The problem of metaphysics starts definitionally. The implication of a metaphysical component interacting with reality implies it leaves a physical trace. For example many people believe that temperature is an emergent property of matter, but not being represented by an acting particle “making” things hot makes it metaphysical. People imagine laws of physics interacting with things like auras of power, instead of the particles themselves having inherent properties that react to thermal energy / kinetic energy. This is a foundational issue in any metaphysical theory because the quantum fields that are physically the minimal positive defined properties of reality also provide unchanging limitations.
Existence itself is inarguable because it happens to exist. There is also ongoing change regardless of your viewpoint. Whether An eternal solid extended existence experiencing change or a multiplicity enacting change on the others, there is always change. The change is structured with physical patterns measured and tested in physical reality through the usage of our grey goo centers. Regardless we are using our connection to the physical to search for physical things, since definitionally metaphysical things can’t be found physically, but only abduced, or deduced for higher probable certainty.
The only 99% sure way to understand a metaphysical property is left to deduction to form a negative descriptive outline of the meta-physic with surety of the completeness, then map the positive descriptive aspects that impact reality. Sadly this leaves us with an insurmountable gap of knowledge to cross without an incredibly strong foundational bridge that acts as the guidance to the exact destination.
You have discovered a issue that many philosophers before you have written about. Even though you’re talking about metaphysics, this should be in philosophy of the mind. A few points to help you out:
v) In traditional philosophy, metaphysics isn’t about auras and such; it’s about the fundamental nature of reality that includes concepts like time, space, identity, causality, and necessity.
x) When it comes to negative deduction, there is already a field surrounding this called apotheic theology. It might be worth checking out. Example:
One cannot fully define God with human language therefore God is beyond speech.
One cannot say God is finite, therefore God is infinite.
f) In physics, temperature is a classic emergent property of matter. Saying that it is not is committing what is known as a reductionist fallacy.
v) Look into the interaction problem from Cartesian duality that goes over what you are asking about.
You can’t even define “physical” without engaging in metaphysics. “Physicalism” is metaphysics.
The problem, therefore, is your own scientism. Metaphysics is not a problem.
People imagine laws of physics interacting with things like auras of power, instead of the particles themselves having inherent properties that react to thermal energy / kinetic energy. This is a foundational issue in any metaphysical theory because the quantum fields that are physically the minimal positive defined properties of reality also provide unchanging limitations.
Physicalism is a metaphysical theory!
Additionally, physics as it currently stands is deep in the metaphysical doo-dah itself, because we have two kinds of physics, not one (QM and GR), and physicists have spent 100 years trying, and utterly failing, to fit them into a single coherent model of reality. Both are mired in metaphysical problems of their own, even before you try to fit them together. The whole mess reeks of metaphysics, but most of the “I love science” crowd don’t even understand that metaphysics is a strictly logical branch of philosophy, not new age tripe.
People in glass houses should not throw stones.
And Wittgenstein needs to be knocked off his pedestal. He had plenty of time to recant – to admit his glaring mistakes regarding the necessity of metaphysics after QM. There’s a reason he resisted the publication of the Investigations.
Indeed it is, but you seem to be assuming a definition. Here’s the opening paragraph in the article on Metaphysics in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy"
It is not easy to say what metaphysics is. Ancient and Medieval philosophers might have said that metaphysics was, like chemistry or astrology, to be defined by its subject-matter: metaphysics was the “science” that studied “being as such” or “the first causes of things” or “things that do not change”. It is no longer possible to define metaphysics that way, for two reasons. First, a philosopher who denied the existence of those things that had once been seen as constituting the subject-matter of metaphysics—first causes or unchanging things—would now be considered to be making thereby a metaphysical assertion. Second, there are many philosophical problems that are now considered to be metaphysical problems (or at least partly metaphysical problems) that are in no way related to first causes or unchanging things—the problem of free will, for example, or the problem of the mental and the physical.
The book Sketch for a Systematic Metaphysics describes a materialist “Metaphysics”, which is inconsistent with the definition you have in mind.
