[3.] Metaphysics

 

[3.1.] What is Metaphysics?

 

metaphysics (df.): the area of philosophy concerned with questions about reality and existence; traditionally, metaphysics has been considered to be one of the central areas of philosophy, (along with ethics, logic and epistemology).

 

The most basic metaphysical question is: what is there?

 

Metaphysics is not concerned to find very specific answers to such questions. For example, it is not looking for answers like: “There are 25 desks in this room; there is water on Mars; there is a recess in the Michael Vick trial.” It is not even concerned with more general, but still specific, answers: “there are desks; there is water; there are trial recesses.”

 

Rather, it is concerned with the most general sorts of answer: there is matter, there are substances, there are qualities, there are kinds.

 

Following that most basic metaphysical question (“what is there?”), there is the question: what is the nature of what there is?

 

Other, slightly more general questions, also belong to metaphysics: what do the words “is” and “are” mean? What is existence? What is being, i.e., what is it to be?

 

Still other, slightly more specific questions have traditionally been viewed as belonging to metaphysics:

·         what is the difference between the actual and the merely possible?

·         what is the nature of causation?

·         does God (or gods) exist? if so, what is the nature of God? [this is now dealt with within philosophy of religion]

·         are minds non-physical and independent of brains, or physical and identical with brains, or something else? [this is now dealt with within philosophy of mind]

·         what is free will, and do humans have it? [this is now dealt with within philosophy of action]

 

 

[3.2.] “Metaphysics” and “Ontology.”

 

The term “metaphysics” was coined when it was given by Andronicus to the body of work directly following the Physics in the edited works of Aristotle. Aristotle himself called that work “first philosophy.”

 

The word “ontology” is used to refer to a list of the things (or types of thing) that have being, i.e., of the things (or types of thing) that there are. For example, one philosopher may have an ontology that includes only physical objects (such a philosopher believes that the only things there are, are physical objects); another may have an ontology consisting of physical objects, non-physical minds, and God (such a philosopher thus believes the only things there are, are physical objects, non-physical minds, and God).

 

But sometimes “ontology” is used to refer, not to a list of fundamental types of thing, but to the branch of metaphysics that tries to come up with such a list. In this sense, ontology itself is an area of metaphysics. Some people use the terms "ontology" and "metaphysics" interchangeably.

 

 

[3.3.] Two Attitudes About Metaphysics in the Analytic Tradition.

 

Philosophers have been engaged in metaphysics since before Socrates. For example, the so-called pre-Socratics were Greek philosophers who espoused theories about the nature of the physical world (e.g., Thales claimed that all was made of water; Anaximenes claimed that all was made of air, etc.)

 

This continued with Plato and Aristotle, through the medieval period and into the modern period (with Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Kant).

 

The Tradition of Analytic Philosophy is no exception. Many philosophers in this tradition were concerned with metaphysics. We have already seen a bit of metaphysics in the philosophers we’ve studied so far:

·         Frege: the claim that there is a third realm of senses associated with expressions and propositions, and which exist outside the mind, is a metaphysical claim. It illustrates how metaphysics and philosophy of language sometimes overlap.

·         The Early Wittgenstein: the claim that the world consists of facts is also a metaphysical claim. But Wittgenstein himself had an odd attitude towards that claim, and towards all of the Tractatus: he held that the entire book was, strictly speaking, meaningless. He thought this because the metaphysical claims in that book do not live up to his own standard of meaning. As we have seen, the final line in the book is: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” So the early Wittgenstein exhibits an odd combination of positive and negative attitudes toward metaphysics.

 

Different philosophers in the tradition exhibited very different attitudes toward metaphysics:

 

1.      Positive: metaphysics is a legitimate enterprise to which philosophers should contribute. Many philosophers in the Analytic Tradition put forward their own metaphysical claims and theories. Much of Kevin Mulligan’s introduction to the “Metaphysics” section of your textbook (83-92) summarizes some of the contributions philosophers in the analytic tradition have made to metaphysics.

 

2.      Negative: metaphysics is not a legitimate enterprise. Others in the Analytic Tradition argued against metaphysics itself, e.g., by arguing that metaphysical claims are meaningless. This group includes the Vienna Circle (including Rudolf Carnap) and A.J. Ayer.

 

 

 [3.4.] Logical Positivism.

