Metaphysics: what’s out there?
Epistemology: how do I learn about it?
Ethics: what should I do with it?
Basically, think of any questions that are of the form “what’s there in the world”, “what is the world made of”, and now take away actual science. What’s left is metaphysics. “Is the world real or a figment of my imagination?”, “is there such a thing as a soul?”, “is there such a thing as the color blue, as opposed to objects that are blue or not blue?”, “is there life after death?”, “are there higher beings?”, “can infinity exist?”, etc. etc.
Note that “metaphysical” also tends to be used as a feel-good word, meaning something like “nobly philosophical, concerned with questions of a higher nature than the everyday and the mundane”.
“Ontology” is firmly dedicated to “exist or doesn’t exist”. Metaphysics is more broadly “what’s the world like?” and includes ontology as a central subfield.
Whether there is free will is a metaphysical question, but not, I think, an ontological one (at least not necessarily). “Free will” is not a thing or a category or a property, it’s a claim that in some broad aspects the world is like this and not like that.
Whether such things as desires or intentions exist or are made-up fictions is an ontological question.
Thanks! I’ve seen many times the statement that ontology is strictly included in metaphysics, but this is the first time I’ve seen an example of something that’s in the set-theoretic difference.
A confusion of mine: How is epistemology a separate thing? Or is that just a flag for “We’re going to go meta-level” and applied to some particular topic.
E.g. I read a bit of Kant about experience, which I suppose is metaphysics (right?) but it seems like if he’s making any positive claim, the debate about the claim is going to be about the arguments for the claim, which is settled via epistemology?
Hmm, I would disagree. If you have a metaphysical claim, then arguments for or against this claim are not normally epistemological; they’re just arguments.
Think of epistemology as “being meta about knowledge, all the time, and nothing else”.
What does it mean to know something?
How can we know something?
What’s the difference between “knowing” a definition and “knowing” a theorem?
Are there statements such that to know them true, you need no input from the outside world at all? (Kant’s analytic vs synthetic distinction).
Is 2+2=4 one such?
If you know something is true, but it turns out later it was false, did you actually “know” it? (many millions of words have been written on this question alone).
Now, take some metaphysical claim, and let’s take an especially grand one, say “God is infinite and omnipresent” or something. You could argue for or against that claim without ever going into epistemology. You could maybe argue that the idea of God as absolute perfection more or less requires Him to be present everywhere, in the smallest atom and the remotest star, at all times because otherwise it would be short of perfection, or something like this. Or you could say that if God is present everywhere, that’s the same as if He was present nowhere, because presence manifests by the difference between presence and absence.
But of course if you are a modern person and especially one inclined to scientific thinking, you would likely respond to all this “Hey, what does it even mean to say all this or for me to argue this? How would I know if God is omnipresent or not omnipresent, what would change in the world for me to perceive it? Without some sort of epistemological underpinning to this claim, what’s the difference between it and a string of empty words?”
And then you would be proceeding in the tradition started by Descartes, who arguably moved the center of philosophical thinking from metaphysics to epistemology in what’s called the “epistemological turn”, later boosted in the 20th century by the “lingustic turn” (attributed among others to Wittgenstein).
Metaphysics: X, amirite?
Epistemological turn: What does it even mean to know X?
Linguistic turn: What does it even mean to say X?
Thanks. That’s still not even a little intuitive to me, but it’s a Monday and I had to be up absurdly early, so if it makes any sense to me right now (and it does), I have hope that I’ll be able to internalize it even if I always need to think about it a bit. We’ll see, probably no sooner than tomorrow though (sleeeeeeeeeep...).
I suspect that part of my problem is that I keep trying to decompose “metaphysics” into “physics about/describing/in the area of physics” and my brain helpfully points out that not only is it questionable whether that makes any sense to begin with, it almost never makes any sense whatsoever in context. If I just need to install a linguistic override for that word, I can do it, but I want to know what the override is supposed to be before I go to the effort.
The feel-good-word meaning seems likely to be a close relative of the flag-statement-as-bullshit meaning. That feels like a mental trap, though. The problem is, at least half the “concrete” examples that I’ve seen in this thread also seem likely to have little to no utility (certainly not enough to justify thinking about it for any length of time). Epistemology and ethics have obvious value, but it seems metaphysics comes up all the time in philosophical discussion too.
Metaphysics: what’s out there? Epistemology: how do I learn about it? Ethics: what should I do with it?