What Wittgenstein objected to in philosophy was its platonism, the idea that understanding how to go on in the world depends on consulting a prior picture, theory, scheme, metaphysics. One could argue that the equivalent of metaphysical scheme for Wittgenstein is forms of life. But unlike metaphysical schemes, forms of life do not exist first as some sort of prior grounding and then are applied to the sciences and other areas of experience. Rather, it is only in the actual doing that a form of life shows up.
I don’t read Wittgenstein to make any metaphysical claim or any scientific claim. His claims were as to word usage and meaning and what could be coherently discussed. If you believe that science discredits Wittgenstein then you confuse him for having made a scientific claim.
I think any discussion of metaphysics has to begin with or at least acknowledge Aristotle. After all it was for a selection of Aristotle’s works that the term ‘metaphysics’ was coined (famously, by a later editor, indicating the writings that were “after physics”.) In saying that, I have no intention of idolising Aristotle, as he was an ancient, and many ancient principles have been superseded by later discoveries.
Many, but not all. Some of Aristotle’s core ideas have found expression in current biology - Alicia Juarrero and Terrence Deacon both acknowledge that their writing on recursive dynamics, absentials and constraints have Aristotelian elements. Furthermore Aristotle’s duality of form and matter (hylomorphism) is still very much a live option in philosophy.
This seems to conceive of a ‘metaphysical component’ as though it were something on the same level as the physical — one more factor among the causes operating within reality. But that is not really what ‘metaphysical’ means. A more promising way of thinking about this in biology is in terms of form and function. Wings, for example, have evolved independently in very different lineages — insects, pterosaurs, birds and bats. They are constructed from quite different materials and by quite different developmental processes, yet they converge on certain morphological features because they have to perform the same function: they must be sufficiently light, aerodynamically shaped, and capable of generating lift. Those features are physically instantiated, but the functional form they instantiate is not itself a further physical cause. It is a principle of organisation. And that kind of principle is much nearer Aristotle’s metaphysics than positing some kind of physical ‘trace’ or ‘influence’.
Apologies I don’t have the patience to slowly peck away at the keyboard for a long time to properly address each point made. I truly thank people for the replies to my extremely messy first attempt at a post. I have poorly communicated my position nearly entirely.
I believe in a solely physical reality by nature of proof of existence being inarguable, the fact that the “conscious” regardless of your view possesses flawed characteristics that prevents 100% accuracy of knowledge. I heavily rely on empirical data to be the only source of accurate data. Induction, abduction, and deduction combined with a healthy dose of occams razor to all reality.
The physical is the fermions, and leptons, with the potential theorized unknown fields, and all of their immediately emergent effects. The reason I say this is because emergence is a property from the foundational fields not something other. This effectively means all reality as I view it as a physicalist is perfectly valid and sound.
I reject the metaphysical as a descriptor because it inherently applies a meta force acting as a control somewhere in the causal chain. A specific example with temperature is that it is best simply described as thermal and kinetic energy transfer between local entities. But the key is that temperature is nowhere in the equation acting as a measure to decide what happens. It is the measurable physical transformations happening that are already best described more technically.
People commonly categorize things metaphysically that are best described as purely physical. The problem lies in whether or not metaphysics is a true descriptor of anything that isn’t best just described as physical. Apologies I’m so h
But is that an accurate depiction of ‘metaphysical’? I think a better example is the infamous question of the nature of the wave function - physical or epistemological?
The later Wittgenstein did not
say metaphysics could not be discussed. He said we need to ask what philosophers are actually doing when they engage in metaphysics. What language-games are they participating in? What gives these expressions their meaning? We only know what a concept like metaphysics means through our actual use of the word in particular contexts. He claimed that asking general, context-free questions like what is Being, what is the essence of time and what is the nature of the self leads to confusion.
That’s not correct. Wittgenstein did not make a scientific claim regarding the coherence of metaphysical explanation. His was an argument about grammar (as he used that term). He offers no commentary on quantum mechanics, neurobiology, or anything scientific. He states that the meaning of a term is found by its public use and the usage of the term is not defined by that which falls outside of public participation.
