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Faculty Paper Accepted at APA Conference

writerCongratulations to NVC Humanities faculty member Daniel Padgett. His paper, titled “Scientific Depravity and Ontological Commitment” was accepted for presentation at the 2017 American Philosophical Association (APA) Pacific meeting in Seattle.

APA conferences tend to be generally very competitive  in terms of having a paper accepted for presentation.

This paper considers two questions. First, what are the ontological commitments of scientific realism? Second, what does the answer to the first question tell us about doing physics-based (or, more generally, science-based) metaphysics? The standard answer to the first question is that the scientific realist is ontologically committed to whatever entities are in our best scientific models.

The assumed answer to the second question is that, if we are ontologically committed to our best models, we are free to employ truths about those models when articulating metaphysical arguments. I argue that the standard answer to the first question needs to be clarified—but that once we do that the only interesting claims that we can defend are not based on science but on metaphysics. Thus, contrary to the assumed answer to the second question, we are not free to make use of our best science when offering metaphysical arguments.

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