Seriously serious metaphysics

If metaphysicians want to be taken seriously as inquirers into the nature of reality, they should be talking about quasars, quarks, black hole radiation and spontaneous symmetry breaking, instead of zombies, gunk spheres, persistence and grounding.

Of course, it is highly unlikely that metaphysicians, with their typical philosophical training, are able to add anything to our understanding of these physical entities and phenomena - or any real-world phenomenon for that matter - that scientists haven't already figured out for themselves.

Since science is our best and only way of studying objective reality, science has taken over the job of metaphysics. Science - and only science, not philosophy of science - tells us what exists, what is the nature of that which exists, and what reduces to what.


I like James Woodward's distinction between "ontology1" and "ontology2":

"in some areas of science, 'ontology' simply refers to what are taken to be the most basic entities or properties or structures in some area of inquiry or to the most useful or perspicuous way of classifying or conceptualizing these. ... Let us call this ontology1. It is ontology in the sense of ontology1 that geneticists have in mind when they speak of constructing a "gene ontology" or that cognitive neuroscientists have in mind when they speak of the importance of constructing a "cognitive ontology". ... On this understanding, constructing an "ontology" (that is, an ontology1) is a matter of ordinary empirical or scientific investigation" (Methodology, ontology, and interventionism, 2014)

By ontology2 he refers to the way mainstream metaphysicians do ontology:

"For example, ontologists2 often focus on questions like the following: what are the 'truth-makers' or 'grounds' for causal claims (laws of nature?, powers and dispositions?, relations of necessitation between universals?)" (ibid.)

In my opinion, serious metaphysicians (seriously serious, not "serious" in the sense of Frank Jackson or David Armstrong), when doing ontology, should do nothing but ontology1.