Now for the last talk of the mediation, we have a local who will do a talk about the prospects of the metaphysics of science and practice and you have the floor, 30 minutes. Thank you everyone for being there. As you can see the title is very exploratory and the abstract was exploratory as well and due to the life that you don't have much time to work on it. So the more it goes and the more speculative it will be, the more open to the floor it will be. So let's start first with a few preliminaries on the states of the metaphysics of science today and philosophy of science. So here is something that I stole from Alexandre, which is a nice way to present the way you could do metaphysics. Even that it's not everything that is done today, there are some parts that are not explored here and that's the beauty of it is that you have different criteria of physics according to which type of authority you are uncertain to. Science, common sense or traditional metaphysics is more like logics or things of this sort. You have another ax of potential of projects which is a priori method or a posteriori method and the last act being descriptive or revisionary. Either you are in the process of just exploring and clarifying your way to understand the world or you are trying to go beyond the other answers to find a new way to think about the world. So these are the three axes that Alexandre proposed to describe the variety of possible metaphysical projects and I think it's a good way to see it. So let's start by justifying why you would do metaphysics science. I guess you're all aware of it, but I don't know if it's so late in the wardrobe. So arguably we could take metaphysics as an epistemic project, whether we are realists and we are at the real world as it is in the MENA or we are more concerned and we cannot access it and we are just looking at the way we conceive of the world. And as armchair metaphysics is a type of rationalist metaphysics, epistemecalists are right so we should connect to our most promising epistemec activity which is today actually science and why because it's supposed to be empirically grounded. Actually if you look at again Alexandre's paper I make a good point that there are two broads family of metaphysics science which is based on the Aprioi and the Pesterite axis. That's not in the paper but that's a way of seeing it. So there is metaphysics applied to science, so metaphysics looking at science to constrain and get information and get better metaphysical theories. And then you have scientific metaphysics which is done mostly by a field of science which is more in the process of deriving metaphysics from science rather than taking metaphysics and then looking at science. So again just in a better, more like within a good example. So metaphysics applied to science, the purpose is to build the potential world systems. So science is just similar constraints which is there to provide a form of tethering to the actual world. Metaphysics first, science later, compatibility is sufficient and that's the kind of idea you have in Lewis and Morabibi's effective equilibria conception of metaphysics or as in Lowe's quote here. And the other that I will be interested in and that I will sustain for this talk is just scientific metaphysics and the purpose of it is to build a scientific image of the world or scientific images of the world. There is no after a reason why there should be only one. We are talking normatively speaking. Metaphysics in this sense is an extension of the way science presents and understands the world. So there is no after a reason to commit either. There is also no after a reason to commit to scientific reason or to restrict ourselves to just theories. The idea is just time-space metaphysics later and you could do a phenomenological approach to scientific metaphysics like Bitbol or Galbofer or which are doing right now. Or you could go back to Célar's way of doing scientific images. The issue being that if you look at the actual literature of scientific metaphysics, so metaphysics done by people who are mostly physicists of science, actually these points have no after a reason to be art taken for granted.  So in Modine you have the idea of basically idea is simple. Metaphysics in so far as is concerned with natural world can do no better than to reflect on physics. Physical theories provide us with the best handle we have on what there is. The first proper task is induction and registration of these theories. So it's not science, it's theories. And same for Lady Menoros. By killing the naturalistic metaphysics we mean the metaphysics that is motivated exclusively by atoms to unify hypothesis and theories that are taken seriously by contemporary science. So the ground of scientific metaphysics at least today is not science, it's scientific theories. And usually with this pair of people it's mostly a founder of physics because everything has to reduce the idea into founder of physics. It's just an overcoat to show that people are saying that. So these are the important points that I want to really put into the highlights. It's the fact that in contemporary scientific metaphysics the starting point is always theories of physical representation. And I don't know if it requires... I don't know if it starts from a scientific argument or it follows or then it goes to scientific realism. I don't know which is first, it's a particular question. But the idea is in the end that ontology and epistemology are two separate fields and you can build your theory approximately through the world. You can just look at the theory and then you will have a direct connection to what these metaphysics are really in the world. And it goes obviously with a very strong revisionist attitude so you should go back to the box. It's part of this little corner where you have revisionary, epistemiary, metaphysical science. So just on the left front corner of the box. In this type of theory it's hard to see how scientific knowledge is not a type of metaphysical knowledge. It makes the difference of maybe degrees but not of nature at least. Here is the problem. So let me be a bit opinionated here on the history of future of science. I mean, I have some to tell me that I should put opinionated there. So here are a few, here I see it at least. So