The following essay is a reading of the book Riddles of Existence, by the American philosophers Earl Conee and Theodore Sider. Specifically, it’s about the last chapter, ‘What is Metaphysics?’ It can be argued that both Conee and Sider are traditional metaphysicians. That’s said because they cover many of the same subjects which traditional metaphysicians covered in (perhaps) pretty similar ways. Of course, they’re writing in the 21st century, so they can’t help but be different in some ways.
“[P]hilosophy investigates the essences of concepts, and thus investigates what is absolutely necessary. Ethicists seek the essence of right and wrong. Aestheticians seek the essence of beauty. Epistemologists seek the essence of knowledge. Metaphysicians seek the essence of personal identity, free will, time, and so on.”
— Theodore Sider. (Source here.)
“[ ] they want to reduce the significance of philosophy. But their picture of philosophy is a far cry from its traditional aspirations.”
— Ted Sider. (Source here.)
Firstly, the American philosopher Earl Conee makes some general psychological points about the study of metaphysics. He refers to those physicists (as well as other scientists) who don’t like the “stubbornly unresolved status of philosophical issues”. Instead, they “prefer to study the cut and dried”. Conee’s metaphysicians, on the other hand, find those stubbornly unresolved issues “challenging, enticing, and even comforting (since they are unlikely to be rendered obsolete)”. That’s a very interesting admission by Conee. He’s happily admitting that, unlike Wittgensteinians, naturalists, etc., the perennial nature of metaphysical issues and problems is appealing in itself. Perhaps it’s even part of the point of metaphysics.
What’s Wrong With Appearances?
There are a few assumptions underneath Conee’s statements about metaphysics. (This isn’t to say that he hasn’t tackled these assumptions elsewhere.) However, what Conee writes quite accurately expresses what many philosophers, as well as laypersons, take metaphysics to be.
Metaphysicians have traditionally made a strong distinction between reality and appearance. Yet aren’t appearances a part of reality? What else can they be part of?
Conee tells us that “appearances are not conclusive”. Instead,
“[o]nly the ultimate realities give us the metaphysical truths of the matter”.
How does Conee know that only the ultimate realities give us the metaphysical truths of the matter? How does he know that appearances are not conclusive? Conclusive when it comes to what? To the metaphysical truths of the matter? What’s the difference between appearances being conclusive and appearances not being conclusive when it comes to the metaphysical truths about ultimate reality?
What is a metaphysical truth anyway?
Conee goes on to tell us that “[a]s we pursue a metaphysical topic, we seek to get beyond appearance”. Why do we seek to get beyond appearances? Even in philosophy, that question will need to be answered. What’s more, even if there are things behind, above, or to the side of appearances, why should we care? Isn’t that a philosophical question too?
After all, isn’t it at least possible that appearances are everything? (In perhaps a weak sense, isn’t that the idealist position?) Conee puts a position that seems to square with this when he says that “[r]eality may confirm initial appearances”. That said, it’s not clear if he’s saying that initial appearances are actually constitutive of reality, or that they don’t contradict the nature of reality. Alternatively, initial appearances may simply help lead us to reality.
In any case, Conee adds that reality “may undercut” initial appearances.
Conee also says that “[w]e seek to learn the reality of the situation”. That assumes that we’ve already been misled by appearances. Perhaps we have. But how would we know that we’d hit the rock of reality even if we have actually done so? What tells us that this metaphorical rock is reality? After all, the rock-that-is-reality doesn’t tell us that it’s reality. Perhaps this reality is just another appearance which we must get behind, beneath or to the side of. So, again, how would we ever know that we’d reached metaphysical (to stretch the metaphor) rock bottom?
Ultimate Reality
Conee ups the ante by moving from talk about “reality” to talk about “ultimate reality”. In other words, ultimate reality, not (mere) reality, is the “goal” of metaphysicians. Indeed, Conee says that ultimate reality is a “subject matter distinctive of metaphysics”.
