J. Ladyman, D. Dennett and E. J. Lowe: Scientific Realism and Metaphysics of Possibilities

Abstract

The paper aims to show that combining D. Dennett’s conception of real patterns as the “object” ontology, understood as the fundamental concept of existence (D. Ross, J. Ladyman), and E. J. Lowe’s four-category ontology as the “base”, we can get an original conception of scientific realism, which will compete successfully with others in terms of traditional arguments for and against scientific realism, or in terms of interpreting the requirements posed by modern science, and will also be successful as an independent conception of metaphysics, setting original ideas about substantiality, identity, modality and causality. The adoption of E.J. Low’s “serious essentialism” helps to solve the problem of J. Ladyman’s ontic structural realism about the matching of nomological (natural) and metaphysical modalities. E. J. Lowe’s statement that “the subject of metaphysics is the possible, but only science can say which of the alternative metaphysical possibilities is actual” reinforces the required relationship between science and metaphysics. The fact that we choose the neo-Aristotelian rather than the Quinean type of metaphysics helps to formulate sufficient conditions for the pattern existence, as well as to adopt an understanding of causality in terms of “forces”, “predispositions” and “manifestations”, connected by a formal (not real!) ontological relation of metaphysical dependence. In this sense, dealing with H. Putnam’s question “what realism is”, we can answer that scientific realism is an exercise in the epistemology of modality, associated with clarifying the essence of the objects of scientific theory in terms of “basic” philosophical ontology.