I am a scattered object

As I said in my previous post, I am a region of spacetime. This follows from accepting supersubstantivalism (there is only spacetime) and giving a reductive analysis of physical objects (they are regions of spacetime). If spacetime is continuous, does this mean that I am also continuous and not scattered? No, because I am not just any old region of spacetime. Actually, I am not even a region, I am a fusion of many regions. I am a mereological sum of a bunch of point-sized pieces of spacetime, each of which instantiates the kinds of physical properties that ground me being a biological organism. And between these pieces of spacetime there are empty subregions (empty in the sense that they don't instantiate the properties needed to ground there being a biological organism), which are not part of me.

If I wasn't a supersubstantivalist, if I believed in physical objects distinct from spacetime, then I wouldn't believe in mereological sums of spatiotemporally separated simples, even if they were carefully arranged in dense bundles. I would be a mereological nihilist and deny the existence of ordinary objects. Why? Because, intuitively, there wouldn't be any deep togetherness in the bundles.

The fact that the properties of my scattered parts are pinned down directly to a spacetime manifold that is itself a connected, continuous entity gives my parts the kind of togetherness that they would otherwise lack. This togetherness is what metaphysically explains there being composite wholes. The togetherness of the subregions of spacetime (which make up me) flows directly from the togetherness of the entire spacetime. So here we have another reason to be a supersubstantivalist!

Is metaphysics possible without a faculty of rational intuition?

Of course it is. I am not even talking about "naturalized" metaphysics, the kind of shallow metaphysics that stays close - too close, I would say - to the results of empirical science. I am talking about in-your-face analytic metaphysics of the most revisionary sort, i.e. the work of David Lewis ("other possible worlds are just as real as the actual world"), James Ladyman ("there are no things, only relations without relata") or Peter van Inwagen ("there are no tables or rocks, but there are people and dogs").

Since strong metaphysical claims cannot be established empirically and are also not pragmatic suggestions on how to talk, do we then need to invoke a special faculty of rational intuition - a faculty for which there is no scientific evidence - in order to reach these deep metaphysical facts? No, we do not. For example, the neo-Quinean methodology popular in contemporary analytic metaphysics does not require appealing to any kind of mysterious intuitions and is not even a priori in the traditional sense, as Gideon Rosen makes clear:

"Lewis's case for modal realism is the most striking example of Quinean methods deployed for non-Quinean ends. This is swashbuckling metaphysics that takes us well beyond commonsense and physics; and yet the methodology posits no special faculty of rational intuition or transcendental reflection. For Quine and Lewis both, we start where we are with commonsense and science and refine our views so as to simplify our total theory, seeking economy of laws and basic idioms. ... We are open at every stage to correction as science progresses, so the enterprise is not a priori in any of the traditional senses, and we need not suppose that we have a special faculty for directly apprehending the facts we seek." (Quine and the Revival of Metaphysics, 2014, p. 566-7; my emphasis)

 In fact, on the Quinean conception, metaphysics is not qualitatively different from science:

"metaphysics, properly understood, is just more science. This claim depends on abstract description of science as the search for 'simple' theories that fit the facts, and a more determinate conception of 'simplicity' that privileges economy of basic laws and primitive vocabulary." (ibid., p. 568)

So even Lewis' defence of modal realism, which is surely one of the most audacious and radically revisionary doctrines in the whole of philosophy, could be seen as continuous with the methods of science.

Of course, the Quinean picture of scientific methodology could be false. But even in that case, the methodology of mainstream metaphysics would not be based on rational intuitions. It would just be non-scientific. Since I take science to be dependent on philosophy (but not vice versa), it does not matter, in terms of the field's respectability, whether or not the methods of philosophy are counted as scientific or non-scientific.

There is nothing "woo-woo" about questions of ontological and ideological parsimony, and a normal human brain is perfectly capable of considering them. It was these kinds of theoretical considerations, not an imagined "direct access" to an otherwise invisible realm, that lead Lewis to postulate his worlds:

"If we want the theoretical benefits that talk of possibilia brings, the most straightforward way to gain honest title to them is to accept such talk as the literal truth." 

