The metaphysics of mereology makes no practical difference in my life.

I agree with you that Lewis has a different picture of modality than the ersatz modalists, but that difference doesn’t make a difference to me.

Does that make sense? What do you think? Is there anything in complementary metaphysics that makes a practical difference?

I think Stamford’s objection to good against all of complementary metaphysics. None of it makes a practical difference.

[fanboy]

can you do a video on the problem of other minds

[marcell]

Not related to the video but may I ask what Meta-ethical framework u find most appealing currently and why?

[Xob_Driesestig]

Neokantian metaphysics seem very epistemological to me. At what point does metaphysics transition into epistemology?

[ctoan_]

hey i am an idealist, deist (i think the cause of universe is a will, mind, consciousnses), and i always held that compositional universalism idea. If my mind and your minds are unique concrete minds in an ideal world, does a third unique concrete mind combining our two minds exist? The question here is does the set of all sets contain itself? sorry for my bad english and pseudo philosophy bullshit. My brain is only capable of that level

[Xob_Driesestig]

Any reason why you made the quality only 360p?

[mykrahmaan]

His claim relativistic time dilation proves capacity of physics to answer metaphysical questions is totally incorrect.

Relativistic time dilation is blatantly metaphysical, because it implies the unjustifiable assumption that:

"the force that makes a clock tick is the same as those which make people age".

It is identical with the assumption that:

Just because a thermometer indicating high temperature in a patient can be reduced to normal by dipping it in cold water, all you got to do to heal the patient is to dip han (her/him) in cold water.

That clocks slow down at speeds closer to that of light doesn't mean the same would happen to aging of people.