The argument of Every Thing Must Go (Part I)

The purpose of my dissertation is to enter Bernard Lonergan’s work on cognitional theory, epistemology, and metaphysics into the contemporary debate concerning scientism. For this, there is no better pair of interlocutors than James Ladyman and Don Ross and their work Every Thing Must Go.

In this and subsequent posts, I’ll present my summary and understanding of that work. Their argument is thorough and compelling, and though I take issue with several of their underlying assumptions, it is an excellent source for thinking deeply about naturalistic metaphysics.

Naturalistic vs. analytic metaphysics

For Ladyman and Ross, the legitimacy of one’s metaphysics depends upon the role that scientific knowledge plays in metaphysical investigation. As such, they distinguish sharply between two prevalent positions on science’s relation to metaphysics: naturalism and contemporary analytic metaphysics. “Naturalism,” they claim, “requires that, since scientific institutions are the instruments by which we investigate objective reality, their outputs should motivate all claims about this reality, including metaphysical ones.”¹ In and through naturalism, scientific statements about reality take on a foundational and exclusive role in both epistemology and metaphysics. However, contemporary analytic metaphysics is informed by a set of assumptions that drive a wedge, a priori, between science and metaphysics.

Ladyman and Ross follow Quine in recognizing that humans are the sorts of creatures that have been fitted to specific tasks in evolutionarily determined ways. Human cognition was developed through evolution to perform a particular set of processes in order to improve chances of survival.

For example, it was advantageous for our ancestors to be able to track objects, and their trajectories, as they moved through three-dimensional space both for purposes of protection and food acquisition. This involved identifying and predicting the movements of all kinds of objects, but all of them medium-sized. Still, this relative success at tracking and manipulating medium-sized objects in our environment does not mean that we are naturally fitted to track accurately the other micro- or macro-sized objects that populate the universe. As such, the means by which we come to know and understand the nature of reality across all scales of size beyond those for which our evolution prepared us, namely science, represent a fundamental transformation of our natural fittedness and our habitual perspective. According to Ladyman and Ross, many of the conclusions that our best contemporary science reaches regarding the objective nature of reality are deeply contrary to our native perspective.

The specific charge that Ladyman and Ross level against contemporary analytic metaphysics is that it attempts to domesticate, or constrain, scientific descriptions of the world by forcing them to comport with our everyday, habitual experience. Rather than acknowledge the increasing complexity and abstractness of the concepts and mathematics used to express contemporary scientific discoveries, analytic metaphysics judges and evaluates the veracity of scientific descriptions according to their compatibility with our natural, commonsense perspective. This domestication of science occurs for two reasons, both of which stem from a style of armchair metaphysics which Ladyman and Ross disdain.

First, analytic metaphysics assumes that there is a means of investigating the objective nature and structure of reality about which science has nothing to say. Moreover, metaphysics is declared to have a realm of inquiry all its own, separate and independent from scientific claims. Ladyman and Ross quote Jonathan Lowe’s characterization of metaphysics as a paradigmatic example of the sort of a priori metaphysics they reject:

Representing the resurgent voice of analytic metaphysicians here again is Lowe: “metaphysics goes deeper than any merely empirical science, even physics, because it provides the very framework within which such sciences are conceived and related to one another” (2002, vi.) According to him the universally applicable concepts that metaphysics studies include those of identity, necessity, causation, space and time. Metaphysics must say what these concepts are and then address fundamental questions involving them such as whether causes can have earlier effects. Metaphysics’ other main job according to Lowe is to systematize the relations among fundamental metaphysical categories such as things, events, properties, and so on.²

This domain of a priori metaphysics, then, is treated as more fundamental to our understanding of reality than is scientific investigation. Accordingly, metaphysics goes first, defines various terms and relations, and essentially sets certain restrictions upon which scientific statements are considered legitimate based on their agreement with these a priori metaphysical notions. The primary mechanism for assessing agreement between such metaphysics and science is, according to Ladyman and Ross, the appeal to intuition.

Second, then, is the assumption that an appeal to intuition is a legitimate philosophical technique for uncovering the nature and structure of reality. Precisely what is meant by the term “intuition” is notoriously difficult to state, but Ladyman and Ross clearly associate it with the natural and habitual perspective that humans have acquired as a result of our evolutionary history. Our intuitions about the world seem to be something like the way we take things to be based on our own experience and reflection upon it. Whatever one takes intuitions to be, it seems clear that some contemporary analytic metaphysicians privilege them to such an extent that they function as an evidentiary rival to empirical science, at the very least in those cases when scientific claims are rejected solely because they, or their implications, are counterintuitive.

Even analytic metaphysicians who seem to affirm naturalism in their epistemology and metaphysics often betray their disregard for the scientific description of the world in several ways. Ladyman and Ross list three ways in which these metaphysicians engage in what they call pseudo-scientific metaphysics:

1. They ignore science even though it seems to be relevant
2. They use outdated or domesticated science rather than our best contemporary science
3. They take themselves to be able to proceed a priori in the investigation of matters upon which they claim science does not bear³

For Ladyman and Ross, each of these attitudes demonstrates a failure of the part of metaphysicians to adequately reckon with the exclusive role that science should play in our objective understanding of the world.

Additionally, Ladyman and Ross criticize what they call the “containment metaphor” which seems to underpin much contemporary analytic metaphysics. The containment metaphor is the idea that the world is a giant container that holds many individual things within itself, and, further, that each individual thing is a container that holds many individual things within itself as well. This metaphor, argue Ladyman and Ross, is essential for motivating metaphysical theories about the structure of the universe such as atomism and mereology, both of which they judge to be inadequate given the most recent developments in quantum physics. More specifically, they take issue with the notion that the universe is composed of, or governed by, a series of “microbangs” in which both the things within the (container of) the world and smaller atomic things within the (container of) each individual thing bang into one another, thereby generating all the known phenomena of the universe. This, they claim, is a model of the universe based upon a centuries old, and now defunct, scientific image described by Isaac Newton.

Ladyman and Ross argue that the Newtonian system is useful because it functions as an accurate enough approximation to manipulate medium-sized objects moving at slow speeds. However, is it not, strictly speaking, true. Rather, they characterize the Newtonian system as an ultimately unsuccessful research programme which failed to extend across the entirety of the known universe. Therefore, since the physical system depicted by Newtonian mechanics is not true of the world, the idea that one would use any metaphysics which depends heavily on the physical world being constituted by containers and microbangs is futile. To quote Ladyman and Ross:

Metaphysicians surely know that contemporary physics is hugely more complicated and less intuitively comprehensible than either classical physics or toy worlds based on the features of classical physics. Most, however, resist the obvious lesson that any attempt to learn about the deep structure of reality from though experiments involving domesticated physics is forlorn. If it really doesn’t matter that classical physics is false then we might as well do our metaphysical theorizing on the basis of Aristotelian or Cartesian physics. But then the absurdity would be patent. Nobody who assumed an Aristotelian distinction between forced and natural motion, and then declared that key parts of what she said about the world were to be understood as placeholders for ‘whatever story about proper places and fundamental substances physics eventually says are real’, would be taken seriously.⁴

Continue reading Part II of this series of posts here.

Notes

1. James Ladyman and Don Ross, Every Thing Must Go, p. 30.
2. ibid., pp. 15 – 16.
3. ibid., p. 17.
4. ibid., p. 26.