"Modal realism is fruitful; that gives us good reason to believe that it is true." (both quotes from Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds, 1986, p. 4)

Lewis' theoretical discoveries have greatly increased our knowledge of the nature of possibility and necessity, the size of reality, the criteria of identity for possibilia, and so on. This is distinctively metaphysical, non-empirical knowledge, and there is nothing mysterious about it.

To conclude: the claims of contemporary metaphysics may be revisionary, but its methods do not involve commitments to revisionary psychology.

No need to apologize for doing "heavy-duty metaphysics"

The term "heavy-duty metaphysics" is often used in philosophy. It seems to be viewed as something to be avoided since philosophers often feel the need to assure their readers that their theory does not involve heavy-duty metaphysics.

Lets look at some passages where the term is being used:

"we also retain what one might call laws of metaphysics. (Despite the grand name, no heavy-duty metaphysics is intended; the underlying account of lawhood is reductive.)" (Theodore Sider, Writing the Book of the World, 2012)

"Those pursuing [the project of providing a metaphysical account of causation] think it important to provide a metaphysics for causal claims or to specify what causation 'is', metaphysically speaking, or what the metaphysical 'truth-makers' or 'grounds' for causal claims are. Those committed to this enterprise sometimes invoke heavy-duty metaphysics involving relations of necessitation between universals, dispositional essences, and the like, although others prefer sparser, more 'Humean' candidates for truth-makers" (James Woodward, A Functional Account of Causation, 2014)

In both of these passages "heavy-duty" is just equivalent to "ontologically excessive". If an account is reductive or is committed to a sparse ontology, then it is not heavy-duty.

Sometimes the assurance of no heavy-duty metaphysics being involved indicates that the account is intuitive or commonsensical:

"To appreciate the exclusion problem, we do not require much heavy-duty metaphysics - overarching doctrines about mental anomalism, "strict laws" in causal relations, a physical/mental conception of causality, token physicalism, and the rest. It arises from the very notion of causal explanation and what strikes me as a perfectly intuitive and ordinary understanding of the causal relation." (Kim, Mind in a Physical World, 2000)

"Nearly all the philosophy we have looked at so far begins from what are relatively ordinary, everyday considerations. ... Hegel's thought in the Philosophy of History, in contrast, arises out a grand vision of reality and the forces that move it - this is heavy-duty metaphysics." (Edward Craig, Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction, 2002)

This sense is clearly different from the previous one. After all, it is not as if Humean or reductive metaphysics is part of common sense.

I see nothing wrong with doing heavy-duty metaphysics in either of these senses. First, there is no reason to think that the deep nature of reality matches common sense or that folk metaphysics is even coherent. Science, especially contemporary physics, often goes directly against common sense, and unintuitive theories become accepted by the scientific community. If a metaphysical theory is weird, then the theorist can just provide reasons for her claims, unapologetically. There is no reason to even start from "ordinary, everyday considerations", and it is perfectly fine to have a fully fleshed-out metaphysics in mind when formulating a problem.

Eric Schwitzgebel thinks that the true metaphysics of mind is inevitably going to be "crazy" because none of the major views are thoroughly commonsensical, even when the theorists take common sense as their starting point:

"I believe that there is not a single broad-ranging exploration of the fundamental issues of metaphysics that doesn't, by the end, entangle its author in seeming absurdities. Rejection of these seeming absurdities then becomes the common-sense starting point of a new round of metaphysics, by other philosophers, which in turn generates a complementary bestiary of metaphysical strangeness. Thus are philosophers happily employed." (The Crazyist Metaphysics of Mind, 2014)

Second, a metaphysical theory should not be favored just because it is sparser, although I am a fan of Ockham's razor. Sometimes ontological sparseness has a cost in terms of a loss in ideological economy (the number of primitive predicates) or explanatory power (I, for one, think that the existence of regularities must be explained). It is not even obvious that a Humean metaphysics is ontologically sparser since it is often taken to be committed to the existence of quiddities.

