Alvin I. Goldman, Rutgers - "Naturalizing Metaphysics with the Help of Cognitive Science"

Abstract:This paper argues that cognitive science can play a significant role in an optimal methodology for metaphysics. This holds not only for "conceptualist" metaphysics, which seeks to characterize our naïve metaphysical commitments, but also for "realist" or "objectivist" metaphysics, which seeks to characterize the world "in itself". Its target is not the metaphysics of mind, but the metaphysics of the "external world." The paper has two parts. The first part illustrates how a metaphysician can (and should) deploy Bayesian reasoning along with findings from cognitive science to adjust his/her probability assignments with respect to competing "realist" versus "anti-realist" theses in four disputed domains: (1) the passage of time, (2) moral value, (3) natural kinds, and (4) the existence of God. How best to interpret the evidence -- where the evidence includes experiences and intuitions of various sorts -- depends partly on what can be learned about the human "cognitive engine" and its role in generating such items of evidence. The second part of the paper discusses the idea that objectivist metaphysics should avoid speciesism; it should not privilege the perspective of a particular cognitive species (including us). A corollary of this approach is the attractiveness of relationalism about color and about persistence, an approach encouraged by cognitive science.