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Meta-Metaphysics: ("In Defense of Skepticism", Everthing Must Go…

- - - - Consilience Networks: Properly scientific metaphysics amounts to nothing more than critically elucidating conscilience networks across the sciences (in order to contribute to the unification of the sciences).
        
        NO other kind but naturalistic metaphysics (which is motivated exclusively by attempts to unify hypotheses and theories that are taken seriously by contemporary science. ) can be regarded as a legitimate part of our collective attempt to model the structure of objective reality.
        
        Why? Philosophers a priori intuitions, common sense, "domesticated" description of the scientific findings and inferential responses are not well designed for science or metaphysics.
    - - Gone Scholastic However, we think that the kind of intellectual atmosphere that led Hume, and later Russell, the Vienna Circle, and Reichenbach, to denounce whole leading branches of the philosophy of their times as scholastic have arisen again.
        
        Why it's gone awry: It seems, inductively, that such moments recur endemically in the discipline. We suppose this happens mainly because philosophers inevitably spend most of their time arguing with one another, until they forget that there is anyone else around or any important source of opinions besides rational arguments. When philosophy becomes institutionally solipsistic, however, it risks making itself intellectually and culturally irrelevant.
        
        Disciplinary Rescue is their goal: Fortunately, in philosophy’s previous episodes of detachment from empirical inquiry, the Humes, Russells, and Carnaps have turned up when needed to save the enterprise from itself. While not claiming a mantle of their magnitude, we are here embarked on a mission of disciplinary rescue in their spirit.
  - - - They are: The basis for, and are reinforced and modified by, everyday practical heuristics for getting around in the world under various resource (including time) pressures, and navigating social games. They're designed for survival.
      - They're not: Cognitive gadgets designed to produce systematically worthwhile guidance in either science or metaphysics.
      - Problems with Intuitions:
        
        1. Ontogenetically and culturally influenced
        
        2. Totally Arbitrary & Poor map of reality:
        
        No necessary reason why the most ontologically accurate view of the world would be one that aligns with our intuitions.
        
        May just as easily be something that does not at all and the fact that current contemporary quantum physics is becoming increasingly untethered to common sense is proof of this.
        
        3. They've infected Metaphysicans
        
        The conception of physical objects that we've been equipped with has been transformed into a metaphysical conception of reality that is so deeply embedded in philosophy that it is shared as a system of obvious presuppositions by metaphysicians.
        
        Philosophers in particular are of issue due to their use of philosophical terminology and recondite concepts as well their habituation into particular philosophical theories. They share even less intuitions with folks than they generally suppose and are even more removed from the latest scientific knowledge than one would think.
        
        4. Actively Misleading
        
        Lewis Wolport: "Modern science has consistently shown us that extrapolating our pinched perspective across unfamiliar scales, magnitudes, and spatial and temporal distances misleads us profoundly.”
    - - 2. Giving up Intuitions is a Cost:
        
        Within metaphysics giving up intuitions in favour of a theory is taken as cost whereas in science it is not seen as one whatsoever. Metaphysicians often argue against theories by pointing to unintuitive consequences or comparing theories on the basis of the quantity and quality of the intuitions with which they conflict.
        
        The criterion for accepting an M conclusion is totally detached from truth.
      - How science differs:
        
        1. Intuitions are Irrelevant:
        
        Philosophy on the whole is the problem: They acknowledge that this is not just a problem for Metaphysics but rather philosophy on the whole. - aligns with Bennett's point.
        
        Their critique of Jaegwon Kim's Physicalism or something near enough suggests that this is not just a critique of metaphysics but is a critique of philosophy on the whole.
        
        Even the intuitons of the greatest scientist are regarded by other scientists as heuristically and not evidentially valuable.
      - 1. Aesthetic Value:
        
        A successful theory in M is semi-aesthetic. The value is placed upon a theory being intuitive, commonsensical, palatable and philosophically respectable.
        
        More in common with the virtues of story writing than science.
  - - - Dealing with the claim made by Lowe that: ‘metaphysics goes deeper than any merely empirical science, even physics, because it provides the very framework within which such sciences are conceived and related to one another’ (2002, vi)
        
        The lads rebuttal: why does this kind of conceptual analysis actually reveal anything about the nature of reality rather than just pointing out what philosophers think about the nature of reality?
        
        Philosophers often regarded states of affairs as impossible that science has come to endorse.
  - - - Because deductive and inductive logic cannot account for scientific knowledge of unobservables most scientific realists admit they must rely in part on explanatory power of claims about unobservable causes to gain scientific knowledge.
        
        Metaphysicians try and imitate this by holding that their inquiry is a search for explanations too although in a different domain.
        
