The Continuum Companion to Metaphysics

Neil A. Manson, Robert W. Barnard, Neil A. Manson, Robert W. Barnard

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780826440617
• eBook ISBN: 9781441137081
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Metaphysics

The Continuum Companion to Metaphysics offers the definitive guide to a key area of contemporary philosophy. The book covers all the fundamental questions asked in metaphysics - areas that have continued to attract interest historically as well as topics that have emerged more recently as active areas of research. Eleven specially commissioned essays from an international team of experts discuss research problems and methods in metaphysics, reveal where important work continues to be done in the area and, most valuably, indicate exciting new directions the field is taking. The Companion explores issues pertaining to modality, universals and abstract objects, naturalism and physicalism, mind, material constitution, endurantism and perdurantism, personal identity, personal
identity, free will, and God. Featuring a series of indispensable research tools, including an A to Z index of key terms and concepts, a detailed list of research resources and a fully annotated bibliography, this is the essential reference tool for anyone working in contemporary metaphysics.

1

Research Problems and Methods

Amie L. Thomasson

The problems of metaphysics seem, at least on the surface, to be among the deepest and most important questions of philosophy. Thus, for example, Richard Taylor writes: “metaphysics is a foundation of philosophy. . . . One’s philosophical thinking, if long pursued, tends to resolve itself into basic problems of metaphysics” (1992, p. 2), while Jaegwon Kim and Ernest Sosa call metaphysics “the most central and general subdivision of philosophy” (1995, p. xiii). Though the problems metaphysicians work on are superficially diverse, most may without too much distortion be divided into three major categories: existence questions, relational questions, and modal questions.

Questions regarding what exists belong to the subdiscipline of metaphysics known as ontology. Some existence questions, for example, “Does God exist?” and “Does matter exist?” have long been at the heart of metaphysics. More recently, especially over the past 60 years or so (under the dominance of a neo-Quinean picture of metaphysics I will say more about later), existence questions have proliferated and taken a more central place in metaphysics, as metaphysicians aim to articulate and defend competing “ontologies”—considered as views about what does (and does not) exist (or, alternatively, about what there is).¹ Thus among contemporary research problems pursued in metaphysics we now find not only traditional existence questions like “Does God exist?,” but also questions about the existence of entities seldom questioned by nonphilosophers—for example, “Do tables and chairs exist?” “Do persons exist?” “Do events exist?” and “Does consciousness exist?”—and even existence questions raised about philosophical entities unfamiliar to nonphilosophers—for example, “Do temporal parts exist?” “Do mereological sums exist?” “Do universals exist?” and so on. Those doing ontology generally take themselves to be interested not merely in answering individual existence questions, taken separately, but also to be attempting to formulate an overall ontology that meets certain theoretic goals better than its competitors—goals such as empirical adequacy, explanatory power, unity, and (prominently) parsimony.

Metaphysicians are also typically concerned with relational questions; in Sellars’ phrase, metaphysicians aim “to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term” (1963, p. 1). How is, say, a statue related to the clay it is made of? Are they identical, connected by some kind of “constitution” relation, or what? More generally, how do such things as conscious beings, and social and cultural entities such as artifacts, works of art and nations, relate to the objects described by the physical sciences? Are there different “levels of reality,” with the entities described by physics (perhaps) on the lowest level, and artifacts, social and cultural objects, or minds on higher levels? If so, what are the relations between entities of different levels? Do the “higher level” entities really exist? May they be “reduced to” lower level entities, or considered to provide no “real addition of being” with respect to them? In the earlier days of analytic philosophy, the goal was typically to reduce “higher-level” entities to the lower; as reductions proved problematic, talk turned more, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, to supervenience; more recently, there has been a turn to looking for lower level entities to serve as “truthmakers” for statements of higher level facts, or looking for the “ontological grounds” for higher level entities (about this more later). The list of options has been ever expanding, and of course has introduced new questions about what precisely the target relation (whether of reduction, supervenience, truthmaking, or grounding) consists in. Relational questions have not been confined to asking about relations between social and cultural entities and those of the natural sciences, however. A perennial set of ontological questions also involves questions about the relations among entities of the most basic ontological categories, for example, objects, facts, events, universal properties, and property instances (tropes). So, for example, questions such as “Are objects just bundles of tropes?” “Are properties just sets of possible objects?” and “Which is more basic: objects or facts?” may also be counted as relational questions.