Is it the case that the adjective “ultimate” simply means, as Conee tells us, “the most fundamental in explanation”? Yet Conee himself says “the ‘ultimate’ in ‘ultimate reality’ doesn’t add anything”. In semantic terms, the adjective “ultimate” just seems to be a honorific given to what some philosophers say reality is. Conee offers us a philosophical explanation of this adjective. He says that perhaps “ultimate reality just consists in the things that actually exist”. It’s not clear what that means. So is ultimate reality simply a list of the things that actually exist? Is it the sum total of all the things that actually exist? Is actual existence different from (mere) existence?
Metaphysics and Modality
Conee covers modality, which was systematised in 20th century. (Modality does date back much further.) Like many analytic philosophers, Conee, and especially Theodore Sider, have a special interest in “basic necessities and possibilities”. Indeed, it’s modality that they believes characterises metaphysics. Conee writes:
“The revised view is that metaphysics is about *the most explanatory basic necessities and possibilities*.”
Here Conee is saying that metaphysics is fundamentally about the most explanatory basic necessities and possibilities. (Some readers may have a problem with any statement of the kind “Metaphysics is about…”) He continues by saying that
“[m]etaphysics is about what *could* be and what *must* be”.
The number of possibilities which could be is surely infinite. Thus, Conee must usually have specific could-be’s in mind. Intuitively, the number of must-be’s must be smaller than the number of could-be’s. It’s the former must-be’s that metaphysicians like Conee and Sider are mainly concerned with.
Conee says that
“[e]xcept incidentally, metaphysics is not about explanatorily ultimate aspects of reality that are actual, but need not have existed”.
In Conee’s version of metaphysics, it’s the case that it isn’t about quarks, spacetime, gravity, human beings, planets like Earth, Ethics, politics, sex, etc. Yet metaphysics is sometimes about “some actual things”, but
“only because whatever is necessary has got to be actual and whatever is possible might happen to be actual”.
Conee’s philosophy is actually about the modal status of many of the things which metaphysics used to tackle.
It’s then that Conee brings in the modal status of physics. He writes:
“This allows us to say that physics pursues the question of what the basic constitution of reality *actually* is, while metaphysics is about what it *must be* and what it *could have been*.”
This is a neat distinction between physics and metaphysics, whether you agree with it or not. Modality was mentioned a few moments ago, so how does the actual (or actuality) fit in here? Is it a modal term at all? If it is, then physics too is dealing with modality. It’s dealing with the actual. Yet what about scientific thought experiments, speculations, hypotheses, etc? Perhaps they’re all at least partially based on the actual.
Part Two: Physics and Metaphysics
It’s now well known that many superstar physicists are critical of philosophy. (Stephen Hawking, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Lawrence Krauss, Sabine Hossenfelder, etc.) Indeed, these physicists often really mean metaphysics when they say “philosophy”. Conee has picked up on this. He writes:
“Physicists often wish to distance their work from metaphysics. They say that they are doing empirical science rather than metaphysics.”
Philosophers, of course, are often keen to tell physicists that physics often — or even always — contains philosophical elements and assumptions.
Conee himself asks if physicists are “really doing both” physics and metaphysics. He then answers his own question: “Not necessarily.” Why not necessarily? It’s because physicists are “using scientific methods rather than philosophical ones”. Yet what if these scientific methods include philosophical assumptions or even philosophical methods? Moreover, how do physicists justify the (in the singular) scientific method or their own scientific methods (in the plural)? Don’t they do so philosophically?
Conee concludes by saying that physicists are “scientifically investigating a subject matter that they share with metaphysicians”. So what is that subject matter? Reality? Ultimate reality? Appearances?
Conee is concerned with fundamentals. And, of course, he fully realises that there’s an obvious question about that concern. Conee writes:
“Doesn’t physics investigate elementary constituents of reality and how they account for all physical events and conditions?”
