Science and metaphysics : an explication of the role of metaphysical principles in scientific inquiry

Abstract

This thesis is largely a study of Collingwood's theory of metaphysics: not a scholarly study concerned with the careful exposition and explication of Collingwood's theory, but a critical study aimed at determining how much of Collingwood's theory is sound, or nearly sound, as an account of the relation of metaphysics to science. The main theses of Collingwood's theory -which I expound in chapter two - are these:- First, metaphysical principles are not eliminable from science, as the positivists claimed, but enter science as presuppositions of the questions which scientists ask and strive to answer. Secondly, the metaphysical presuppositions of science are not constant, but change in the course of scientific development, though not as a result of scientific or philosophic criticism of previously accepted presuppositions. Thirdly, the presuppositions of science cannot be ascribed a truth value, are not propositions, and cannot be justified either empirically or a priori. Fourthly, the study of metaphysics is possible only as a historical science, concerned with the discovery of the presuppositions operative in any scientific epoch, and with the description of the processes by which they change. In the third and fourth chapters I try to determine in what sense it could be claimed that scientific inquiry has metaphysical “presuppositions”. An explication of the notion of 'presupposition' leads me to the conclusion that Collingwood was mistaken in supposing that metaphysical principles are logically presupposed by scientific questions, Something is logically presupposed by a question, I suggest, only if it is logically implied by every admissable answer to that question. But Collingwood held, as I do, that metaphysical principles are not logically implied by scientific theories. I suggest, however, that metaphysical principles might be found a useful, if not indispensable, role in science as generators and co-ordinators of scientific questions i. e. that they might function as regulative principles in science, In order to evaluate this last suggestion I turn, in chapters five and six, to the problem of demarcation, seeking to develop a means of distinguishing between scientific statements and metaphysical statements, The criterion I defend is a modified version of Ayer's definition of verifiability. Having obtained a demarcation criterion I go on to consider, in chapter seven, whether metaphysical statements can be sufficiently relevant to science to serve fruitfully as regulative principles. I suggest that they can, and offer an account of how it is possible for a metaphysical principle to 'generate' scientific questions. But my account leads to the rejection of Collingwood's claim that metaphysical principles are not true or false. In the final chapter I take up the problem of the critical appraisal of metaphysical principles, and argue, as against Collingwood, that there can, to a limited extent, be both a priori and empirical arguments about the acceptability of competing metaphysical principles. Show more