Most importantly, it is all just more metaphysics. Humean and non-Humean accounts are both metaphysical pictures of reality. Both are highly speculative and require lots of theoretical work using traditional a priori methods. So, in both cases, there is something "heavy-duty" going on. And prima facie, both are equally valid candidates. So there is no reason to apologize for developing and defending either account. If we want to understand what lawhood or causation really is, we have to develop both frameworks side by side until we finally reach the truth.

I am a fusion of spacetime points

"Spacetime is substance enough. There is no need for the dualism of the contained and the contained (or for fundamental containment relations). When God makes the world, she needs only create spacetime. Then she can pin the fundamental properties directly to spacetime." (Jonathan Schaffer, Spacetime the one substance, 2009)

Supersubstantivalists identify physical objects with regions of spacetime. Ockham's razor favors the view over substantivalism, which unnecessarily includes both spacetime and physical objects as two distinct fundamental substances. The third option, relationalism, which derives spacetime from relations between physical objects and thus includes only physical objects in its fundamental ontology, cannot accommodate the notion of unoccupied locations without making major concessions to substantivalists (supersubstantivalists can just talk about some regions lacking certain properties). Supersubstantivalism is the clear winner.

Therefore, I am not in space and time. I am a piece of space and time, that is, a bundle of spacetime points. Here I am in partial agreement with Theodore Sider:

"Although my ontology contains no physical objects per se, it does contain entities with which they may naturally be identified: the sets of spacetime points that they occupy. I, for example, can be identified with a set whose earliest points are around 1967, whose temporal cross-sections are person-shaped, and which continues on into the future for an unknown duration." (Writing the Book of the World, 2012) 

My agreement is only partial because Sider is a mereological nihilist and I am not. I am not just a set of spacetime points, I am their fusion.

Why knowledge of physics is unnecessary for doing metaphysics

James Ladyman and Don Ross, in their book Every Thing Must Go (2007), criticize contemporary analytic metaphysicians for not paying enough attention to science, especially physics. They argue that fundamental physics has shown that the whole framework of analytic metaphysics, the kind of atomistic billiard-ball picture of physical reality assumed in common sense, is false, and that analytic metaphysics should be discontinued and replaced with the project of unifying empirical science.

In this post I will not yet discuss their metaphysical (wink wink) interpretation of physics or their idea of "naturalized" metaphysics (which is confused, by the way), I will just point out that they are simply mistaken about the level of ignorance among metaphysicians. Metaphysicians have been aware for a long time of the theories and results of contemporary physics that Ladyman and Ross are referring to. For example, the analytic metaphysician Dean W. Zimmerman wrote this already in 1996:

"Many scientists and philosophers now hold that, if we take contemporary physics seriously, we can only conclude that the traditional concept of extended substance has no application." (Could Extended Objects Be Made Out of Simple Parts? An Argument for "Atomless Gunk")

So if metaphysicians are aware of the empirical inadequacy of the billiard-ball model, why are some of them still using it? The answer is very simple. Metaphysics is about the fundamental nature of reality and goes deeper than mere empirical science. Therefore, empirical science cannot refute metaphysical views that easily. Metaphysics is prior to science, it is a more fundamental type of inquiry, and is thus autonomous from science. Science, on the other hand, is dependent on metaphysics. As I already said in my previous post, metaphysics is necessary for interpreting science (and interpretation is necessary for understanding). Ladyman and Ross cannot simply derive their anti-atomistic conclusions from the bare formalism of physics unless they engage in heavy-duty metaphysics.

