Metaphysics of Science @ Nottingham
My busy September is finally coming to an end and it is time for a few reports. I’ll start with the Metaphysics of Science Conference which took place in Nottingham 12-14 September. I’ll try to keep this brief if I can. A report from ENFA4 in Portugal will follow soon.
At the bar on the first night. Daniel Nolan, Katherine Hawley & Andreas Hüttemann
Firstly, my photos from the conference are available in my gallery. Not too many of them this time, and I’ve also neglected Nottingham itself — not that I actually explored the city much. I’ve been to Nottingham once before, for a conference as well. The conference was quite good and I’ve got no complaints about the organisation. I do, however, have some complaints about some of the recent trends in this area of metaphysics.
The conference was dominated by two themes, critiques of essentialism concerning natural kinds, and dispositions. The previous is a topic which is of interest to me, but I was very disappointed to find out that the debate seems to be focused on Brian Ellis’ so called ‘scientific’ essentialism. I can’t say much about Ellis, as I’ve never read him, but from what I heard he seems to be an easy target for criticism. Fair enough, but what bothers me is that the apparently not very well formulated version of essentialism that Ellis defends is taken to be as a typical or even predominant type of essentialism.
My paper: Natural Boundaries and Metaphysical Realism
Lowe’s essentialism for instance was mentioned only in passing, even though it would certainly constitute a much more worthwhile opponent for those who are opposed to essentialism. This is a point which was also noted by Alexander Bird, another essentialist who differs from Ellis. Anyway, I won’t go into any more detail about this topic, it’s something that I’m interested in, but which is currently too specific for my research project to spend much time on. I hope to get back to it at some point though, as I do have things to say about essentialism concerning natural kinds.
In my own talk I aimed to defend a much more modest type of essentialism, namely microstructucal essentialism. Or, more simply, that certain (necessary) properties possessed by microphysical entities, such as the charge of electrons, are necessary for the emergence of macrophysical entities. The talk was entitled ‘Natural Boundaries and Metaphysical Realism’ and it was originally motivated by Achille Varzi’s recent rejuvenation of extreme conventionalism, specifically in his paper ‘Boundaries, Conventions, and Realism’. I’ve got a longer paper about this with some other arguments as well, but I will need to develop the main argument mentioned above a bit. I’ll upload the revised paper when I’ve had a chance to look at it. I had quite a small audience as I was competing with more mainstream topics (such as dispositions), but Katherine Hawley and Helen Beebee showed up, so the discussion was pretty good.
Antony Eagle: Can we Read Metaphysics off Physics?
One more thing I might mention is that in Nottingham as well there was one paper on the topic that I addressed in a previous report from the BSPS conference, namely the relationship between metaphysics and science. Anthony Eagle, one of the invited speakers, gave a talk entitled ‘Can we Read Metaphysics off Physics?’, looking specifically at the case of presentism and whether physics can be of any help there. It was nice to see him actually defend so called autonomous as opposed to naturalised metaphysics (using Ladyman’s distinction). He said for instance that:
I agree that reliance on ‘rational insight’ or conceptual analysis doesn’t look like it will deliver us truths all by itself. That’s okay, since metaphysics needn’t use these dodgy sources of ‘evidence’. I deny that metaphysics has a special method or technique, or even a special subject matter [...]. We offer arguments, based on premises which we believe, to come to believe the validly derived conclusions of those arguments [...]. The job of metaphysics, like the job of philosophy more generally, is to decide on the truth of certain claims [...].
Conference dinner
Ok, so Eagle doesn’t much like conceptual analysis. Nor do I. But I feel like he might conceed too much to Ladyman, although I still haven’t read the primary source! The problem is that the way Eagle sets the job of metaphysics makes it seem more like a translation scheme than anything else: we need to make it clear what the metaphysical claims of science are, and perhaps then we can read some metaphysics off science as well. Well, he does say that it’s hard to argue against a piece of autonomous metaphysics strictly from physics, but I’m afraid he says very little about the actual methodology of autonomous metaphysics (if it isn’t conceptual analysis or something of the like). This is something that I hope to write about as soon as I’ve actually got time to write a new paper…
That’s that, another report will follow soon.
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