• fdrake
    5.9k
    I still haven't come to a conclusion regarding metaphysics in the realms of science and mathematics. At times I feel that only scientists who are involved in or knowledgeable of research into a particular topic are qualified to delve into the metaphysics of that topic, and at other times I think that this requirement is too stringent.jgill

    I think the pictures of metaphysics you get if you immerse yourself in a field differ a lot from field to field, and even subfield. Dive into physics, maybe you end up seeing reality as a collection of coupled fields and asking questions like "are space and time emergent properties?"; much different from what is imagined in mechanics. Dive into politics, maybe you end up seeing a perpetual struggle for power between social institutions and groups of people. Dive into biology, maybe you see a self differentiating flow of biomass adapting to environments and its own internal conflicts. The entities stipulated differ, how they relate within fields differ, how you imagine the fundamental principles differs.

    That's somewhat of a vertical picture; what you end up thinking about the principles of the entities from descending into a domain of study. But it's also possible to do metaphysics laterally, to draw connections between domains, come up with uniting metaphors and vocabulary, describe process commonalities between domains of study in an abstract manner. This can be productive, or as is common, produces short circuits of thought and impassable problems; or interpret the impasses of what you have thought as contradictions or omissions within or between domains. Often both happen at once; by insulating over a live wire, productive simplifications engender broader world views, unaware of the limitations of their pictures, believing they have written all that needs be written until the inevitable, fatal, shock. Holding the background fixed with a violated assumption residing within it; avoiding shocking revelations by papering over their source
    *
    (and sometimes highlighting relevance by such papering over, as in the formation of one tradition through reaction to another's productive insanities)
    .

    Such short circuits are common forum posts; people taking folk notions, dipping into the concepts of a field, then finding a something counter intuitive they declare as an impasse, or essential for understanding of, or as an internal contradiction of the domain. Professional philosophers are not immune to producing such impasses, however, and you can feel the tensions; the subject in phenomenology devouring the autonomy of nature, the contradiction between the universality of rationally revealed structures and their presence alongside contingent events, institutions, social norms and emotion
    **
    (a very general pattern of non-relativism and relativism, realism and anti-realism)
    , and the unbridgeable, but already crossed, chasm between mind and body.

    Typically philosophy consists of both impulses; being drawn down conceptual rabbit holes and being drawn to dig sideways and make a warren of them.
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