Abstract Realism about metaphysics states that metaphysics seeks, and can sometimes succeed in discovering, valuable truths. One version of realism about metaphysics, which I call Structural Realism, holds that although many ordinary truths about the world seem to require the existence of certain things with particular properties, we cannot actually draw metaphysical conclusions from these truths because they are not stated in a way that “matches” or represents the intrinsic structure of reality (they do not “carve at the joints” of nature). In this paper, I clarify this view and distinguish two forms of it. I show that the more extreme version cannot be correct because a constitutive aim of language use is communication; I argue for this using a novel, teleological account of constitutive aims. I then critique the more moderate version of the theory on the grounds that it would render metaphysics irrelevant to other areas of philosophy.
Contemporary analytic philosophy abounds with invocations of something called ‘the world’ (or ‘reality’); but it is none too clear what is meant by ‘the world’ in those invocations. This book shows that in case after case—ranging from the metaphysics of magnitudes, through cognitive science, epistemology, and the phi...
The methodology of metaphysics has come under severe scrutiny from critics who claim that, while metaphysics aims to uncover deep non-conceptual truths regarding reality, its standard methodology is incapable of giving us justified beliefs regarding which metaphysical theses are true. In this Element I investigate whet...
Recent critiques of metaphysics tend to focus on arguing that it is methodologically unreliable, otherwise epistemically deficient, and/or irrelevant to practical concerns. Defenders counter that metaphysics is continuous with science, an unavoidable part of inquiry, and/or already yielding valuable results. So far, ne...
Sam Baron, Finnur Dellsén, James Norton· Synthese· 0 citations
Following Hanegraaff’s (2020: 73) claim that pioneers in our field considered it “to be no less than essential for any adequate understanding of the history of human culture and society as such,” this text answers Schilbrack’s (2013) question: “After we deconstruct ‘religion’, then what?” The answer is formulated wit...
Milan Fujda· Method & Theory in the S...· 0 citations
In this paper I discuss an initially very plausible principle about metaphysical explanation, which has recently been explicitly defended. Suppose some q metaphysically explains the metaphysical necessity of p. Does q then also metaphysically explain p’s truth? The principle at issue, call it ‘(NT)’, gives an affirmati...
Michael Wallner· Synthese· 0 citations
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