Commentary on Rosefeldt: Should Metaphysics Care About Ontological Commitment from Casual Utterances?

Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 49 (2):179-186 (2018)
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Abstract

Tobias Rosefeldt argues that in order to reconcile a physics-based fundamental ontology with the ontological implications of our everyday utterances, philosophers should pursue a ‘linguistics-based conciliatory’ strategy: They should refer to the results of linguistic research in order to avoid ontological commitment to problematic entities. Whereas Rosefeldt is not an advocate of radical forms of naturalized metaphysics, his argument is driven by the motivation behind pleas for a naturalization of the discipline. I claim that although there is a need for reconciliation, Rosefeldt’s favored account falls short of this goal. More generally, I argue that so-called ‘conciliatory accounts’ fail to do justice to the motivation that necessitated them in the first place, as the role they assign to analyses of everyday speech in search of ontological commitments is at odds with said motivation. ‘Conciliatory accounts’, hence, sit uneasily between radically naturalistic and traditional armchair approaches to metaphysics.

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Julia Göhner
University of Münster

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References found in this work

Every thing must go: metaphysics naturalized.James Ladyman & Don Ross - 2007 - New York: Oxford University Press. Edited by Don Ross, David Spurrett & John G. Collier.
Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized.James Ladyman & Don Ross - 2007 - In James Ladyman & Don Ross (eds.), Every thing must go: metaphysics naturalized. New York: Oxford University Press.
On What There Is.W. V. O. Quine - 2011 - In Robert B. Talisse & Scott F. Aikin (eds.), The Pragmatism Reader: From Peirce Through the Present. Princeton University Press. pp. 221-233.
A survey of metaphysics.E. Jonathan Lowe - 2002 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
In defence of scientism.Don Ross, James Ladyman & David Spurrett - 2007 - In James Ladyman & Don Ross (eds.), Every thing must go: metaphysics naturalized. New York: Oxford University Press.

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