4 Can Metaphysics Be Naturalized? And If So, How? Andrew Melnyk I began to study philosophy about 30 years ago.1 It is clear to me, as it is to every philosopher who has lived through the intervening period, that the way in which philosophy is practiced today is very different from the way in which it was practiced then. The obvious outward sign of this difference in practice is the greatly increased probability that a philosophical journal article or book will discuss or cite the findings of some kind of empirical investi- gation, usually a science, but sometimes a branch of history. The difference itself is the (partial) so-called naturalization of many branches of philosophy. Reflection on the contemporary practice of, say, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, moral philosophy, and even political philosophy suggests that the findings of empirical investigation play two main roles when philosophy is naturalized. First, they serve as evidence intended to confirm or disconfirm philosophical theses, theses that may themselves be quite traditional. For example, such findings have recently been used to cast doubt on the traditional claim that we have infallible knowledge of our own current experiences; and other findings to support an approximately Humean sentimentalism about moral judg- ments.2 Second, such findings play the role of object of philosophical inquiry, in effect generating new philosophical questions. For example, the perplex- ing results of experiments performed on patients whose left and right cerebral hemispheres had been largely disconnected have generated much 1 I.e., Anglophone philosophy, the only kind I know. 2 See Schwitzgebel (2008) and Prinz (2006). 80 ANDREW MELNYK philosophical discussion of how to make sense of them.3 More recently, the success of neuroscience and cell biology in discovering the mechanisms underlying various phenomena has prompted extensive efforts to under- stand what mechanistic explanation is.4 But when we turn to metaphysics as currently practiced by philosophers who think of themselves as metaphysicians (rather than as, say, philoso- phers of physics), we see no such signs of naturalization. Conforming to a long tradition, these metaphysicians do not cite empirical findings to confirm or disconfirm their contentions, and they do not address novel problems generated by such findings.5 It might be suggested that this is because there is no reason to naturalize metaphysics of this sort; it is a non-empirical inquiry that is managing quite well, thank you, as it is. The most promising way to develop this sugges- tion is to claim that metaphysics as currently practiced is, if not exactly a branch of mathematics or logic, then at least analogous to mathematics or logic, where these disciplines are understood traditionally, as a priori. But metaphysics as currently practiced is very unlike mathematics and logic. At any point in time, a remarkably broad consensus—amounting almost to unanimity—obtains among competent practitioners in mathematics and logic concerning the truth of a vast number of mathematical and logical claims. Moreover, the scope of this consensus has grown wider and wider over time, that is, competent practitioners at later times agree on more mathematical and logical truths than did competent practitioners at earlier times. In metaphysics, by contrast, we observe neither phenomenon; we instead observe persistent disagreement concerning what is true. This disagreement is strong prima facie evidence that contemporary metaphys- icians do not have reliable methods for discovering metaphysical truths. As I see it, then, the position is this: although metaphysics has not in fact been naturalized, it ought to be, since non-naturalized metaphysics has been pursued for a very long time without yielding results at all 3 The pioneering discussion was by Thomas Nagel (1971). 4 See, for example, Craver (2007). 5 Admittedly, Jonathan Shaffer (2010) invokes quantum entanglement to support his metaphysical thesis of the priority of the whole (pp. 51–5). But in fact this invocation just emphasizes the gulf between his thesis and actual science. All that quantum entanglement shows is that the cosmos has properties that don’t supervene on the intrinsic properties of, plus the interrelations among, its entangled parts. From this it doesn’t follow that the cosmos is prior to its parts, in Shaffer’s sense of ‘prior’, unless there’s such a thing as priority in his sense; and there is absolutely no scientific reason to believe that there is. CAN METAPHYSICS BE NATURALIZED? AND IF SO, HOW? 81 comparable with those achieved by mathematics and logic. But can meta- physics be naturalized? And if it can, how exactly can the results of empirical investigation be made relevant to metaphysics—as evidence, as a source of new problems, or in other ways? How many traditional metaphysical problems will it still be reasonable to investigate? And if the answer is ‘Not many,’ then what sort of problems will take their place? These are the sorts of questions that I wish to explore in this paper. I do not approach these questions, however, with the assumption that metaphysics is bound to turn out to be a viable branch of inquiry, and hence that the only live question is how it works. On the contrary, I think there is a real possibility that the activity that we call ‘metaphysics’ should turn out not to constitute a viable form of inquiry at all, either empirical or non-empirical. I am therefore prepared to find that the right answer to the question, ‘Can metaphysics be naturalized?’ is ‘No, it can’t.’ My procedure in what follows will be slightly unorthodox. I will allow my answers to the questions I have raised to emerge from close dialogue with the first chapter (co-authored by Don Ross, James Ladyman, and David Spurrett; henceforth ‘RLS’6) of Ladyman and Ross’s remarkable book, Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized.7 I single out this chapter for such full examination because it is far and away the richest account to date (i) of why mainstream analytic metaphysics is objectionably non-naturalistic and (ii) of how metaphysics might be naturalized. I will be quoting from it liberally. I find RLS’s critique of mainstream analytic metaphysics very powerful, but I have significant reservations about their positive conception of naturalized metaphysics, as I shall explain. I RLS begin their chapter as follows: The aim of this book is to defend a radically naturalistic metaphysics. By this we mean a metaphysics that is motivated exclusively by attempts to unify hypotheses and theories that are taken seriously by contemporary science. (1) 6 Since ‘RLS’ simply abbreviates the names of the three co-authors, I treat it as grammat- ically plural. 7 All page references that follow are to this book, unless the contrary is clearly indicated. 82 ANDREW MELNYK But their speaking of ‘a radically naturalistic metaphysics’ (italics added) does not indicate tolerance for other kinds of metaphysics, for they immediately add this: For reasons to be explained, we take the view that no alternative kind of meta- physics can be regarded as a legitimate part of our collective attempt to model the structure of objective reality. (1) Even these few remarks make it clear that not much of what contemporary analytic philosophers do under the heading of ‘metaphysics’ counts as legitimate by RLS’s lights. In my next section, I shall look at the details of RLS’s conception of naturalized metaphysics. In this section, I shall ask three general questions about it that don’t require knowing the details. My first question about RLS’s conception of naturalized metaphysics is why they think that unification is the touchstone of legitimate metaphysics. On the strength of their pp. 27–8, I think their answer can be paraphrased as follows: The goal of ‘a relatively unified picture of the world’ is pursued by actual scientists—and rightly so. But unifying whole branches of science, by figuring out the ‘reciprocal explanatory relationships’ between them, ‘is not a task assigned to any particular science’. Doing so, therefore, is a truth-oriented task for meta- physics that is not crowded out, so to speak, by any single science. I am all in favor of seeking ‘a relatively unified picture of the world’;8 but I have two reservations about this argument. First, I don’t see why this argument should provide any reason to restrict naturalized metaphysics to attempts at unification. After all, the goal of discovering true answers to questions we find important is also a goal pursued by actual scientists; and some of these questions are also not addressed by any single branch of science. Examples are the questions whether anything ever causes anything, whether the world is fundamentally impersonal, whether anything has intrinsic properties, or indeed whether there are any fundamental individuals.9 Thus there is, I suggest, as good a 8 See the ‘problem of the many sciences’ in Andrew Melnyk (2003). 9 Readers familiar with Every Thing Must Go will know that its Ch. 3 argues in detail that what contemporary physics, properly viewed, is really telling us is that there are no funda- mental individuals. While this chapter is in fact integrated into the book’s overall project of giving a unified account of the world as a whole, it would still, I think, be a legitimate contribution to an acceptably naturalized metaphysics even if it were not (and even if it CAN METAPHYSICS BE NATURALIZED? AND IF SO, HOW? 83 rationale for allowing naturalized metaphysics to seek answers to these questions as there is for allowing it to seek global unification. Second, although RLS are right that no single branch of science is tasked with generating an account of how all the branches of science fit together, there are branches of science, for example, physical chemistry and molecu- lar biology, that give accounts of the relations between members of par- ticular pairs of branches of science—and that do so without philosophical assistance.