Original Topic Title: Does Scientific Naturalism exclude Metaphysics?
[Note from NvR: You will see I have grouped this thread discussion with discussions held nearly a year ago on the same concept. Thank you. Natasha]
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As background to this thread I'd suggest glancing through the following paper : http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~kjh5/OnlinePapers/ScienceAsAGuideToMetaphysics.pdf
More to come!
David
David - once again, you've hit the nail on the head. I'd suggest as a follow up a fellow who seems to have some clear ideas about what metaphysical debates are 'about', what physical theory DOES bring to metaphysics, and the rôle of the 'metaphysician" : Craig Callender's "Time's Ontic Voltage" ().
I'm particularly found of one of the 'conclusions' he draws (p. 25):
"As it turns out, philosophy of time rises to the call by framing a debate among three metaphysical positions, positions that are empirically equivalent to one another, explanatorily equivalent to one another and may even be metaphysically equivalent to one another.
There is a better way to conceive of the debate. Philosophers of time should model the debate the way philosophers of mind frame theirs. The natural sciences don’t have sophisticated theories of intentionality and consciousness, for instance. There seems to be an explanatory gap between our experience and the so-far incomplete description of our experience provided by the natural sciences. There is an honest-to-goodness problem over how to explain consciousness, for instance. Philosophers of mind then suggest explanations using naturalistic resources to explain consciousness (which, if picked up, might develop as parts of natural science) or they look elsewhere and supplement the naturalistic resources, either with new ‘naturalistic’ resources or ‘non-naturalistic’ resources. They then argue about whether the explanation actually succeeds in accounting for consciousness. Similarly, philosophy of time ought to refine our description of what needs to be explained, carefully examine science and the way it treats time, compare the two, and then try to account for any explanatory gap that arises".
(we could transfer this discussion to Robin's site - it COULD attract some scientists....)
Oh David; they have, they have ;-) : and firend Quine was one of the guiding lights - Word & Object, p. 171 : "physical objects conceived … four-dimensionally in space-time, are not to be distinguished from events or, in the concrete sense of the term, processes. Each comprises simply the content, however heterogeneous, of some portion of space-time, however disconnected and gerrymandered".
As for a wider view of the recent field, try Ned Markosian's article on "Time" http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time/ - for a view from the philosophy of physics, see Steven Savitt's "Being and Becoming in Modern Physics" : http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html#space-and-time-being-and-becoming-in-modern-physics-Savitt
- it so happens that I'm working on the coincidence of certain representations of verbal tense and of the 'causal structure of spacetime', and on the thesis that verbal tense represents an irreducible characteristic of our (local) individual perspective while accepting to the full a four-dimensionalist, eternalist, B-theoretic (and for that matter perdurantist) account...
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