Metaphysics

Metaphysics is the part of philosophy where we ask and answer questions about reality. That was, as a research question, not something I was particularly concerned about. I wasn’t particularly concerned about answering questions about reality because I wanted to ask and answer the prior question about research: how would we figure out the right answer to anything?

Figuring out the right answer to things isn’t necessarily about figuring out what is real. Sometimes figuring out the right answer is about understanding what makes something wrong or false. Sometimes figuring out the right answer means knowing why something is a fiction.

What I noticed was that as I was pushing on with these methodological questions about research, it became harder and harder to pretend like my work wasn’t pointing to certain conclusions about reality.

Models of Thought

My mature work centers on a distinction between two kinds of explanations: interpretation and explication. These two kinds of explanations, in turn, depend upon different models of thought. Interpretation relies on the linguistic account of thought, or LAT, and explication relies on what I called linguistic externalism. Linguistic externalism is the idea that a thought is the use we can make of any meaningful expression in service of some type of inquiry, discipline, genre, or question. What this entails is that there are different kinds of thoughts:

Philosophical thoughts
Mathematical thoughts
Chemistry thoughts
Literary thoughts

Each kind of thought is answerable to the criteria that allow us to understand what that thought is about.

However if we’ve got enough in place to understand what a thought is about, then we’re pretty close to determining which thoughts are true and which are false. The true thoughts are the facts. If we can get to the facts, then we know something about reality.

What are the Objective Facts: What is Objective Reality?

Objective reality is a very difficult concept to come to terms with if you assume LAT. If you assume LAT, thought is a linguistic matter and the thought is no different from the meaning of what we say. The meaning of what we say is dependent upon culture and history, and culture and history are quite relative to specific groups of people. If we start with a lot, reality becomes something quite difficult to come to terms with. We can talk about reality but it’s hard to disentangle it from our cultural expectations.

But if we adopt an explicatory approach to explanation based on linguistic externalism, what that allows us to do is to first identify a field of inquiry in terms of its breadth of controversy. That would be the first-order research we have to get past. We basically do this by using deductive logic to understand various controversial theories in an area of questioning and then we line them up and then we compare them.

This gets us to the second level of research. At the second level of research we use both deduction and inductive logic to come to determine what the contraversy is about. And what the contraversy is about, is the object that the various first order theories are disagreeing about.

At the third level we make use of the inference to the best explanation to sort through all the first-order theories and figure out which of those theories explains the possibility of the disagreement. Whatever theory can explain the possibility of the disagreement would be shown to be objectively true.

Metaphysics So Understood Shows us that Agency Is Primary

If we need an example, consider physics.

Physicists consider many theories and all have some evidence going for them: relativity, Newtonian physics, and quantum mechanics, but they don’t agree with each other. That’s important because it shows that they are different perspectives that describe different aspects of what is objective.

Once we understand that they are triangulating on something that physics disagrees about, at the second level, if we have a sufficiently good understanding of the first-order disagreement, we could identify, in some abstract way, what that object is. At the third level we would look to find a theory that would explain the possibility of that type of disagreement. When we have such a theory, we would have the objectively true physics theory. The objectively true physics theory would explain how the same physical objectivity could appear as quantum mechanics, relativity, or Newtonian physics under different circumstances. My understanding is that will take some innovation.

In my work I’ve done the same with ethics. I’ve shown that the first-order disagreements of ethics are theories of the right or the good:

Virtue ethics
Consequentialism
Deontology
Yoga

This shows that the object of dissent, what we figure out at the second order, is the concept of the right or the good. At the third order we would determine what theory explains the possibilities of the disagreement on the right or the good. I’ve argued that’s actually Yoga because Yoga as an ethical theory provides the infrastructure to engage first in the eplicatory activity of determining the first-order disagreement and the subsidiary or subsequent levels of ethical inquiry.

This is the model of how we figure out what is objectively real. There is something that we cannot get rid of in our story of reality: responsible agents who can engage in research. This line of inquiry leads to the bedrock importance of agents as rational answers to these difficult questions. What that should teach us is that any view of reality that doesn’t fully make room for agents is partial and not objectively true.