Anti-Fundamentalist Lessons for Scientific Representation from Scientific Metaphysics

Abstract

Scientific metaphysics can inform discussions of scientific representation in a number of ways. For instance, even a relatively generic commitment to some minimal form of scientific realism suggests that the targets of scientific representations should serve as source material for one’s scientifically-informed ontology. Historical connections between commitments to realism and commitments to reductive approaches in scientific metaphysics further inform a persistent strain of the reductive approach to generating scientific representations. This chapter comments on two recent challenges to reductive scientific metaphysics: C. Kenneth Waters’ “No General Structure Thesis” and Robert Batterman’s account of scientific metaphysics built on many-body physics. Each of these accounts has anti-fundamentalist leanings: they reject the premise that the fundamental physical theory is the appropriate or best source material for scientific metaphysics. In addition, both Waters’ and Batterman’s accounts foreground the role of scale in defining ontological categories, and both reject the reductionist ideal that the stuff at the smallest scale is the most fundamental, the most general, or the most real. This chapter discusses the implications for scientific representation imparted by anti-fundamentalist approaches that emphasize the role of scale in building a scientifically-informed ontology.