4.3 A Note About Metaphysics
It is almost de rigueur for pragmatists to express misgivings about contemporary metaphysics. I am no exception. Charles Sanders Peirce said ” The demonstrations of the metaphysicians are all moonshine. The best that can be done is to supply a hypothesis, not devoid of all likelihood, in the general line of growth of scientific ideas, and capable of being verified or refuted by future observers” (Peirce, CF1.7) The pragmatic cynic might even argue that ‘metaphysics is not even useless’, to paraphrase an expression about string theory. However I am not one of those people.
Nevertheless, I personally find it desirable to avoid uninformative metaphysical concepts that do not form an important part of ordinary discourse, or the language of other systematic studies (or more precisely Wissenschaft). I have no personal need of terms such as essences, forms, extension, universals, mental substance, and souls as explanatory terms. Nor do I feel impoverished by ignoring concepts such as pansychism, religious cosmology, mysticism, realism, anti-realism, idealism, solipsism, metaphysical determinism, free will, metaphysical transcendence, and so forth. (Of course, when those terms are encountered in historical scholarship about the development of ideas they have a contextual legitimacy). The concept of ‘mind’ has the obvious and convenient role of self-reference and reference to others. Beyond the referential role there is nothing useful to be said about mind that is outwith an observationally based cognitive psychology. Here I am envisaging the sciences as continuous with philosophy, in much the same way as W.V.O. Quine had presumed.
One of my misgivings about the vocabulary and concepts of traditional metaphysics is that it can give rise to unproductive debates that are only of interest to professional philosophers. As a pragmatist, I simply do not care to favour Ontic Structural Realism over Anti-Realist aspects of Constructive Empiricism (discussed in a later essay). Neither are essential to my view of the world or the human condition, as far as I can see. For me they both have approximately the same entertainment value, when discussed in YouTube lectures by very articulate and erudite professional philosophers. (If that reads like Richard Rorty that is my intention.) Yes philosophy can be fun!
Deprecation of traditional metaphysical concepts does not mean that I feel the need to abandon metaphysics. Talk of concrete and abstract objects, for example, is at the very least conversationally useful. Talk of the physical properties of objects and substances is intellectually useful within the ontology of the sciences and aesthetics. The metaphysical and epistemic concepts of reduction and emergence are fundamental in the philosophy of science. For any pragmatist engaged in exhaustive enquiry there is also some importance in understanding the strengths and weaknesses of implicit assumptions about scientific practice and explanations, which a pragmatic metaphysics should be able to deliver if is is at all useful.
We should also defend metaphysics against against the attacks of arid logicism such as Quine’s rather amusing statement “To be is to be a value of a bound variable”—i.e., of the x in (∀x) or in (∃x)” The idea of replacing ontology with set theory is a futile and a completely unnecessary abstraction.
In contradistinction to speculative metaphysics, the sciences provide vast possibilities for expanding our ontology. I prefer to try to understand how the sciences, both natural and social (or more precisely Wissenschaft) can enrich my personal perspective on the world and my understanding of what is required for a metaphysics of causation. The reason for this is very simple; the activities, observations and posits of scientists are, on the whole, far richer in content than vague, disengaged, redundant, and uninformative speculations about the physical world.