we had a huge part of future of science that was many theory based. And that's when metaphysics came about with the revival of racism in the 60s and 70s. I'm not exactly sure when. You have put in the 75 which is a numerical argument. So around these years you have realism coming back and I guess metaphysics is back in style as well with wine and all the way afterwards. But the thing that is mostly forgotten in this kind of metaphysics is that in 1983 we had two big two books that are quite important at least for future of science. Which are representing and intervening for marking and how a lot of physics lie from character rights. Which started the new experimentism and the turn to practice. And that's something that you see, there's a lot of debates. At some point if you look at the literature, I mean, if someone is computer scientist I want to do the corpus analysis with digital humanities. I'm afraid to go but I'm not good enough at that. But if I'm from an instinctive point of view when I look at the two types of literature of future of science and practice and more of that philosophy. There seems to be a real divide after science wars where people don't talk to each other and you have two different communities with two different paradigms. The paradigm of what science is and how you use the future of science. And that is not as reflected at least to my knowledge as reflected at all in the metaphysics of science and even the scientific metaphysics that I was talking about. So let's do a few very caricatural way to characterize both project and future of science to see how metaphysically speaking it should be different as well. So, I mean, as you will know, new explanatism starts from hacking the motto of that experimentation as a life of its own. And it implies a lot of things for future of science and practice afterwards. So you should mainly look at practice. So you should actually see science as an activity and have an active view of knowledge. So science is done by agents that do something with the world. It's not just a spectator passive new passive stuff that you just look at who serve passively the world and when you get knowledge of it. Agents have a real impact on the knowledge you get from the world. You tend to have in science and practice a sentence of so so historical critics of scientific objectivity, of feminist critics and of critics of the possibility to have progress in a very strong objective way, which goes with critics of representationalism and the possibility to have non-epistemically true representation of the world. And it goes also with tendency to reject some of the scientific realism to go more into a pragmatist or conscientious flavor stuff. So you will connect this ontology and epistemology link that you don't have in your orthodox future of science as I call it. So let me now put the claim that I wanted. I would like to defend in this talk, so I would like to motivate a move away from firm-based scientific metaphysics to a more comprehensive scientific metaphysics. If I can at the same time convince you that there are ways to metaphysics starting from scientific practices and experimental form of knowledge, great. And at least I can argue that this kind of scientific practice and experimental form of knowledge metaphysics, if they manage to take off, they would stand on firmer ground, empirical ground than the theoretical base of scientific metaphysics. So let me start at something that is absolutely not original, but I stole from you. So I really like this idea to have a metric to evaluate the empirical grounding of our metaphysical projects. So the episymmetric at least of a formal version, I don't know if it has changed that much. It has two parameters, experimental distance and epistemic risk. So experimental distance being how much your objective inquiry is far away from the empirical ground. And episymmetric risk being how much is your hypothesis or claim susceptible to be disconfirmed by empirical work. And that's the metric I will use to evaluate and show that the metaphysics of scientific practice should, according to this metric, be a more promising way to do a metaphysical scientific metaphysics. So theoretical-based scientific metaphysics is actually a very ambitious project. It doesn't just stop at compatibility, it wants to go really like a entainment of metaphysics from science. But if you look at Lady-Man and Ross and everything about Google and their defense of scientism, they say that they are being entailed by empirical science, but actually they are being entailed by theoretical theories and all they talk about and all they care about most of the time is theories. And that requires a part of scientific realism that is kind of controversial, which is the epistemic physics, but our theories now are approximately true of the world. You can infer two of the world from our scientific theory now, which Lady-Man puts to put a claim that realism is for metaphysics because together, if a project of scientific realism goes away, its metaphysics goes away as well. And this type of metaphysics is actually very... If you look at the constructive and feminist critiques that you have in physical science and practice, this type of metaphysics is quite in danger. I'm not aware enough of all the critiques to make around them and I don't think I have time to do everything about it. So let me start by saying something that I like way too much and she's less spread way and more in the content. So there are ways actually to find the metaphysical content from scientific practices as entities. We remember the best friend of the realist, the scientific realist of the field of science, the influence of the best explanation, the influence from the precepts that the given precepts would provide a better explanation for the evidence that could, any other precept exists to the question that even the hypothesis is true. And the question being that since naturalistic metaphysics is a project to emphasize continuity with content or method of physical science, you could argue that, if you're interested in the definition, it's also a good myth to use in metaphysics. It's a very political point. But let's assume that you can use IBEs in naturalizing the physics. We know that certain practices are successful