Many people who take up philosophy, and particularly those who take up metaphysics, end up coming away from the activity with very rich and populated ontologies (for the philosophically uninitiated, one’s ontology consists of the range of things which they take to exist, or to be a genuine part of reality). For instance, in addition to believing in the ordinary natural world and its denizens- protons, electrons, chairs, people, cars, stars, black holes, and so on- one might also end up believing in platonic mathematical entities, non natural moral reasons, Lewisian possible worlds, souls, and so on.
For my part, I find such worldviews crazy (said, of course, with love for my mystically inclined friends). I have what some may call a metaphysically thin picture of reality. I believe in the aforementioned ordinary natural world and its denizens, and nothing else. Beyond this, I tend to prefer a thinner conception of what exists in the natural world- I don’t posit, for example, any primitive, metaphysically thick causal relations or governing laws of nature, as some naturalists might- all such “nomic properties” as they are called are also eliminated or reduced to, essentially, some matter spread out across space-time.
The central topic of this article is the following question: what explains this sort of radical difference in interpretations of what reality is like? Why do some people believe in so much more reality than I do? In what follows, I am going to attempt to answer this question while defending my general worldview and philosophical approach against my foil, who I will call “the realist metaphysician”.
I will begin by describing the project of metaphysics from the perspective of the realist metaphysician.
The Metaphysical Project
Many of the statements that we make in our everyday life are philosophically uncontroversial. If I say “there’s a chair in my room”, we know what that means, and we know what would make that statement true- namely, the presence of a certain kind of physical object at a certain portion of space. Most of us believe in physical objects, as well as in space, so there’s no trouble here.
However, sometimes we make statements where things get a little weirder. For example, take moral statements- we say, “you ought not kill people”, “killing people is bad”, “saving people is good”, “happiness is valuable”, “suffering is disvaluable”, and so on. In other words, we use what philosophers call “normative terminology”. What’s that all about?
Of course, normative discourse is just one example- other paradigmatic domains of discourse which supposedly raise metaphysical worries include:
Mathematical discourse- mathematical discourse consists of statements involving mathematical concepts- statements like “2 is prime”, “4 + 4 = 8”, and so on.
Modal discourse- modal discourse consists of statements involving concepts of possibility, contingency, necessity, impossibility, and so on- what could have been, what must have been, what couldn’t be. For example, “drawing a square circle is impossible”, “Hillary Clinton could have beaten Donald Trump in the 2016 election”, and “necessarily, 2 + 2 = 4”, are all modal statements.
Nomic discourse- nomic discourse involves concepts such as causation, laws of nature, and chance. For example, I might say “my kicking the ball caused it to move”, “it is a law of nature that nothing goes faster than the speed of light”, and “there is a good chance that Donald Trump wins the 2024 US election”.
Abstract Object discourse- paradigmatic examples of “abstract objects” that we apparently refer to in our everyday talk include propositions, properties, relations, and events. For example, we might say ““the sun is shining” and “el sol está brillando” express the same proposition”, or “I bear the ‘being the child of’ relation to my mother”, or “I possess the property of being human”.
The worry comes from the fact that, for these kinds of statements, unlike my earlier example concerning the presence of a chair in my room, it is not exactly clear what part of reality makes them true- and in many of these cases, any straightforward attempt at answering the question of what makes them true would require adopting a commitment to entities which go beyond what I earlier referred to as “the ordinary natural world and its denizens”.
For example, what would make a statement like “2 is prime” true? Seemingly, the existence of the number 2, the existence of the property of “being prime”, and the fact that the entity in question possesses the property in question. But what is the number 2? It certainly couldn’t be a physical object that exists in the universe- rather, it would have to be some sort of abstract entity, existing in some sort of platonic realm, outside of space and time.
The realist metaphysician, then, wanting to preserve the integrity of our mathematical discourse and the truth of our mathematical statements, argues that we must adopt such abstract platonic objects into our ontology. Repeat this process for all of the aforementioned domains of discourse, and you might end up with a very rich and populated picture of the world indeed.