 

In the 1920s in Vienna, Austria, a group of philosophers known as the Vienna Circle developed a view of meaning that had serious consequences for metaphysics and other areas of philosophy.

 

Members of the Vienna Circle included:

·         Moritz Schlick (1882-1936)

·         Friedrich Waismann (1896-1959)

·         Otto Neurath (1882-1945)

·         Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970)

 

The Vienna Circle was deeply influenced by Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, although they did not accept all of its claims.

 

The members of the Vienna Circle embraced the following position:

 

logical positivism (df): There are only two types of meaningful statement:

(1)   statements that are true or false solely because of the meanings of their words (“All bachelors are unmarried”; “Some squares have three sides”)

(2)   statements that can be shown to be true or false by way of experience (“This thermos contains water”; “The earth is orbited by two moons”).

All other statements are meaningless.

·         This view is also known as logical empiricism and verificationism.

·         The above definition is a non-technical way of defining logical positivism. We will see a more technical way of defining it soon.

 

 

[3.4.1.] Historical Background: Kant.

 

To really understand logical positivism (LP), we need to go back in time, to the eighteenth century, to the work of Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804).^[1]

 

Kant employed a pair of distinctions which have been widely used within philosophy ever since.

 

One of these we’ve seen before: the distinction between the a priori and the a posteriori.

 

The other distinction is new for us: the distinction between the analytic and the synthetic.

 

Kant applies these distinctions to “judgments” (by which he meant a sort of mental operation).

 

analytic (df.): an analytic judgment contains nothing in the concept of the predicate not already thought in the concept of the subject (e.g., “Bachelors are unmarried”).   synthetic (df.): a synthetic judgment is one which is not analytic (e.g., “Some philosophers are bachelors”).     This is a metaphysical distinction between two different types of truth.

a priori (df.): an a priori judgment is one that can be known to be true or false independently of sense experience     a posteriori (df.): an a posteriori judgment is one that can be known to be true or false only by sense experience.     This is an epistemological distinction between two different types of knowledge.

 

The combination of these two distinctions yields four possible categories of judgment... This table shows the sorts of judgment that Kant thought belonged to each of the four categories:

 

	analytic	synthetic
a priori	trivial verbal judgments (“Unmarried males are male”; “Bachelors are unmarried”)	mathematics (e.g., "7 + 5 = 12") & metaphysics (e.g., "Every event has a cause").
a posteriori	empty	natural science, history, commonsense empirical knowledge

 

Synthetic a priori judgments would be (i) non-trivial, interesting judgments about the world which (ii) we can know prior to any particular sense experience.

 

Kant’s category of synthetic a priori is controversial. Prior philosophers had maintained that such judgments were impossible. Kant himself took it to be an important philosophical task to explain how they are possible. He tried to give such an explanation in his book, Critique of Pure Reason.

 

 

[3.4.2.] The Verification Principle. 

 

The Logical Positivists had no problem with the analytic a priori and the synthetic a posteriori. But they rejected the synthetic a priori.

 

They gave the following classification of statements (notice that they are focusing on language rather than on mental judgments as Kant had done):

 

cognitively meaningful statements		cognitively meaningless statements
logical meaning: mathematics logic (i.e., the analytic a priori)	empirical* meaning: science historical statements common-sense empirical statements (i.e., the synthetic a posteriori)   *empirical (df.): having to do with sensory experience or observation	religious discourse poetry ethics aesthetics metaphysics

 

(Carnap himself describes these distinctions; see p.114 of your textbook.)

 

Why did the positivists think that metaphysics, religion, etc. are meaningless instead of empirically meaningful? It is because they accepted the following standard of empirical meaning:

 

The Verification Principle (df.): A sentence S is empirically meaningful if and only if S is verifiable by experience, i.e., S can shown to be true or false by means of the senses.

 

Another name for the positivists’ position regarding empirical meaning is "the testability theory of meaning”; in order for a statement to have empirical meaning, it must be possible to test it by way of sensory experience in order to determine whether it is true or false.

 

As we will see, Carnap’s account of meaningfulness emphasizes the relationships among meaningful statements more than the confirmation of a given statement by way of sense experience.

 

 

Stopping point for Friday February 20. For next time, begin reading the article by Carnap in your textbook (pp.105-108 [secs 1 & 2]).