I’m not suggesting there aren’t limitations to this approach, but the argument that he had a scientific theory that was subject to the evidence of the time misunderstands him. Look at PI 109 and 126.
I’d also point out that his position did change from the Tractatus to Philosophical Investigations, particularly on this point.
" Scientism is the view that all real knowledge is scientific knowledge—that there is no rational, objective form of inquiry that is not a branch of science… Despite its adherents’ pose of rationality, scientism has a serious problem: it is either self-refuting or trivial. Take the first horn of this dilemma. The claim that scientism is true is not itself a scientific claim, not something that can be established using scientific methods. Indeed, that science is even a rational form of inquiry (let alone the only rational form of inquiry) is not something that can be established scientifically. For scientific inquiry itself rests on a number of philosophical assumptions: that there is an objective world external to the minds of scientists; that this world is governed by causal regularities; that the human intellect can uncover and accurately describe these regularities; and so forth. Since science presupposes these things, it cannot attempt to justify them without arguing in a circle. And if it cannot even establish that it is a reliable form of inquiry, it can hardly establish that it is the only reliable form. Both tasks would require “getting outside” science altogether and discovering from that extra-scientific vantage point that science conveys an accurate picture of reality—and in the case of scientism, that only science does so."
I am a naturalist, and often refer to myself as a materialist or physicalist. But I recognize that something more is needed than scientific facts, and what that IS, is a “metaphysical framework”. It does not entail metaphysics, in the sense you’ve used the term as something non-physical. Rather, it needs an ontology that provides a coherent framework for addressing the issues Feser raises. It can’t be established empirically, and it can’t be argued to be necessarily true. But it’s a reasonable framework that falsifies any claims that “metaphysics” (as you use the term) is required.
However, philosophy might provide an avenue of meta-cognitive awareness, such that the insights of metaphysics come alive, which is more than simply verbal gymnastics. Recall in Plato’s academy, the curriculum included actual gymnastics, and every other facet of education. Philosophy then embraced all of what we would now regard as science in a way that it no longer does.
There are two issues I see involved here. One concerns the ‘meta’ as general or inclusive aspects of experience. The second concerns the relation between language and
context. Your depiction of Wittgenstein’s language games as mere ‘mental gymnastics’ divides the contextually particular meaning from meaning in its most general function (meta-cognitive awareness).
But writers like Wittgenstein, Foucault, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty argue that the
relation between the particular and the whole is such that we at the same time experience the world as a total system of relational sense (Wittgenstein’s forms of life, MP’s corporeal intersubjectivity,Heidegger’s world projection, Foucault’s power relations and epistemes) and as utterly particularized by the temporal contextualizations of language. Platonism subordinate the temporally finite to the metaphysically eternal, supratemporal and infinite, but the above authors subordinate the eternal to the temporally finite.
Heidegger writes:
In the occurrence of projection world is formed. This ‘as a whole’ is not tailored to any particular area nor even any particular species of beings. Rather this ‘as a whole’, the world, admits precisely the manifestness of manifold beings in the various contexts of their being–other human beings, animals, plants, material things, artworks, i.e., everything we are capable of identifying as beings.
This manifold, however, is poorly comprehended, or is not comprehended at all, if we take it merely as a colourful multiplicity of things at hand…so-called regions of being are not arrayed alongside one another or above or behind one another, but are what they are only within and out of a prevailing of world. This ‘as a whole’ that constantly surrounds us, and which has nothing to do with any pantheism, must, however, also be what brings with it that un differentiatedness of the manifestness of beings within which we commonly move.
“…in all comportment we become aware of comporting ourselves in each case from out of the ‘as a whole’, however everyday and restricted this comportment may be…However concerned we are to comport ourselves with respect to various issues and to speak in terms of individual things, we nevertheless already move directly and in advance within a tacit appeal to this 'as a whole‘. (Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics)
I was reacting against the expression ‘language games’, which I really don’t like. It seems trivialising to me. As for Heidegger, I would expect from him a holistic comprehension of philosophy as a lived discipline, although the way it was manifested in his political activites was not especially wholesome.
