This is genuinely interesting, and I’d love to see more natural philosophy departments. However, the view that metaphysics must be tied to science already presupposes a whole set of metaphysical and epistemic premises. I’d also cast doubt on whether analytic metaphysics is truly separate from science. In fact, Ladyman’s own structural realism, and how he defines and defends it, doesn’t seem to be all that different from the theories they attempt to explain away in the book. Metaphysics is the conceptual scaffolding science uses, so ultimately, they just accept one metaphysical theory over others. Cognitive science also comes to mind since it, as a field, sprang out of functionalism, which is an analytic philosophical theory, as well as from insights in other disciplines. Debates about grounding and fundamentality are also, ultimately, relevant to science. Like I said in my post on whether panpsychism is pseudophilosophy, I think their arguments could be applied to some practices in theoretical physics as well, and yet the target only seems to be philosophy. Why are only physicists allowed to postulate things in order to explain some phenomenon? To sum up, I think metaphysics is valuable because it doesn’t have to be constrained, we need a branch of philosophy that questions, well, *everything* without being committed to a set of premises already (metaphysically) derived from an interpretation of scientific progress.
I did a philosophy BA a few years ago (retirement project), and took a course covering early analytic phil, roughly 1890-1940 -- Russell, Moore, Ayer. I struggled through "The Refutation of Idealism" and even turned in a few thousand words on it. Since then I've taken a couple of empirically-oriented phil of mind type courses, and read a few other things (including some of yours). I now re-read Moore and my essay, and think: So many words, so little contact with the way the world actually works. (But no doubt I'm prejudiced by coming from a STEM background).
The methodology of naturalist philosophy vs traditional analytic philosophy certainly makes them radically different and it can be hard for those literatures to find common ground.
Ross and Ladyman's framing cuts deeper than most critiques because they're not just questioning metaphysics' conclusions but its epistemic legitimacy. The elephant analogy works brilliantly - studying actual behavior patterns yields insights armchair speculation about 'being qua being' never could. What strikes me is how this mirrors broader institutional drift: when fields become self-referential, producing theory about theory, they lose contact with the phenomena that justified them initially. The real test isn't whether analytic metaphysics contradicts science, but whether its methods could ever be corrected by evidence.
This is the kind of critique that feels clarifying rather than dismissive, and it sparked a question I’m still turning over. Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” solved a real problem: it localized accountability when shared reason failed. One mind became accountable. But it also enshrined the myth of the solo genius and quietly offloaded sense-making to institutions.
From an evolutionary view, this feels strange. It seems to me more likely that we didn’t evolve for private certainty; we evolved for coordination. Inner narrative emerged later as a maintenance mechanism. Perhaps we need to reassess what the Enlightenment cost us as we hurtle toward optimized central scrutiny and away from individual thinking.
If intelligence evolved for coordination, not introspection, are our Enlightenment-era assumptions about where reason lives now holding us back?
Great article that for me speaks to the self-hypnotic nature of belief & the communication-biased nature of our imaginative social animal, form of consciousness. How lacking the tough hide of elephants, we insulate ourselves from the harshness of reality, with the fantasy-of-knowing inherent in the imaginary demands of language.
And astonishingly, for biologically created creatures fail to grasp the biologically receptive quality, of our consciousness. So driven by the communication need of reified-reality ideas about reality, and the subconsciously automatic nature of our behaviors, we fail to grasp the reality-labeling misconceptions of reality, within our taken for granted, neuro-linguistic projections.
Thanks for drawing the link between the view on analytic metaphysics and our more recent reflections on why human ecological success has come with such huge costs to natural stability and, consequently, to our own prospects. And of course the link to Darwin.
I’d add that the danger of unconstrained metaphysics isn’t just epistemic but institutional.
Once abstract frameworks detach from empirical correction, they don’t merely float free, they can become coordination narratives that legitimize action without feedback.
The Enlightenment wasn’t anti-abstraction; it was pro-constraint. That distinction feels especially fragile today.
Maybe I am wrong but my impression is that trying to understand reality means trying to fit every piece of the puzzle that is on the table into one picture. I don’t think that it is really helpful to discuss which piece belongs to the puzzle because there is only one puzzle. My whole life I see people discussing the right to use certain pieces of the puzzle. Because some thinkers want to simplify reality by throwing away pieces of the puzzle they don’t like or don’t understand.
But let’s be clear. (Western) Philosophers have tried to understand the nature of reality for about 2500 years and decided around 1900 to stop the quest because all the efforts were in vain. Physicists swiftly hijacked the aim of the philosophers because they were convinced they had the magic trick: the scientific method. Unfortunately the real progress got stalled in the second part of the 20th century. Mathematicians have dreamed the Pythagorean dream of a mathematical theory of everything (describing all that exists in one enveloping mathematical construct). Around 1900 they concluded that the idea of the existence of one coherent puzzle defied logic (?).
Maybe it is fruitful if every philosopher creates a file on his/her Substack that tells the reader which parts of reality don’t belong to the “sphere of thoughts” of the philosopher. So I can create targeted likes or even subscribe.