So, in essence, the realist metaphysician approaches metaphysics as follows: Firstly, with respect to the domains of discourse in question, they will insist that we take our statements at “face value”. For example, when I say that “killing people is wrong”, surely the most straightforward way of reading this statement is that I am saying that there exists some property, wrongness, which the act of killing people possesses. Or, when I say that “2 is prime”, surely the most straightforward way of reading this statement is that there exists a number 2, which has the property of being prime.
Secondly, the realist metaphysician is concerned with vindicating our statements, so interpreted. There is a presumption in favor of such statements being true, and the truth of these statements requires the existence of some part of reality which makes them true, and so we must find or postulate some part of reality to play the truth maker role.
The Empiricist Alternative
As you may have gleaned from some of my earlier comments, I approach things rather differently from the realist metaphysician. For one, I reject the picture of language which underlies the metaphysician’s interpretation of our statements. In particular, it seems as though the metaphysician is committed to the assumption that the structure of language mirrors the structure of reality in some way, such that there has to be some entity in the world corresponding to any legitimate singular term in a sentence. But why would anybody grant this? Limning the structure of reality is not the sole purpose of human language- language is a tool for communication. This is a familiar Wittgensteinian point, and I will not dwell on it any further here.
Secondly, even if I were to grant the metaphysician’s interpretation of our statements, I would still reject the presumption that the truth of these statements so interpreted is, in itself, a datapoint which is in need of explanation.
To be sure, if an analysis of the precise meaning of the statement reveals that it is asserting some descriptive fact whose truth we are antecedently committed to (for example, if, as is false, Sam Harris is right that statements about what is good just are statements about what maximizes welfare, which we can all surely agree that there are facts about), then I’m happy to grant the claim that the statement is true, and that it’s made true by some part of reality.
However, if, as is often the case according to the metaphysicians, the statement turns out to be an attempt at describing some part of reality which we’re not antecedently committed to, and which isn’t required for or involved in a causal explanation of our making the relevant statements and so on, we are not entitled to posit that the requisite part of reality exists simply because doing so would make our statement a true one.
The upshot of these points is that I have a narrower construal of the data than the metaphysician does. To be sure, I do think that there are questions regarding our utterances of the supposedly philosophically problematic statements that are in need of explanation. For instance, we might ask: why do we make these statements- what is the causal explanation for our tendency to utter them? What functional role do the relevant concepts and terms play in our language? What do people in general consciously intend to communicate or express when making such statements, if anything? These are, as far as I can tell, empirical questions, providing answers for which is the job of the sciences.
What I do not recognize as a legitimate starting point for inquiry, however, is the question which drives the sort of metaphysics that I set out to critique- namely, “what makes this statement true?” Again, if the fact that the statement is true falls out of an investigation of the aforementioned empirical questions, that’s fine by me- and presumably, any such inquiry would also answer the question of what makes the statement true. However, if you find yourself out on the hunt for a truth maker for some statement independently, as though there being a truth maker is a datapoint in itself, you are doing something wrong.
I should at this point make explicit the fact that the methodology which I’ve discussed here seems to basically rule out any non natural metaphysical hypothesis’. If all we need to do is causally explain our invoking of certain terms and concepts and so on, it’s most likely that we will end up needing only natural, and certainly only causal entities. For a narrower and less presumptuous scope of explanatory tasks, you require fewer metaphysical resources.
Now, my aversion to that kind of metaphysics does not solely lay in the fact that its hunt for truth makers is unmotivated and unnecessary. What is perhaps even more problematic is the path that this hunt tends to lead one down, which is, in my view, nothing short of a philosophical catastrophe.
Obviously, explaining the metaphysician’s datapoint is no trivial task- otherwise, how to do it wouldn’t be a point of vociferous philosophical debate. As mentioned previously, the metaphysician often ends up having to explain this datapoint by appealing to non natural, abstract entities and the like. The postulation of such entities, of course, is regrettable on ontic parsimony grounds (all else equal, we should prefer a view on which fewer distinct types of entities are said to exist). Moreover, if you are, like me, especially prone to viewing such kinds of entities as utterly bizarre or even inexplicable, then this provides all the more reason to reject them.