Most importantly, metaphysics is about the specifically metaphysical nature of things, and here we slide into the realm of metaphysical possibility. Metaphysics asks: What is causation, metaphysically? What is a law of nature, metaphysically? What is composition, metaphysically? In order to find out the metaphysical nature of, say, causation, it is not enough to look at what causation is in the actual world, i.e. by trying to ontologically reduce the oomph-y, productive notion of causation to conserved quantities. We have to know what causation is in all the metaphysically possible worlds. In one world it could be something, in another it could be something else. Or it could be the same thing in every world by metaphysical necessity. In any case, the only way to understand something metaphysically is to leave the actual world behind.

The same goes for the metaphysical nature of physical objects. It is not enough to know that in the actual world, there are no extended substances. For the purposes of metaphysics it is more important to know whether such substances are possible because such a possibility would have far-reaching consequences, as Zimmerman explains:

"Extended substances are more like gold mountains than round squares. Perhaps there aren't any, but there could be. And if the argument of this paper is correct, the possibility of extended objects implies the possibility of objects consisting of 'atomless gunk'. ... [T]he bare possibility of atomless gunk has far-reaching consequences for the metaphysics of living things and artifacts. ... [I]f there could be objects made of atomless gunk, then ... living things and other objects that can be constituted by different masses of matter at different times must be construed as either (i) a kind of process or event, or (ii) logical constructions out of more basic entities." (ibid; first emphasis mine)

The only way to study bare metaphysical possibilities is to use the traditional a priori methods of metaphysics. Empirical science is, by necessity, silent about these kinds of issues because it aims at mere empirical adequacy, a superficial level of understanding.

When studying the metaphysical nature of objects, one is not obliged to stay in nearby worlds. In fact, the more exotic the worlds, the deeper we get into the very essence of objects. This is why knowledge of physics, which describes only a very thin slice of all the metaphysical possibilities, is unnecessary when doing metaphysics.

Knowledge of physics could even be harmful, because people have the tendency to want to show off their knowledge and do what they have a comparative advantage in. This could lead physics-literate metaphysicians to stay too close to the actual world and provide analyses that are metaphysically shallow. This is often the case with "naturalized" metaphysics.

Physicists do not understand physics

These days it is a popular pastime of famous physicists, such as Lawrence Krauss, Stephen Hawking and Neil deGrasse Tyson, to attack philosophy. This reflects a profound confusion on their part. They think they can understand reality by just doing observations, experiments and theoretical calculations. But to really understand things, at a deeper level, one has to engage in a lot of philosophy, especially metaphysics.

First, physics is necessarily based on metaphysical assumptions, for example about the uniformity and universality of the laws of nature. One can try to ignore these assumptions, but they are there, and they guide research. So the physicists who ignore them are doing their job blindfolded, stumbling around.

Second, and most importantly, physics requires an interpretation. Without an interpretation, physics is not properly understood. And to interpret physics, to figure out what physics is telling us about reality, just is to engage in metaphysical thinking, to step into the kingdom of analytic metaphysics.

Here is the metaphysician of science Matteo Morganti's view on the relationship between metaphysics and science:

"metaphysics grounds the interpretation of scientific theories, and thus science is ... dependent on philosophy." (Combining Science and Metaphysics, 2013; my emphasis)

But why do we need an interpretation? Isn't it enough to just know how to make predictions and so on? Well, if one is solely interested in having practical, mundane expertise, then one does not have to interpret science. But this kind of instrumentalist attitude, the attitude of an engineer or a technician, is in direct opposition to what the goal of science is, what actually motivates scientists to do science, which is to seek understanding and knowledge.