This is genuinely interesting, and I’d love to see more natural philosophy departments. However, the view that metaphysics must be tied to science already presupposes a whole set of metaphysical and epistemic premises. I’d also cast doubt on whether analytic metaphysics is truly separate from science. In fact, Ladyman’s own structural realism, and how he defines and defends it, doesn’t seem to be all that different from the theories they attempt to explain away in the book. Metaphysics is the conceptual scaffolding science uses, so ultimately, they just accept one metaphysical theory over others. Cognitive science also comes to mind since it, as a field, sprang out of functionalism, which is an analytic philosophical theory, as well as from insights in other disciplines. Debates about grounding and fundamentality are also, ultimately, relevant to science. Like I said in my post on whether panpsychism is pseudophilosophy, I think their arguments could be applied to some practices in theoretical physics as well, and yet the target only seems to be philosophy. Why are only physicists allowed to postulate things in order to explain some phenomenon? To sum up, I think metaphysics is valuable because it doesn’t have to be constrained, we need a branch of philosophy that questions, well, *everything* without being committed to a set of premises already (metaphysically) derived from an interpretation of scientific progress.
I did a philosophy BA a few years ago (retirement project), and took a course covering early analytic phil, roughly 1890-1940 -- Russell, Moore, Ayer. I struggled through "The Refutation of Idealism" and even turned in a few thousand words on it. Since then I've taken a couple of empirically-oriented phil of mind type courses, and read a few other things (including some of yours). I now re-read Moore and my essay, and think: So many words, so little contact with the way the world actually works. (But no doubt I'm prejudiced by coming from a STEM background).
The methodology of naturalist philosophy vs traditional analytic philosophy certainly makes them radically different and it can be hard for those literatures to find common ground.
Yes.
Ross and Ladyman's framing cuts deeper than most critiques because they're not just questioning metaphysics' conclusions but its epistemic legitimacy. The elephant analogy works brilliantly - studying actual behavior patterns yields insights armchair speculation about 'being qua being' never could. What strikes me is how this mirrors broader institutional drift: when fields become self-referential, producing theory about theory, they lose contact with the phenomena that justified them initially. The real test isn't whether analytic metaphysics contradicts science, but whether its methods could ever be corrected by evidence.
Well put!
This is the kind of critique that feels clarifying rather than dismissive, and it sparked a question I’m still turning over. Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” solved a real problem: it localized accountability when shared reason failed. One mind became accountable. But it also enshrined the myth of the solo genius and quietly offloaded sense-making to institutions.
From an evolutionary view, this feels strange. It seems to me more likely that we didn’t evolve for private certainty; we evolved for coordination. Inner narrative emerged later as a maintenance mechanism. Perhaps we need to reassess what the Enlightenment cost us as we hurtle toward optimized central scrutiny and away from individual thinking.
If intelligence evolved for coordination, not introspection, are our Enlightenment-era assumptions about where reason lives now holding us back?
Great article that for me speaks to the self-hypnotic nature of belief & the communication-biased nature of our imaginative social animal, form of consciousness. How lacking the tough hide of elephants, we insulate ourselves from the harshness of reality, with the fantasy-of-knowing inherent in the imaginary demands of language.
And astonishingly, for biologically created creatures fail to grasp the biologically receptive quality, of our consciousness. So driven by the communication need of reified-reality ideas about reality, and the subconsciously automatic nature of our behaviors, we fail to grasp the reality-labeling misconceptions of reality, within our taken for granted, neuro-linguistic projections.
Thanks for drawing the link between the view on analytic metaphysics and our more recent reflections on why human ecological success has come with such huge costs to natural stability and, consequently, to our own prospects. And of course the link to Darwin.
I’d add that the danger of unconstrained metaphysics isn’t just epistemic but institutional.
Once abstract frameworks detach from empirical correction, they don’t merely float free, they can become coordination narratives that legitimize action without feedback.
The Enlightenment wasn’t anti-abstraction; it was pro-constraint. That distinction feels especially fragile today.
Maybe I am wrong but my impression is that trying to understand reality means trying to fit every piece of the puzzle that is on the table into one picture. I don’t think that it is really helpful to discuss which piece belongs to the puzzle because there is only one puzzle. My whole life I see people discussing the right to use certain pieces of the puzzle. Because some thinkers want to simplify reality by throwing away pieces of the puzzle they don’t like or don’t understand.
But let’s be clear. (Western) Philosophers have tried to understand the nature of reality for about 2500 years and decided around 1900 to stop the quest because all the efforts were in vain. Physicists swiftly hijacked the aim of the philosophers because they were convinced they had the magic trick: the scientific method. Unfortunately the real progress got stalled in the second part of the 20th century. Mathematicians have dreamed the Pythagorean dream of a mathematical theory of everything (describing all that exists in one enveloping mathematical construct). Around 1900 they concluded that the idea of the existence of one coherent puzzle defied logic (?).
Maybe it is fruitful if every philosopher creates a file on his/her Substack that tells the reader which parts of reality don’t belong to the “sphere of thoughts” of the philosopher. So I can create targeted likes or even subscribe.