because science is successful and we know that they are sufficiently stable in time and actually most of the time more stable than their scientific results. And we know that these practices are successful in virtue of empirically acceptable feature, so they are posterior entity in a sense. So there is no reason why we could not do the same stuff that scientific metaphysics do with theories starting from scientific practices as entities. And that's something that actually has been done by someone in the Detective Metaphysics Project, Andreas Sütman, and he uses influence-based explanations starting from prediction, manipulation and this type of experimental practices to infer metaphysical claims on how the model structure of flow, how the model features of flow works and how the structure of causality works and all this kind of stuff. So here is an example, starting from the external intelligentization of the scientific practice, infer model assumption, the best account of infer how the model surface structure or flow works. And since these scientific practices are technically successful in virtue of empirically acceptable feature, they are posteriority, but since these are still scientific practices, it's a descriptive project. So actually if you go back to the box, it's a new non-explore so far part of the box, at least from how I understand it. So this is the point that I have no satisfactory answer on which the whole project relies. So if you have good answer, I welcome them. Actually, IBEs are quite controversial. So the issue is that what does it mean to be the best explanation or the better explanation? Do we have standard enough precision on this type of values to rank projects in a serious and precise manner? Are there just pragmatic virtues in which case you couldn't infer the truth from these kind of virtues? And if you have multiple set of virtues, do they all select the same hypothesis at the end? That's one of the objections. Your objection is coming from Van Vraasen. I don't have a satisfactory answer to this one either. It's that you're forced to take the hypothesis that you have actually so far and you don't know which one will come afterwards. So maybe the one you have are just really bad and will have the best one afterwards. So that you can't know. Another argument that I know how to answer to is one coming from Ladyman who says that you shouldn't use IBEs in metaphysics. You can use them in science because in science you can do an induction from the past success of this kind of process. And this legitimates the IBEs in science but you cannot do the same thing in metaphysics. So you shouldn't use it in metaphysics, you should just use it in science. But the pessimistic meta-addiction seems to me to give as many anecdotes of cases of it not working in science either. So to me the legitimacy of IBEs should not be different in science and metaphysics. It should be the same and even more if in the project of scientific metaphysics, scientific knowledge is just a type of metaphysical knowledge. So as a review, provided you accept legitimacy of IBEs, scientific practices carry the kind of metaphysical content that you can extract. And you can use it in proper metaphysical projects. And if you look back to the metric that we had before, since scientific practices are actual acts in the world, actual American acts in the world and not representation of stuff in the world, you are closer to the American one than you would be with the theories. So you are better at the exponential distance variable and the epistemic risk. I would argue that for the epistemic risk it's the same because the section of scientific practices is stricter than theories. Due to the under-determination of theories, you can have a lot of theories that survive. While scientific practices, if they don't work, scientists will abandon them quite quickly. So on both of these cases, it feels better than the traditional theory-based scientific and metaphysical science. But now, if you're not very comfortable with IBEs, there is another way to see metaphysical content inside scientific practices and experimental practices. And that's something that you find in actually a physics example. So here are a couple of examples of concerns you can find if you look at contemporary metaphysical physics. So in the wave functionalism, you have the concern that the wave functionalists cannot construct other space and space-time as fundamental as it is. So they cannot support the idea that you have local variables and local variables are taken to be necessary for experimental practice. So there is a threat that your expectation of theory is empirically incorrect. That means that if it were true, the scientific practices wouldn't take off and so you couldn't justify the truth of your theory. And these kind of theories, they appear a lot in the quantum gravity case. That's where I found them at the start. So you have that in getting the Trich article from 2013. But in quantum gravity, you don't have space-time. If you don't have space-time and our experimental work is arguably something that you do in space-time or in space-time, it's hard to see how you could argue for the fact that there is no space-time by doing experiments in space-time. So there seems to be a balance between metaphysical interpretation of theory and metaphysical interpretation of what is needed to do your practice to justify your theory. So it has a kind of constant flavor. So here is the definition of the empirical incoherence concept. So metaphysical interpretation for a given theory is empirically incoherent. Whenever holding it to be true, pre-close the metaphysical conditions for carrying out the scientific practices that went into providing empirical efficiency for theory. So in this case, these scientific practices seem to carry transcendental constraints on our liberty to metaphysically interpret the theories. So there is a kind of transcendental argument somewhere behind it that you could decipher and that you should merely recognize and put to the front. Okay. And theory based on the scientific physics, who doesn't look at the epistemology and just that the theory is always at risk of going too far in its primalist tendency and going into this empirical incoherence. Okay. So this is a way to