Meinard Kuhlmann, who has developed a dispositional trope ontology for quantum field theory, puts it well:

"[Instrumentalists] deny that scientific theories are meant to represent the world in the first place. For them, theories are only instruments for making experimental predictions. Still, most scientists have the strong intuition that their theories do depict at least some aspects of nature as it is before we make a measurement. After all, why else do science, if not to understand the world? Acquiring a comprehensive picture of the physical world requires the combination of physics with philosophy." (What is real? 2013; my emphasis)

Morganti again:

"[N]on-interpreted science is not as much 'understood' as 'usable'. ... At best, in such a case one has merely practical knowledge. ... [T]he deeper meaning of such theories can only come to the surface through sophisticated philosophical analysis." (Combining Science and Metaphysics, 2013; my emphasis)

At this point the critic of metaphysics could argue that metaphysics is not really understood either. In fact, she could say, metaphysical theories are even less clear than the mathematically formulated theories of physics. Here is Bas van Fraassen, an opponent of metaphysics:

"metaphysicians interpret what we initially understand into something hardly anyone understands." (The Empirical Stance, 2002)

But this is simply not the case. First, physics is not "initially understood" without metaphysics, it is just empty formalism. Second, analytic metaphysics is probably the most clear and rigorous subfield in the whole of contemporary philosophy. Theories and definitions are formulated in painstaking rigor, connections to ordinary language are provided, and step-by-step arguments are given, often with the help of formal logic. For example, here is the analytic metaphysician Hud Hudson's analysis of touching, the metaphysical relation of being in perfect contact:

"Necessarily, x touches y if and only if ∃R2, ∃w, ∃v, ∃p (i) w is a part of x, whereas v is a part of y, (ii) w exactly occupies R1, whereas v exactly occupies R2, (iii) p is a boundary point of both R1 and R2, (iv) p is a member of at least one of R1 and R2, and (v) w ≠ v." (Touching, 2001)

A definition couldn't be any clearer. More examples could be given. Thus, contemporary analytic metaphysics is better understood than the bare formalism of non-interpreted physics, and it provides the necessary tools for interpreting that formalism.

To conclude: if one seeks understanding and knowledge, then doing philosophy, especially metaphysics, is absolutely necessary.

Metaphysics takes it a level deeper

What is metaphysics about? In short, the job of metaphysics is to answer the most fundamental questions about the nature of reality. By "most fundamental" I mean to indicate that I am not talking about the kinds of questions already asked by empirical science, for example about the detectable properties of quasars, neurons or molecules. Those are relatively superficial questions, and easy to answer by just going to a lab and doing a couple of experiments. Metaphysics is about the deep nature of reality.

Here is L. A. Paul on how metaphysics goes deeper than mere empirical science:

"Physics tells us which fundamental (i.e., perfectly natural) physical objects, structures and properties are the actual members of the ontological categories, and metaphysics takes it a level deeper, by telling us what the fundamental categories are, and adding any needed supporting properties and relations (such as identitity, ground, composition, etc.)." (Building the world from its fundamental constituents, 2012; my emphasis)

In physics it is just blindly assumed that there are, say, certain kinds of properties. But in order to know whether there really is such a fundamental ontological category, a category of being, as "property" where mass, charge and so on would belong, we need to do some metaphysics.

As an empirical science, the job of physics is to provide empirically adequate models of observable phenomena. Thus, it stays at the surface level and merely accounts for some superficial features of quarks, photons, etc. It does not tell us what the deep nature of a quark or a photon is, as the metaphysician Meinard Kuhlmann explains:

"the standard picture of elementary particles and mediating force fields is not a satisfactory ontology of the physical world. It is not at all clear what a particle or field even is. ... [Quantum field theory] accounts for our observations in terms of quarks, muons, photons and sundry quantum fields, but it does not tell us what a photon or a quantum field really is." (What is real? 2013; my emphasis)

Therefore, physicists by themselves are not able to give us a complete account of even their own objects of inquiry. If we seek deeper insights into the nature of quarks and fields, it is not enough to learn, by doing some experiments, how they behave. We also need to know what they are, and answering this question is the job of metaphysics, not physics.

Another way to put it is to say that metaphysics provides the very foundation for the nature of reality, as Kit Fine does here:

"[Metaphysics] serves as a foundation, not for reality as such, but for the nature of reality. It provides us with the most basic account, not of things - of how they are - but of the nature of things - of what they are." (What is metaphysics? 2012)