Basically, think of any questions that are of the form “what’s there in the world”, “what is the world made of”, and now take away actual science. What’s left is metaphysics. “Is the world real or a figment of my imagination?”, “is there such a thing as a soul?”, “is there such a thing as the color blue, as opposed to objects that are blue or not blue?”, “is there life after death?”, “are there higher beings?”, “can infinity exist?”, etc. etc.
Note that “metaphysical” also tends to be used as a feel-good word, meaning something like “nobly philosophical, concerned with questions of a higher nature than the everyday and the mundane”.
Isn’t that ontology? What’s the difference?
“Ontology” is firmly dedicated to “exist or doesn’t exist”. Metaphysics is more broadly “what’s the world like?” and includes ontology as a central subfield.
Whether there is free will is a metaphysical question, but not, I think, an ontological one (at least not necessarily). “Free will” is not a thing or a category or a property, it’s a claim that in some broad aspects the world is like this and not like that.
Whether such things as desires or intentions exist or are made-up fictions is an ontological question.
Thanks! I’ve seen many times the statement that ontology is strictly included in metaphysics, but this is the first time I’ve seen an example of something that’s in the set-theoretic difference.
Ontology is a subdiscipline of metaphysics.
Is the many-world hypothesis true? Might be a metaphysical question that not directly ontology.
A confusion of mine: How is epistemology a separate thing? Or is that just a flag for “We’re going to go meta-level” and applied to some particular topic.
E.g. I read a bit of Kant about experience, which I suppose is metaphysics (right?) but it seems like if he’s making any positive claim, the debate about the claim is going to be about the arguments for the claim, which is settled via epistemology?
Hmm, I would disagree. If you have a metaphysical claim, then arguments for or against this claim are not normally epistemological; they’re just arguments.
Think of epistemology as “being meta about knowledge, all the time, and nothing else”.
What does it mean to know something? How can we know something? What’s the difference between “knowing” a definition and “knowing” a theorem? Are there statements such that to know them true, you need no input from the outside world at all? (Kant’s analytic vs synthetic distinction). Is 2+2=4 one such? If you know something is true, but it turns out later it was false, did you actually “know” it? (many millions of words have been written on this question alone).
Now, take some metaphysical claim, and let’s take an especially grand one, say “God is infinite and omnipresent” or something. You could argue for or against that claim without ever going into epistemology. You could maybe argue that the idea of God as absolute perfection more or less requires Him to be present everywhere, in the smallest atom and the remotest star, at all times because otherwise it would be short of perfection, or something like this. Or you could say that if God is present everywhere, that’s the same as if He was present nowhere, because presence manifests by the difference between presence and absence.
But of course if you are a modern person and especially one inclined to scientific thinking, you would likely respond to all this “Hey, what does it even mean to say all this or for me to argue this? How would I know if God is omnipresent or not omnipresent, what would change in the world for me to perceive it? Without some sort of epistemological underpinning to this claim, what’s the difference between it and a string of empty words?”
And then you would be proceeding in the tradition started by Descartes, who arguably moved the center of philosophical thinking from metaphysics to epistemology in what’s called the “epistemological turn”, later boosted in the 20th century by the “lingustic turn” (attributed among others to Wittgenstein).
Metaphysics: X, amirite? Epistemological turn: What does it even mean to know X? Linguistic turn: What does it even mean to say X?
Thanks. That’s still not even a little intuitive to me, but it’s a Monday and I had to be up absurdly early, so if it makes any sense to me right now (and it does), I have hope that I’ll be able to internalize it even if I always need to think about it a bit. We’ll see, probably no sooner than tomorrow though (sleeeeeeeeeep...).
I suspect that part of my problem is that I keep trying to decompose “metaphysics” into “physics about/describing/in the area of physics” and my brain helpfully points out that not only is it questionable whether that makes any sense to begin with, it almost never makes any sense whatsoever in context. If I just need to install a linguistic override for that word, I can do it, but I want to know what the override is supposed to be before I go to the effort.
The feel-good-word meaning seems likely to be a close relative of the flag-statement-as-bullshit meaning. That feels like a mental trap, though. The problem is, at least half the “concrete” examples that I’ve seen in this thread also seem likely to have little to no utility (certainly not enough to justify thinking about it for any length of time). Epistemology and ethics have obvious value, but it seems metaphysics comes up all the time in philosophical discussion too.