Nature of Naturalism: David Papineau

David gave a talk entitled 'Methodological versus Ontological Naturalism'. The talk had two parts corresponding to the two forms of naturalism. In these David defined the kind of naturalism in question and then went on to defend it against possible objections.

In the first part of the talk David argued that Ontological Naturalism is driven by natural science itself. The drive is to have an ontology that only counts things that have physical effects which are thus measurable by natural science. This motivates the naturalist to include in her ontology only the kinds of things that can have such effects. However, this ontological move alone is not enough to yield physicalism. For there could be things that have physical effects that aren't themselves physical. Physicalism is driven by the idea that there be explanatory closure in the domain of the physical (the domain described by physics).

Methodological Naturalism, David argued, is not driven by philosophy adopting some set of scientific methods, but by a rejection of 'conceptual analysis'. What philosophers do is analyse - test for coherence and consistency - the theories operative in science. The commonality between scientific method and philosophy is thus a rejection of conceptual analysis and an embracing of theory testing. Philosophy differs from natural science in that its theory testing is not evidence based.

One question that came up was whether philosophy really wasn't concerned with conceptual analysis seeing that it seems to be so widespread in philosophical practice. David replied that perhaps that is so much the worse for much philosophy. Another question was whether the distinction between science and philosophy being that the former is evidence based and the latter not is tenable. After all, much of the science that is concerned with the closure of the physical is not evidence based at all (theoretical physics for example).