The Shaky Game +25, or: on locavoracity

Synthese 192 (11):3425-3442 (2015)
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Abstract

Taking Arthur Fine’s The Shaky Game as my inspiration, and the recent 25th anniversary of the publication of that work as the occasion to exercise that inspiration, I sketch an alternative to the “Naturalism” prevalent among philosophers of physics. Naturalism is a methodology eventuating in a metaphysics. The methodology is to seek the deep framework assumptions that make the best sense of science; the metaphysics is furnished by those assumptions and supported by their own support of science. The alternative presented here, which I call “Locavoracity,” shares Naturalism’s commitment to making sense of science, but alters Naturalism’s methodology. The Locavore’s sense-making projects are piecemeal, rather than sweeping. The Locavore’s hypothesis is that the collection of local sense-making projects fails to issue a single overarching unifying framework deserving of the title “the metaphysics that makes the best sense of science.” I muster some examples supporting the Locavore hypothesis from the interpretation of quantum field theories.

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Author's Profile

Laura Ruetsche
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

References found in this work

Every thing must go: metaphysics naturalized.James Ladyman & Don Ross - 2007 - New York: Oxford University Press. Edited by Don Ross, David Spurrett & John G. Collier.
The metaphysics within physics.Tim Maudlin - 2007 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Mind, Language and Reality: Philosophical Papers.Hilary Putnam - 1975 - New York: Cambridge University Press.

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