What is metaphysics?

Michael De University of Utrecht Department of Philosophy Utrecht, Netherlands mikejde@gmail.com June 10, 2011

What is metaphysics? (And what it isnt)

What is metaphysics? The answer one typically hears is that it concerns inquiry into the fundamental nature of reality. While true, this answer is by itself misleading. One important aspect of this form of inquiry is that, since the fundamental nature of reality is typically taken to lie outside of direct or immediateindeed even indirect or mediate!observation, answers to questions which lie at the heart of metaphysics, e.g. What exists?, involve essentially considerations of a purely theoretical nature. If we want to know whether things of kind x exist (e.g. mere possibilia), we cant just look and see. We have to ask what theoretical benets can be gained from the supposition that things of kind x exist. Thus questions concerning the nature of things get ultimately transformed into questions about theory choice. We should not, however, place too much emphasis on metaphysics as theory. Suppose we inquire into some subject matter. As is the nature of philosophical inquiry, there are a number of competing theories on the table, some of which score better in certain areas than others. We nd out, however, that these theories are pairwise mutually interpretable (in the sense of [1]) or synonymous (in the sense of [2]) or equivalent modulo some other purely formal property. We might then be inclined to conclude that, after all, none really scores better than any other along any dimension: theyre all on equal footing. For we can translate talk in one into talk in any of the others while preserving some set of relevant structural characteristics. I think we should strongly resist this conclusion. The cogency of this form of reasoning is grossly overestimated. Equivalence modulo some purely theoretical property carries next to no philosophical weight. As a simple example consider the semantic equivalence of certain glutty (dialetheic) languages with certain gappy languages, e.g. where being true and false is mapped to neither true nor false and vice versa (and, moreover, the glut theorist holds, just like the gap theorist, that logical consequence ought to be dened in terms of truth-only, rather than truth, preservation). This mere translational equivalence goes no way toward showing that the theories are on a philosophical par. For one posits the uncontentious truth that some sentences (not propositions) may fail to receive a truth value (under some interpretations) while the other rejects the analytic truth that under no (admissible) interpretation can a sentence be both true and false. Sure, we can translate glutty

talk into gappy talk, but no translation will help the gap theorist understand what the glut theorist intends to say. For an example from metaphysics, consider the open future cashed out in terms of (i) divergence and (ii) branching. We may be able to always obtain a branching structure from a divergent one and conversely, but that in no way shows some substantive notion of equivalence between divergence and branching. For on the divergence picture the future is open only in an epistemic sense, while on the branching theorists the indeterminacy of the future is at root ontic. What can we say, then, regarding the signicance of formal equivalences? Metaphysically, not much. For instance, we cant say that divergence and branching come to the same thing. What we can say is that a language interpreted with respect to either divergent models or branching models yields the very same logic. That itself is an interesting fact. It tells us that on very dierent pictures of the open future, one epistemic the other ontic, the very same patterns of reasoning come out valid. Maybe theres more to it than that, but until we are given some plausible story for thinking so, we shouldnt be tempted into granting formal equivalences any signicant metaphysical role.

How do we understand research into real possibilities as a metaphysical enterprise?

There are various notions of metaphysical possibility, but none is as close to us individuals situated here in the actual world at the present timeas real possibility. It is surprising, then, that not as much attention has been paid to determining precisely which part of broadly metaphysical space real possibility carves out. Real possibilities are metaphysical possibilities, just like physical possibilities and possibility dened in terms of consistency with some set of laws of nature. When we inquire into what is really possible we engage in a metaphysical enterprise. The scope of such inquiry is broad, for it asks what the structure of time is, whether the future is open and, if so, in what sense, and what role science has in philosophical analysis. One way of eshing out real possibility is in terms of (relativistic) branching spacetime structures or, if we wish to interpret temporal operators explicitly and model possibility in a tensed language, in terms of (relativistic) convergent preorders (i.e. Kripke frames with a reexive, transitive and convergent accessibility relation). But there are other ways of analyzing or modeling real possibility and we need to ask which of these is best, and in order to do so we must ask important metaphysical questions concerning space, time, modality, causation and the laws of nature.

References
[1] Per Lindstrm, Aspects of incompleteness, Lecture Notes in Logic, Springer, o 1997. [2] Francis Jery Pelletier and Alasdair Urquhart, Synonymous logics, Journal of Philosophical Logic 32 (2002), 259285.