The words put in the mouths of metaphysic’s critics may not be entirely accurate. Not all physicists would necessarily talk about “elementary constituents” when discussing the fundamental aspects of reality. That is partially the supposedly old materialist view of physics. Instead, physicists can also talk about spacetime, energy, fields, systems, entanglement, etc. and still be discussing fundamentals. In other words, there’s no need to focus entirely on quarks, electrons, etc. when talking about fundamentals. However, there may be when talking about elementary constituents. Yet even here there may be holistic factors involved. On top of that, it’s not clear that all physicists will dismiss philosophical questions such as the “higher-level deductions from particles”. After all, how much can physicists really know about the elementary constituents if they’re completely ignorant of all high-level explanations and/or phenomena?
Despite all that, Conee says that “physics does include inquiry into the metaphysical topic of the elementary constitution of reality”. That means that metaphysicians don’t study quarks and electrons. However, they still have many questions to ask about what is fundamental, why it’s fundamental, and how the fundamental relates to the less fundamental. There are many other metaphysical questions in this area too.
In conclusion, Conee says that “[t]his question is part of physics when it is pursued scientifically”. However, “it remains a metaphysical subject too”. So even though readers may disagree with some of Conee’s statements and positions, they can agree with this way of characterising the relation between metaphysics and physics. In other words, perhaps metaphysics and physics are coming at the same subject — or the same reality — from different angles. That’s not to say that metaphysicians will tackle every subject which physicists tackle. However, what they do discuss may sometimes be the same subjects or phenomena.
Conee also deals with what can be seen as being the most fundamental or basic way in which physics is, well, at least partially metaphysical.
Firstly, he states what many would take to be obvious: “Physics is about the physical world.” (Hence the name.) That’s what physics is about. What about physics itself? Conee says that
“conceivably physics itself is an immaterial thing, perhaps because it consists in abstract propositions that constitute the theoretical truth about the physical world”.
This ties into a long philosophical tradition. So, more basically, take the proposition “Snow is white”. This proposition is about, or refers to, snow or to the whiteness of snow. Snow is physical. But what about the proposition “Snow is white” itself? Is that physical? Surely it’s abstract. (One usual way of displaying the abstractness of a proposition is to formulate it with different natural-language sentences.)
Conee firstly refers to “physics itself [being] an immaterial thing”, and only then does he say that’s “perhaps because it consists in abstract propositions that constitute the theoretical truth about the physical world”. So each individual proposition — which helps constitute physics — is abstract. What of the totality — physics itself? Is it simply the sum of the propositions which constitute it?
Most people would say that physics consists in theories, not propositions. However, that may be a difference that doesn’t make a difference in that a theory is constituted by propositions, many of which are mathematical. So whatever philosophical take we have on this, both theories and propositions are abstract, and the propositions which constitute theories are certainly abstract. What else can they be?
Thus, if physics is constituted by theories, which are constituted by propositions, then physics itself must be abstract. More relevantly, this must mean that there’s an element of physics that isn’t physical. (That’s to disregard the ontological status of the mathematics used in physical theories.)
Conee’s conclusion is strong. He says that “physics is about the physical world but not part of it”. You can bet, however, that there are philosophers who’ll dispute this, just as some philosophers (such as Thomas Hobbes, J.S. Mill, L.E.J. Brouwer, Hartry Field) have disputed the abstract nature of mathematics and numbers.
All this leads to a defence of metaphysics when it comes to physics itself. Thus, metaphysics has “the nature of physics itself as the topic of an investigation”. In other words, “that investigation does not automatically have a physical subject matter”.
Conclusion
It may seem a little unfair to criticise positions in a book that’s meant to be an introduction to metaphysics. That said, it isn’t always clear when Earl Conee is putting his own position, or the position of other philosophers.
To some readers it might also have seemed that the proceeding essay was critical of metaphysics in toto. It wasn’t. It was critical of some of the metaphysical positions and statements which are expressed within it. My own positions (or alternatives) are metaphysical too.
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