see it. It was proposed by Azov Cheng to have this kind of, to formalize this kind of argument as contingent on some arguments. He sums it up as so, if you want to engage in certain type of activity, you have to presume the truth of some particular metaphysical principle that legitimates this activity metaphysically wise. So for some example, if you want to engage in voluntary action, you should presuppose that you have some agency, if not voluntary actions makes no sense. If you want to engage in intervention, you should propose a form of causality, you should presuppose that your actions can make something happen. So there is a kind of way to get transcendental arguments out of scientific practices. However, these arguments are contingent because we are talking about practices and engagement on the activities that are contingent themselves. We are not concerned in this sense, we are not trying to find universal condition of knowledge, we are just looking at what you need to engage in certain activity metaphysically wise. And even then it seems to be a type of IBEs because this type of activity that you want to engage in are technically supposed to be successful because you don't want to say that if you engage in astrology you have to accept a metaphysically that movement of star impact your hour of destiny and you don't want to have that as a metaphysical commitment. So that's a very exploratory part, the experimental form of scientific knowledge and experimental based metaphysic of science. Sorry, I don't have a lot of time so it's always good but I don't have time to bring very exploratory stuff. So is there a possibility for genuine experimental knowledge that is not theory based or theory oriented? Most of these studies are historical studies so I won't go through all the history. But if you look at the way activism was done in the 1820s in Faraday and Rampere, Steinleuf showed that you have two types of experiments. You have a theory driven experiment or one that we are used to that are there to test or to legitimize a theory but you also have another type of experiment that is very interesting. These are experiments that have no purpose, no theory oriented purpose. The purpose is to test stuff in the laboratory and see what comes out without constraining yourself to a goal oriented theory or a kind of physics. It's not like just do whatever you want and see what comes out. There is actually a methodology in this kind of exploratory experiment that supports the idea that you can have actually genuine experimental knowledge of low level theoretical relations. So there are ways to get experimental knowledge. Now the interesting part is that according to the literature on exploratory experiments, if you look historically speaking at when they develop and what is surrounding them, these happen when you have no theory around and that's when you have actually drastic conceptual revision in science. So if in metaphysics of science and for metaphysics you have to take into account scientific progress and to say something about scientific progress at some point, you should probably put more emphasis and look more at this kind of events in science where conceptual shifts are quite evident and are coming from purely empirical matter, experimental matter and not theoretical or conceptual ideas. To my knowledge, this type of literature doesn't exist. Nobody has really formally worked on how this exploratory experiment impacted the development of subsequent conceptual shifts. Another way of maybe needing that is done. So I would just skip that and I would just say that there are a few other types of projects that I could have gone through, experimental racism but since Quentin was talking about that, I don't want to just rehearse the same thing. There is another way. You can just accept pragmatism from scientific practice and go full pragmatic metaphysics. So to my knowledge there are a few stuff going around. You have the Putnam from 2004 and Pistron from 2009. And the interesting part is that actually it looks a lot like the Levi-Nassian material of usur in the sense that what is first is the ethics. You have to discuss norms and how norms impact the practices before you can discuss metaphysics. So your metaphysics is based on the ethics and ethics is first years of life. Another way to do this kind of sense in practice, metaphysics would be to adapt a brand-done type of inferentialism or ex-pacifism where meaning and use are related and you just could translate that to a future of science. To my knowledge, it hasn't been done so far. And you could also go the full cellar's way and space of reason and that has been done actually. I actually have a bunch of questions but the first one is about the precoherence. So can you go back to the position? We are never holding it to precoherent metaphysics conditions or carrying out scientific practices. So first of all what are the metaphysical conditions? And second aren't you talking more about practical incoherence? So one can think that incoherence depends more on the coherence of the theoretical content and not on how the metaphysical content bears on scientific practice. That's more practical incoherence I'd say. One can say there are other situations in which a theory can be considered as incoherent, which don't involve scientific practice at all and we still would want to call it incoherence. But maybe that's a terminological issue. The term is a consecrated term in the literature so that's why I'm using it. But the idea is that when you do an interpretation of a theory and your interpretation says that for example there is absolutely nothing that changes. Since the case for metaphysics, when you look at generativity there's a way to interpret it as saying that there's actually nothing physical that changes. And then you look at the way generativity is being legitimized by your empirical practices and you see that you need some kind of physical change to say that well generativity is a legitimized theory. So if your interpretation tells you that your empirical practice can take off, can guide out, then you are in an issue because there is some kind of secularity in the issue of secularity. So is this really a problem of what metaphysically is necessary to do the experiment and what you