Reality: Fundamental Topics is Metaphysics

Chapter II: Metaphysics and its Critics: Realism, Antirealism, and the Possibility of Metaphysics

The aim of this book is to discuss and advocate views—on the topics which will be explored, those that seem most plausible—in metaphysics. With anticipation in antiquity, some philosophical thinkers since the eighteenth century have claimed to regard metaphysics as impossible, meaningless, primitive, pre-scientific, or anti-scientific, naive and precritical , or anthropocentric (sometimes, in recent years, androcentric). these are not of course all the same charges, but they are all charges affirming that metaphysics is bad, and not doable (or seriously doable). i do not propose treating the case against metaphysics in detail. it would be wrong, however, to ignore anti-metaphysics altogether. Many philosophers and non-philosophers, including many scientists, have explicitly ranged themselves against metaphysics, and a considerable number have been educated to regard metaphysics as out-of-date and intellectually irrelevant for a serious modern mind. in recent years, new arguments and positions have been developed by foes of the metaphysical enterprise which have generated a considerable literature which it would be inappropriate to pass by without some discussion. I One simplified account of the development of anti-metaphysics goes like this: until the seventeenth century, philosophy, which might be better labelled speculation and theory, enjoyed a unitary and somewhat privileged position in western culture. For plain and practical folk, it was alien and artificial, C H A P t e R i i Metaphysics and its Critics: Realism, Antirealism, and the Possibility of Metaphysics 16 ReALitY: Fundamental topics in Metaphysics but sanctioned by its intimate relation to theology, an ideological support for that culture. Philosophical topics were curiosities, brain puzzlers, and sometimes matters of deadly earnest, as they involved individuals’ and states’ concerns about possibilities of power and intelligence beyond human life. Candour acknowledged that there was, for humans at least, only one genuine systematic body of theoretical knowledge, and that was geometry. For some, (Aristotelian) logic was a second science. Piety and institutional power insisted that there was much more of a theoretical kind that was actually known; but behaviourally people betrayed, as Hume (1711–76) was shrewdly to point out,1 that philosophical convictions did not go deep. Hardly anyone really believed that they knew much at all about the extra-quotidian world, or even underlying structures of the quotidian world. if they did, they would have behaved differently than they did. Along with much else, the seventeenthcentury scientific revolution changed things in these regards. Galileo and his confrères, and finally, supremely, the 1687 Principia of newton (1642–1727), showed that humans were capable of more actual science than just geometry and logic. there were other branches of mathematics that could be established to constitute actual bona fide systematic knowledge—i.e., knowledge in the praxis sense, things that, once you understood them, you could see to be correct, teachable to others, and not seriously doubtable. And, most remarkably, actual systematic knowledge, rather than mere speculation, about the world was achievable through the achievement of newtonian physics. in the intellectual environment these developments engendered a distinction came to be drawn between the philosophy (speculation) that was turning into, or seemed to hold promise of being turned into, (systematic) knowledge, or science, and the philosophy that looked to be dead-end, really condemned forever to remain speculation. thus was born the distinction, as many have acquired and transmitted it ever since, between science and metaphysics. For this distinction and its advocates, metaphysics has chiefly survived since 1687 as an historical curiosity, or at best as a source-pool for possible proto-sciences of the future (e.g., a genuinely scientific psychology). if such a proto-science were able to be drawn from that well, it would show that it hadn’t properly belonged with metaphysics in the first place; if the effort proved abortive, then it was correctly lodged, i.e., sunk, in the swamp of speculation (metaphysics). II the next major phase in the development of anti-metaphysics is due to Kant. the so-called critical philosophy that he developed involves a detailed Metaphysics and its Critics: Realism, Antirealism, and the Possibility of Metaphysics 17 and specific case against the possibility of metaphysical knowledge, and in favour of Kant’s distinctive and complex account of rational psychology. the Kantian argument is complicated and also, i think, unpersuasive. Kant argues, by reductio, that if there were knowledge of the world (i.e., of reality, as it is in itself...