Metaphysics is not only traditionally concerned with what exists, and with how things are related, but also with questions about the natures of things of various sorts. Thus other important problems in metaphysics are questions about the natures, for example, of persons, artifacts, or works of art. What are their essential properties? What does it take for something to be a person, an artifact, or a work of art? Are humans, artifacts, or works of art essentially tied to their origins? Related questions concern the identity and persistence conditions for things of various sorts. Metaphysicians writing about personal identity, for example, often aim to determine under what conditions persons A and B would be identical. Meanwhile, from the time of the ancients, metaphysicians have been concerned with puzzles about the conditions under which ships or other artifacts persist over time. All of these questions about natures, identity, and persistence conditions are modal questions: questions about the properties an object must have to be of a certain type, about what it would take for there to be something of a given type, about the conditions under which individuals would be identical, or under which a given thing would or would not persist.² Under this heading also come questions not about whether something of a given sort exists, but about what it would take for something of a given sort (or for an individual) to exist, about the existence conditions for things of various kinds. Questions about whether or not colors, numbers, or moral facts are “mind-dependent,” for example, are modal questions about whether the existence of minds is necessary for the existence of things of these other sorts.³

This may not capture everything metaphysicians deal with, and the tripartite classification is certainly not the only way of dividing up the problems of metaphysics. Nonetheless, it provides, I think, a fair survey of the sorts of problems that have come to occupy center stage in metaphysical debates over the past 60 years or so, during the post-positivist revival of metaphysics. Furthermore, the division into three will provide a useful organization for considering the methodological issues below, as similar methodological issues arise, for example, for all existence questions and for all modal questions, despite superficial dissimilarities between, for example, questions about identity conditions and questions about essences (both of which are classified as modal questions).

Now, if those are among the central questions of metaphysics, the next question is how we are to go about answering them. While the methodology to be employed in the natural sciences has been clear and consistent for some time, the question of what methods are proper to answering metaphysical questions has become only more contested and more obscured over the past century.

A standard response—if you interrupt metaphysicians in the heat of a first-order debate to enquire about their methodology—is to brush off the question, saying that to answer metaphysical questions we simply “think really hard” and “see who has the best arguments.” But this alone is no kind of answer to a very real and pressing question, for it only leads us back further to the underlying questions. What sorts of arguments are and are not appropriate, or suitable for providing support for metaphysical theses, say, about what exists, about identity and persistence conditions, or about the relation between higher and lower level entities? Do purely a priori arguments based on thought experiments and/or conceptual analysis provide the proper support? Or should we be suspicious of the idea that “intuitions” about imagined cases can be truth-tracking at all, or that conceptual analysis can tell us anything about what the world is like? Is empirical enquiry relevant, and can it alone be sufficient to tell us what ontology to adopt or what the natures of things of various kinds are? What role, if any, do the theoretic virtues play in justifying the adoption of a metaphysical theory? Do metaphysical theories aim to do the same sort of job as scientific theories, so that they may be evaluated on similar grounds, according to their theoretic virtues? Moreover, if we do take metaphysical questions to be answerable empirically, further questions arise about the sorts of empirical evidence that are relevant. If we want to know about the essence of a given kind of thing, say, persons or artifacts, do we study the things themselves, or should we, with experimental philosophers, undertake empirical study of those who use the corresponding terms or concepts?

None of these methodological questions are easy to answer, all are highly contested, yet how we answer them makes an enormous difference to how we go about entering into metaphysical debates and evaluating the merits of various proposals. Perhaps it’s no wonder, then, that the controversies in metaphysics show so little hope of being resolved, and that the answers to metaphysical questions seem to keep proliferating and diversifying rather than converging on (what we hope is) the truth. The methodological problems are crucial, since without clarity about what we are doing in metaphysics, what sorts of consideration are and are not legitimate to resolving metaphysical debates, we can make little progress in adjudicating metaphysical disputes (at least where the disputants do, as is often the case, explicitly or tacitly employ different methodologies). These obscurities at the methodological level, and the proliferation in opinions that has resulted, have led some to doubt that these questions of metaphysics are as deep and important as they seem. Indeed, methodological doubts have led some to treat many core metaphysical questions as pseudo questions, as poorly formed and unanswerable questions, or as trivially answerable and so not suitable subjects for deep metaphysical debates.

