Is metaphysics justified in its conclusions?

Question

I'm curious of the modern meta-philosophical viewpoints on metaphysical knowledge. That is, is it possible for arm-chair theorizing or rational pure thought alone to gain true knowledge about any metaphysical structure or facts of the real world?

In my mind metaphysical theories regarding abstracta, materialism or idealism, and so on, are usually considered to be epistemically indistinguishable so we are really just debating the concepts themselves separated from any true interaction with reality.

I'm wondering whether certain other modern philosophers hold onto a similar positivist-like viewpoint as I do regarding metaphysics in a deflationary viewpoint? Further, are there philosophers who have defended metaphysics and in what fashion have they attempted to this?

Answer 1

Edward Feser, speaking in the context of the philosophy of mind regarding arguments between dualism and materialism, claims that the "positivist" view that the OP presents is common and is indeed a misunderstanding of philosophical argumentation. (page 234)

A related misunderstanding - and this time, one that even many philosophers are prone to - is to assume that dualism is to be understood as a kind of quasi-scientific "explanatory hypothesis," presented as an ostensibly more plausible way of accounting for the same data that materialist theories try to explain.

Rather the dualist argument is a "straightforward demonstration", much like a proof in geometry. It is a metaphysical argument about a true interaction with reality.

Assuming Feser is right, let's consider the first question:

I'm wondering whether certain other modern philosophers hold onto a similar positivist-like viewpoint as I do, regarding metaphysics in a deflationary viewpoint?

One should assume that many philosophers take a similar "deflationary viewpoint". It is modern philosophical common sense. However, Feser suggests there's another perspective worth considering. He attempts to explain it from the perspective of Descartes' dualism: (page 235)

[Descartes] is not "postulating" its existence [immaterial substance] as merely the most plausible way among others of "explaining" the "data" that both dualists and materialists seek to "account for." If anything, the existence of immaterial substance is for Descartes itself part of the data that any truly scientific picture of the world has to take into consideration.

This shows metaphysical argument is a true interaction with reality and not just a language game where concepts are debated. Philosophical argument is not intended to be scientific and (page 236)

empirical science is simply not the only form of rational inquiry.

Let's consider the final question:

Further, are there philosophers who have defended metaphysics and in what fashion have they attempted to this?

Based on these quotes from Feser, he would be one of the philosophers who takes metaphysics seriously by presenting it as a rational demonstration. If those claims succeed then

...they provide genuine knowledge of a level of reality that is not material, and do so without resting on empirical observation or theory - construction of the sort familiar in science. Of course, one could try to refute this claim, but the point is that to do so one would also have to defend scientism, rather than simply presuppose it.

The way Feser attempts to do this is to challenge anyone who thinks metaphysics is not genuine knowledge of reality to provide a philosophical argument, a demonstration, that scientism is true and not just assume scientism is.

---

Feser, E. Philosophy of Mind: A Beginner's Guide. 2013. Oneworld.

Answer 2

Metaphysics does its job perfectly well but you have to realise there are different approaches to it, by one of which it is useless.

Are there philosophers who have defended metaphysics and in what fashion have they attempted to this?

There are many. I would be one.

Briefly, the situation is this. Metaphysics proves that all positive metaphysical theories do not work. They give rise to fatal contradictions. This would be the reason why so many philosophers follow Russell and Carnap and reject metaphysics as a source of knowledge. Meanwhile the Perennialists argue that all these theories are false, which explains their failure in logic, and it is to the eternal credit of metaphysics that it does not endorse any of them.

Thus we have a choice as metaphysicians. We can believe it is incomprehensible and useless, or we can believe it is a proof of the doctrine of Middle way Buddhism etc. and as such of immense value. The former belief is held by philosophers in Russell's tradition, who usually reject metaphysics as pointless. The second is held by philosophers in the tradition of Plotinus, Lao Tsu and Nagarjuna, who produce an extensive literature explaining the results of metaphysics and proving its value as an analytical discipline. It's your choice who to believe, but while there is comprehensible explanation that remains unfalsified the idea that metaphysics is incomprehensible or useless is redundant.

I feel this is not the place to post links to my more comprehensive explanations of this issue, but if you want them and can figure out a private communication method I'll do so.

EDIT: It has been asked that I say more about the relationship between metaphysics and Reality. This would require a long essay. I would rather leave it to the reader to do their own investigating. My longer answer would take the form of suggested reading and I would be forced to link to my own work. To do so publicly seems inappropriate.

The essential point is that the conclusion of metaphysics is the absurdity of extreme or positive metaphysical theories. As Bradley notes, it does not endorse a positive result. There is only one doctrine for which they would all be false, thus explaining their failure in logic, and this is the one I mention. This is very definitely not rocket-science but it's off the beaten path for academically-trained philosophers, as the comments here indicate.