        This leads to M being regarded as its own special science which SUPPOSEDLY produces explananda furnished by other sciences.
    - - 1) They ignore science even though it seems to be relevant. (rare though to find a metaphysician who argues that a priori reasoning outweighs scientific evidence but they are around.
      - (3) Prioritize A Priori Investigation: They take themselves to be able to proceed a priori in the investigation of matters upon which they claim science does not bear.
      - (2) They use outdated or domesticated science rather than our best contemporary science.
        
        They accuse metaphysicians of assuming the following:
        
        (a) non-actual physics can be used as part of the explananda for metaphysics
        
        b) this is acceptable because whatever the actual details of mature physics, they will somehow be able to ‘dock’ with the non-actual physics in question at some level of abstraction or generality, so that philosophers need not worry about or even pay attention to those details.
        
        e.g. Matter & Gunk: It is preposterous that in spite of the developments in the scientific understanding of matter that have occurred since then, contemporary metaphysicians blithely continue to suppose that the dichotomy between atoms and gunk remains relevant, and that it can be addressed a priori. Precisely what physics has taught us is that matter in the sense of extended stuff is an emergent phenomenon that has no counterpart in fundamental ontology.
    - - Analogy:
        
        the eastern mystical interpretation of quantum mechanics (which most philosophers would disagree with) is actually not that different to the philosophers encouraging people who know a bit of physics to make quantum accounts seem less bizarre by comparing them to what they learned in A-level chemistry.
        
        They don't do their scientific due diligence and they just assume that any attempt to learn about the deep structure of reality from domesticated physics is ok.
        
        The Metaphysicians Belief: If it really doesn’t matter that classical physics is false then we might as well do our metaphysical theorizing on the basis of Aristotelian or Cartesian physics rather than actually learning what is involved in Quantum physics.
        
        Basically saying Metaphysicians just do theorising with faulty conceptions of physics because it’s going to fit more neatly with the theories they’re attempting to purport.
- - - - There is a special problem with metaphysics just in case there is at least one problematic feature or activity that is reasonably widespread in the discipline, but nonexistent or at least notably less widespread outside the discipline.
  - - - This is due to:
        
        (A) It's subject matter: the kinds of questions asked.
        
        (B) It's methodology: How it goes about asking these questions
        
        Any method distinctive to Metaphysics must be used reasonably widely within Metaphysics.
        
        the boundaries between the subfields of philosophy are both vague and somewhat arbitrary.
        
        Makes it reasonable to assume that any method used widely within metaphysics is at least used reasonably widely outside M.
        
        Methods used by M's are: A priori reasoning, empirical claims, thought expirements, counferfactual and modal reasoning, inference from the best explanation.
        
        1 more item...
    - - too embedded in the rest of philosophy to solely have a problem that is distinctive to metaphysics.
        
        Metaphysicians ask about the presuppositions of the questions that other philosophers ask, and ask about the underlying structure of the views proposed in response to those questions. The subject matter of metaphysics is literally embedded in the rest of philosophy. That is why there cannot be any distinctive problem with it.
        
        It cannot be the case that it is fine to talk about whether there are moral properties, or what the property of biological fitness is, but somehow deeply problematic to talk about whether there are properties, and what they are like if there are any.
        
        claim, in short, is that the subject matter of metaphysics cannot be distinguished from the subject matter of the rest of philosophy in a way that allows it to be distinctively problematic.
        
        There may be reasons to be skeptical of philosophy overall but little reason to be skeptical of metaphysics as distinctively problematic.
        
        Metaphysics enables philosophers who are not metaphysicians to bury their heads in the sand, and to avoid the hard questions that affect their subdisciplines too.
  - - - Part One: Toolbox Maintainer: largely but not exhaustively—the maintainer of the toolbox. It investigates the categories, tools, and notions upon which other philosophers (and non-philosophers) uncritically rely. Metaphysics in this sense is the study of what there is, and what what there is is like, for a restricted value of ‘what’.
        
        Just about every philosopher makes claims about certain phenomena depending on other phenomena—just about every philosopher will say, for some value of x and y, that x depends on y, or exists in virtue of y, etc. It is the job of metaphysics to train the spotlight on this talk, to try to unpack it, to see whether anything really answers to it, to see what difficulties different accounts might face, and so forth.
        
        Eg. Dependence is in the philosopher’s toolbox; metaphysicians examine it to see whether it is in good working order. Metaphysicians talk about dependence because everyone else engages in dependence talk.
      - Part Two: investigating the nature of certain particularly puzzling phenomena that seem somehow recalcitrant (particularly difficult to get at) to purely empirical investigation: consciousness, freedom, time.
      - Her definition attempts to and arguably does distinguish Metaphysics from science:
        
        does distinguish metaphysics from science, or at any rate distinguishes the first metaphysical project from science. Science does not try to figure out what worldly matters, if any, answer to or make true the expressions and concepts that are seemingly crucial to the rest of philosophy—expressions and concepts like ‘could have been’, ‘property’, and ‘in virtue of’.