Perhaps worst of all, the kinds of entities that the metaphysician often finds himself admitting into his ontology tend to introduce epistemic problems. As I earlier alluded to, many of these entities- non natural moral reasons, platonic mathematical objects, and so on- are acausal, and thus have no way of interacting with the natural world. This means that, as I also previously alluded to, such entities can play no role in explaining how we came to form beliefs about them, why we talk about them, and so on.
The correspondence, then, between our statements and beliefs on the one hand, and the causally isolated realm which makes them true on the other hand, must be said by the metaphysician to be a miraculous coincidence. For my part, I strongly tend to prefer avoiding the stipulation of such coincidences whenever I can, and thus, the foregoing point provides me with very strong reason to forsake and avoid the metaphysical project.1
Conclusion
None of the points which I’ve made in this article are particularly original to me- there has been a longstanding empiricist critique of metaphysics in philosophy for as long as metaphysics has been around (and, by extension, for about as long as philosophy has been around). Nonetheless, I hope to have assembled some relevant remarks on the topic in a way that’s concise and compelling to my readers.
In summary, what differentiates me from the realist metaphysician is, firstly, that I have a narrower conception of the data which needs to be explained than the metaphysician does- I do not take as granted that the relevant statements ought to be interpreted as descriptive statements about reality, and I certainly do not take as granted the accuracy of the descriptions found therein. Therefore, I do not recognize any demand to explain how the relevant statements are true, or what makes them true.
Secondly, I am more disturbed by the postulation of the entities which the realist metaphysician often appeals to in order to explain their construal of the data than the metaphysician is. I am bullish on parsimony, I find the entities in question extremely bizarre and unintuitive (and perhaps not even intelligible), and I cannot accept the causal-epistemic gaps which they tend to introduce.
These complaints place me squarely in line with the traditional empiricist aversion to metaphysics. As Bas Van Fraassen writes in The Empirical Stance:
What exactly are the targets of the empiricist critique? As I see it, the targets are forms of metaphysics that (a) give absolute primacy to demands for explanation and (b) are satisfied with explanations-by-postulate, that is, explanations that postulate the reality of certain entities or aspects of the world not already evident in experience. The empiricist critiques I see as correspondingly involving (a) a rejection of demands for explanation at certain crucial points and (b) a strong dissatisfaction with explanations (even if called for) that proceed by postulation.
As a result of these differences in approach, those who are inclined towards the realist metaphysician approach usually end up believing in far more reality than I do. Some people get to live out their lives happily, comforted by their possible girlfriends and promises of reincarnation- all the while I am left with my boring Humean mosaic. In some respects this result is disappointing, but these comforts are, I think, well lost for love of the truth.
So really there are two points here. Number one, the epistemic gap issue rules out lots of metaphysical views, particularly non naturalist realist sorts of views. Number two, the fact that you run into such huge problems when you embark on the journey of providing truth makers gives you reason to be skeptical of the whole project.
Ethan,
I think that a major element behind the phenomenon that you are discussing is psychological, in that "believing in a lot more reality than you do" is an attempt by the believer to fill some kind of emotional or psychological void. Over the years, I have encountered many people who just can't seem to be happy accepting existence as it is. I see this in the range from a between a belief in a God to a belief in the latest conspiracy theory of the day.
I think that an Objectivist would say that having those "extra beliefs" is an instance of the primacy of consciousness fallacy, and I accept this, but then my question is why does the person involved choose it. What you are discussing also brings to mind the issue of just what is behind what we call creativity.
While I may be carrying this somewhat off of your track, I am reminded of cults, as I see what you describe being practiced in them. If this specific area interests you, I can recommend a book that I read a few years ago, called "The Cult of Trump", by Steven Hassan.
While I have your attention, I think that you might find interesting the podcasts by a Michael Liebowitz who has a YouTube podcast called "The Rational Egoist". Earlier this year, Michael was hosted by Matthew on his "Deliberation Under Ideal Conditions" show, and I found it very enjoyable.
Paul