A new book from Cambridge University Press, Interpreting Carnap, edited by Alan Richardson and Adám Tuboly, contains some interesting papers that I hope I will get around to discussing here. I will start with one whose title is calculated to arouse, well, interest, shall we say: “Carnap is not against metaphysics” by Vera Flocke. (Just as one’s attention would naturally be drawn to a headline “Pope advocates contraception” or “Mike Johnson to propose mandatory teaching of evolution in public schools.”)
Continue readingLadyman and Ross
Yet another friendly suggestion for Ladyman and Ross (with an aside on Quine)
I hope I’ve made clear in my previous posts about Ladyman and Ross and their wonderful book All Things Must Go (here and here) that my critical remarks about them are to be understood as supportive and constructive. I’m trying to buttress their position and make it stronger. I’m on their side, as are certain other sympathetic critics, who have pointed out other problems with their approach, not directly related to what I’ve said in those previous posts. Of particular importance, I think, is the critique by Kyle Stanford in a 2010 symposium on the Ladyman-Ross book in Metascience. Stanford points out that the concept of “structure” central to Ladyman-Ross’s structural realism serves several distinct purposes in their book: it is what remains continuous through theoretical transitions, for instance, and is also what explains the novel predictive successes of those theories. Stanford doubts whether a single concept of “structure” can do all these jobs. Continue reading
Further thoughts on Ladyman and Ross
In my previous remarks about Ladyman and Ross I wondered whether the differences between them and Carnap were (largely or entirely) a matter of terminology. What Ladyman and Ross call “metaphysics” Carnap entertained as a programmatic constraint on the language chosen, or developed, as an agreed common language of science, i.e. that it enable us to unify all the disperate knowledge from all the special sciences into a single coherent story. Does it matter whether we call this “metaphysics”? For Carnap, it didn’t really. He obviously was wary of the word “metaphysics” but was quite clear that a good deal of traditional metaphysics (he mentions Aristotle, Leibniz, Kant, Peirce, and Whitehead) could easily be interpreted as engineering work on our conceptual apparatus, rather than taken at face value in the material mode, i.e. as pertaining to some sort of ultimate “reality.” He would no doubt have taken Ladyman and Ross in the same spirit, Continue reading
Is “unity of science” a form of metaphysics?
The one thing people can be counted on to know about Carnap is that he was against metaphysics. But what is metaphysics? According to the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, it is “the philosophical investigation of the nature, constitution, and structure of reality” and is “broader in scope than science, e.g. physics and even cosmology. . ., since one of its traditional concerns is the existence of non-physical entities. . . It is also more fundamental, since it investigates questions science does not address but the answers to which it presupposes” (2nd ed., p. 563). Ladyman and Ross (LR) in their book Every Thing Must Go contrast their “naturalized” metaphysics to this Cambridge-Dictionary (CD) type, which they refer to as the “metaphysics of domestication,” since it tries to make counter-intuitive scientific knowledge accessible to the crude categories of our inherited vernacular, the ways of thinking that have evolved from the accumulated experience of the species since the Continue reading