EDIT 2: I've been pushed to provide a link to support this answer so have done so. The most comprehensive discussion of these issues is the dissertation at the bottom of the page, the bibliography for which provides a long list of sources. Although I've done it once or twice before it seems wrong to link to my own work and I post this only because I intend to drop out of SE in the near future.

https://philpeople.org/profiles/peter-g-jones

Answer 3

Whenever we talk about metaphysics, we have to be careful of scope. There's an unfortunate tendency to define metaphysics in indiscriminate and subjective terms — treating metaphysics as a dumping ground for any question one doesn't happen to like — that obscures a lot of good reasoning.

For example, consider Durkheim's concept of 'social facts'. Émile Durkheim (back at the turn of the 19th century) did some analysis and discovered that people from predominantly Protestant cultures committed suicide at significantly higher rates than people from predominantly Catholic cultures. He reasoned that this effect came from what he called anomie: the failure of the society to provide proper moral guidance, which tends to break down social bonds and force individuals to make solipsistic decisions. The question is this: is anomie a matter of metaphysics? Clearly, the impact of anomie on an individual is not 'tangible' in the same sense as getting hit by a baseball; equally clearly, something is going on that produced these divergent suicide rates. Anomie is obviously related to overtly metaphysical concepts like 'free will' (since it involves human choice), but it is also a concept based in empirical evidence. And then there is the other side of this issue, in which we only have indirect evidence for the existence of things like quarks, gravitons, and dark energy... Are they metaphysical concepts, and if not, in what way are they different from a concept like anomie?

There are metaphysical questions which are little more then philosophical argle-bargle, granted. But making the assumption that all metaphysical questions are such, particularly with a loose and subjective definition of the term 'metaphysical', seems ill-advised.

Answer 4

Positivism will get you really far, and we have not tapped some of its most powerful insights.

Modernism is full of people who consider all of metaphysics either decided or irrelevant. My favorite one of these alive right now is Daniel Dennett. He thinks that we need to take science and apply it to our philosophy, deconstructing problems we don't realize are already solved, which decides, and then removes large areas of metaphysics. This is an entirely positivist endeavor.

For instance, he is most famous for working from the known structure of the brain, and realizing that it means the 'Cartesian Theater' with a centralized self observing outside reality was not an option. Whatever strong metaphysical attachments we had to the self, it was optional, and all the thinking around it needed to be used to pull it apart and generate a theory of self congruent with the parallel and distributed nature of neuronal processing.

On the other hand, hard-core modernism is dead: We know positivism fails. We see that it ultimately fails as an basis for truth through modern logical analysis. And we see it fail as a strategy for dealing with reality on a regular basis by looking at history.

Late modernist historians of science like Kuhn pointed out that can proceed with a positivist endeavor only by freezing a given set of metaphysical assumptions. No progress is possible if you have not already made decisions about what is and is not real, knowable, etc. Whether or not you have expressed those, you have to be working from the same basic notions. When theoretical explanations of observed results cannot fit into those presumptions, for instance the idea that there is a fixed global frame of reference to which all events are equally related, you have to rewrite parts of that provisional paradigm.

This is itself a defense of the relevance of metaphysics. You cannot discuss alternatives to such propositions if you do not have a fund of metaphysical analysis from which to draw distinctions and propose alternatives. The only place to get ideas and habits you need to talk about the things that up until now were wholly outside of your physics from the possibilities we have entertained about those things that currently appear wholly outside physics in general.

Atomism went from metaphysics to physics when chemistry demonstrated that chemical transformations involved small fixed and generally integral ratios of masses. Until then, it was impossible to decide, because we lacked the right kind of problem. If it had not existed as a metaphysical concept already, we are unlikely to have come up with it at the right time.

And Kant's Antinomy of Atomism motivated us to not trust it too completely, and to reach behind it looking for continuous descriptions of the apparently discrete reality. We know that there is a deep paradox here, and we are not shocked that we come down to some weird partially discrete, partially continuous solution. We expected that -- we just didn't realize it.

That we can expect these things to change faster and faster as we watch cultural development accelerate implies that we will be making use of a lot of metaphysical ideas that we currently don't care about. The fact that we do not have leverage on problems that make the concepts relevant right now, does not mean we will not need those concepts.

So metaphysics is generally not justified in its conclusions, but it is justified in analyzing and expanding different ways of looking at the kinds of explanations people can reasonably make and share about abstract reality, ultimate truth, etc. Some of them will have such major flaws they can never be redeemed. Others will interact and generate more options.

The same way that mathematics provides the power behind ordinary, everyday science -- what Kuhn calls the 'normal science' of 'puzzle solving' -- philosophy often provides the power behind resolving paradigm shifts and other arguments of crisis throughout scientific history.