Rethinking Metaphysics - Misdirections in Metaphysics 1: The Explanatory Conception of Metaphysics

Amie Thomasson (Dartmouth College)

This is part 1 of a series of three lectures

Abstract

Two approaches have dominated work in metaphysics since its post-positivist revival: an explanatory approach and a truthmaker approach. I will argue that both approaches rely on the unargued assumption that all discourse serves the same function. This assumption has taken metaphysics in misdirections, leading to pseudo-problems and epistemological mysteries that have left metaphysics in a crisis.

The ‘Explanatory’ conception of metaphysics, often traced to Quine, presents metaphysics as (part of) an explanatory enterprise, concerned with offering (part of) a best total explanatory theory. On this view, the work of metaphysics is likened to the work of natural science. In this lecture, I aim to diagnose where this approach has gone wrong: by relying on the assumption that all the noun terms we are concerned with in metaphysics serve an explanatory function.