While many practicing metaphysicians still prefer to brush off methodological problems, over the past ten years or so (as the post-positivist euphoria among those who wanted to just practice metaphysics unencumbered has died down, and as skeptics and deflationists have raised new worries), there has come to be an increasing sense of the importance of returning to examine these methodological issues. Tim Williamson, for example, speaks of a “current tendency towards increasing methodological self-consciousness in philosophy” (2007, p. 8), a tendency that can be witnessed in the prominent books and collections on the topic which have recently come forth or are in preparation (e.g., Chalmers et al. 2009; McGinn, 2011; Sider, 2011; Williamson, 2007). The clearest way to see how and why the confusion over the methods for addressing metaphysical debates has developed is to take a brief look back at the history of metaphysics—so I will pause now to provide a bit of that history, and then return to assess the current state of the debate.

Methodology in Metaphysics: A Very Brief History

In the days of rationalism, philosophers doing metaphysics thought of themselves as aiming to discover fundamental truths about the world and its structure using a priori reasoning. Thus, for example, Descartes argued for the existence of God, and for the existence of two fundamentally different kinds of substance, from his armchair alone.

Empiricists grew suspicious of these lofty claims and sought to clarify the methods for resolving metaphysical disputes. Some traditional questions of metaphysics were held to be resolvable empirically if at all, whether through external observation or internal observation of our own psychological processes. So, for example, the question of the existence of God was thought to be resolvable (if at all) by empirical arguments about whether or not God is the best causal explanation of the (coming into) existence of the world, or of its apparent “design.” Other questions of metaphysics were taken to be resolvable by way of grasping “relations among ideas” rather than “matters of fact.” For example, through examining relations among our ideas, we can see that moral responsibility presupposes liberty in (and only in) the sense of doing what one wills, without external hindrance (Hume, 1748/1977). Purported metaphysical questions that cannot be resolved through either of these means were considered dubious. Thus, in what may have been the most famous early attack on rationalist metaphysics, Hume wrote:

If we take in our hand any volume of divinity, or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames. For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. (1748/1977, p. 114)

Kant also raised suspicions against traditional metaphysics as illegitimately attempting to acquire knowledge about things in themselves, an attempt which reaches beyond our cognitive powers. His transcendental approach gave a new way of understanding metaphysical questions about, for example, the structure of space and time or the nature of freedom: neither by using experience to examine the world, nor by examining our concepts, but rather by ferreting out the transcendental presuppositions required for our experience of the phenomenal world to be possible or for our moral concepts to have application.

As the empirical sciences continued to develop, to become methodologically self-conscious and to break off from philosophy (ending with the separation between philosophy and psychology around the end of the nineteenth century), philosophers became increasingly concerned with methodological questions. The question of what philosophy is, how philosophy differs from science, how we should do it and what sort of knowledge we might hope to gain from it, as Gilbert Ryle puts it, didn’t “begin seriously to worry the general run of philosophers until right around the beginning of the twentieth century” (1971, p. 366). But by the middle of the twentieth century, methodological concerns had become far more prominent—even a core obsession for many philosophers. Thus Ryle says of philosophers of his generation: “We philosophers were in for a near-lifetime of enquiry into our own title to be enquirers” (1970, p. 10).

The methodological crisis for metaphysics

In the early twentieth century, the dominant answers to the question “what are the proper roles and methods of philosophy?” deflated the goals and ambitions of metaphysics. The logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, as heirs to the Empiricist tradition, drew a clear distinction between metaphysics and science. Forms of traditional metaphysics that involved claims to knowledge of a reality transcending the world of science and common sense were roundly rejected as nonsensical. A. J. Ayer, who visited the Vienna Circle and aimed to promote its views to an English-speaking audience, put the point as follows: “no statement which refers to a ‘reality’ transcending the limits of all possible sense-experience can possibly have any literal significance, from which it must follow that the labors of those who have striven to describe such a reality have all been devoted to the production of nonsense” (1946/1952, p. 34). That is, on this view many of the statements (and debates) of traditional metaphysics are not...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Introduction
• 1   Research Problems and Methods
• 2   Modality
• 3   Universals and Abstract Objects
• 4   Naturalism and Physicalism
• 5   Mind
• 6   Material Constitution
• 7   Endurantism and Perdurantism
• 8   Personal Identity
• 9   Free Will
• 10  God
• 11  New Directions in Metaphysics
• Annotated Bibliography
• Research Guide
• A–Z Index of Key Terms and Concepts
• Index