infer metaphysically from the theory and that leads to a metaphysical interpretation crashing out? That's interesting because in some cases that can rule out the interpretation which seems to me coherent with the direct content. Exactly. That's how it was introduced actually. If you look at the original paper, the first paper talking about that, it was in 1997 by Barrett. And it was an argument against some type of interpretation of quantum physics that presupposed that there is no record of past measures and we need that to do empirical experiments. So that was a way to constrain the type of interpretation you can get out of the field. This is just a suggestion actually. I think this is a really great project and I think it's going to be very exciting. I have a suggestion that might maybe in some ways deepen it or complexify it a little bit because I think the way that we frame these issues as philosophers and the way we might frame these issues as scientists maybe partially overlap that are different. So as philosophers we have to make this distinction between theory and practice which tend to be theory and experimental practice or something like that. But in the sciences we think of theorizing as a form of practice and experimentation as a form of practice and there are other forms of practice. So my suggestion was really just to look at, I don't know if you've looked at Peter Galasim and others because he has I think interesting things that might be interesting for you to say about how theoreticians and experimentalists and he includes a third group of instrument makers actually think about the phenomenon differently and then end up characterizing it differently in different metaphysical terms. And that might be interesting to try to plug into your analysis. Thank you very much. You're absolutely right. Just the way I present it usually is kind of a reaction to the type of scientific metaphysics which is, because if you look at, if you remember in Lady Man and Ross in the defense of sciences and they talk about the practice of science and then everything else about theory and their practice is theoretical practice. But you're right. I think in science and practice I'm not the most knowledgeable about that but I think in the field of science and practice you have people like Gouding or Radar or some of the guys who are effectively talking about the thing about how the theoretical and the experimental practice are bootstrapping one another and effectively going on one another. But you're absolutely right. Thank you very much. I also wanted to come back to the empirical occurrence. Could you come back to these previews? Yeah. I just didn't get the space-time example. When you say that it's a current you say that we use space-time in our experiment and say that space-time is just not a good property. So the thing is in this paper they have a very opinionated understanding of how experiments work which comes from Modellin and which is the same type of problem that Modellin raised from Ray-Functional Rhythm. They believe that to carry out experiments you need to be able. So you need entities that live in space and time or in space-time. And the fact that in certain interpretation of quantum gravity and some theory and some impression of quantum gravity you have no space-time at all at that level is an issue because then how do you test something that is not in space-time with you being in space-time You could just say that space-time is not fundamental but it's emergent. And then in our at all scale we use space-time. That's what they are pointing towards and that's the peak of current physics that you probably know. But it's kind of hard to know what it means to be emergent and how these imagines can carry out the legitimacy of macro level experiments. My fundamental issue is more general than this particular example. You can always say that the metaphysics is some way and the practice is another way. And say that the second way of the world is emerge or is derived from without having an influence. It's just different. One depends upon another. You're right that in this case we are talking about people who think that there is only one metaphysics. If you ground the metaphysics at a different level you can say there is one metaphysics but at how it will manifest no difference. I also have a good answer to tell you right now. I'd say it's a question but actually I thought that's one point but I don't have a good answer to that. I think it would depend on the type of emergence and the reduction. You would have to say more about what type of emergence and the reduction is effectively used. But I don't know enough about emergence due to your presence. The argument seems to be kind of similar because saying that practice happens is space-time. For example the space-time exists.  But one can say well I suppose that practice happens but it's not in space-time. In a sense it's the same direction as it is going. It's emerging for non-existent code. It's just we are in relation to the other thing because space-time is just the way we conceptualize our work. Is there a response or is there a question? I have a comment on that. No? Okay. Look at the others. They need to be fed. So you can continue the discussion.


This is the SF Productions podcast network Hey, this is Mark you can check out our audio podcast how I got my way free comics on itunes or on our website SFpodcastnetwork.com This won't be a regular episode life kind of gotten away, but I wanted to get something out to you We shot some video at various places and hope you find it interesting First off we checked out free comic book day at our favorite LCS peck rat comics They always do a great job and after that we just got back from Wisconsin And I shot some stuff at three unique museums the National Mustard Museum in Middleton the Chudnow Museum of yesteryear in Milwaukee and the Milwaukee Transit Archives and Museum in West Alice Thanks to all of them for their assistance and patience and enjoy this potpourri episode You're checking out strange museums in Wisconsin and we're starting with the National Mustard Museum. Let's take a look They're an assuming door and another museum the Milwaukee Transit Archives and Museum Actually a very impressive collection here. Let's take a look