Can anybody give me a good description of the term “metaphysical” or “metaphysics” in a way that is likely to stick in my head and be applicable to future contemplations and conversations? I have tried to read a few definitions and descriptions, but I’ve never been able to really grok any of them and even when I thought I had a working definition it slipped out of my head when I tried to use it later. Right now its default function in my brain is, when uttered, to raise a flag that signifies “I can’t tell if this person is speaking at a level significantly above my comprehension or is just spouting bullshit, but either way I’m not likely to make sense of what they’re saying” and therefore tends to just kind of kill the mental process that that was trying to follow what somebody was saying to me / what I was reading.
Given how often it comes up, and often from people I respect, I’m pretty sure that’s not the correct behavior Figured it’s worth asking here. In case it wasn’t obvious, I have virtually no background in philosophy (though I’ve been looking to change that).
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.
This is in no way an answer to your actual question (Anatoly’s is good) but it might amuse you.
“Meta” in Greek means something like “after” (but also “beside”, “among”, and various other things). So there is a
Common misapprehension: metaphysics is so called because it goes beyond physics—it’s mode abstract, more subtle, more elevated, more fundamental, etc.
This turns out not to be quite where the word comes from, so there is a
Common response”: actually, it’s all because Aristotle wrote a book called “Physics” and another, for which he left no title, that was commonly shelved after the “Physics”—meta ta Phusika* -- and was commonly called the “Metaphysics”. And the topics treated in that book came to be called by that name. So the “meta” in the name really has nothing at all to do with the relationship between the subjects.
But actually it’s a bit more complicated than that; here’s the
Truth (so far as I understand it): indeed Aristotle wrote those books, and indeed the “Metaphysics” is concerned with, well, metaphysics, and indeed the “Metaphysics” is called that because it comes “after the Physics”. But the earliest sources we have suggest that the reason why the Metaphysics came after the Physics is that Aristotle thought it was important for physics to be taught first. So actually it’s not far off to say that metaphysics is so called because it goes beyond physics, at least in the sense of being a more advanced topic (in Aristotle’s time).
In my experience people use “metaphysics” to refer to philosophical exploration of what kinds of things exist and what the nature, behavior, etc. of those things is.
This is usually treated as distinct from scientific/experimental exploration of what kinds of things exist and what the nature, behavior, etc. of those things is, although those lines are blurry. So, for example, when Yudkowsky cites Barbour discussing the configuration spaces underlying experienced reality, there will be some disagreement/confusion about whether this is a conversation about physics or metaphysics, and it’s not clear that there’s a fact of the matter.
This is also usually treated as distinct from exploration of objects and experiences that present themselves to our senses and our intuitive reasoning… e.g. shoes and ducks and chocolate cake. As a consequence, describing a thought or worldview or other cognitive act as “metaphysical” can become a status maneuver… a way of distinguishing it from object-level cognition in an implied context where more object-level (aka “superficial”) cognition is seen as less sophisticated or deep or otherwise less valuable.
Some people also use “metaphysical” to refer to a class of events also sometimes referred to as “mystical,” “occult,” “supernatural,” etc. Sometimes this usage is consistent with the above—that is, sometimes people are articulating a model of the world in which those events can best be understood by understanding the reality which underlies our experience of the world.
Other times it’s at best metaphorical, or just outright bullshit.
As far as correct behavior goes… asking people to taboo “metaphysical” is often helpful.
The rationalist taboo is one of the tools I have most enjoyed learning and found most useful in face-to-face conversations since discovering the Sequences. Unfortunately, it’s not practical when dealing with mass-broadcast or time-shifted material, which makes it of limited use in dealing with the scenarios where I most frequently encounter the concept of metaphysics.
I tend to (over)react poorly to status maneuvers, which is probably part of why I’ve had a hard time with the word; it gets used in an information-free way sufficiently often that I’m tempted to just always shelve it there, and that in turn leads me to discount or even ignore the entire thought which contained it. This is a bias I’m actively trying to brainhack away, and I’m now tempted to go find some of my philosophically-inclined social circle and see if I can avoid that automatic reaction at least where this specific word is concerned (and then taboo it anyhow, for the sake of communication being informative).
I still haven’t fully internalized the concept, but I’m getting closer. “The kinds of things that exist, and their natures” is something I can see a use for, and hopefully I can make it stick in my head this time.
it gets used in an information-free way sufficiently often that I’m tempted to just always shelve it there, and that in turn leads me to discount or even ignore the entire thought which contained it.
This seems like a broader concern, and one worth addressing. People drop content-free words into their speech/writing all the time, either as filler or as “leftovers” from precursor sentences.
What happens if you treat it as an empty modifier, like “really” or “totally”?
Leaving aside the fact that, by default, I don’t consider “totally” to be content-free (I’m aware a lot of people use it that way, but I still often need to consciously discard the word when I encounter it), that still seems like at best it only works when used as a modifier. It doesn’t help if somebody is actually talking about metaphysics. I’ll keep it in mind as a backup option, though; “if I can’t process that sentence when I include all the words they said, and one of them is ‘metaphysical’, what happens if I drop that word?”
Can anybody give me a good description of the term “metaphysical” or “metaphysics” in a way that is likely to stick in my head and be applicable to future contemplations and conversations? I have tried to read a few definitions and descriptions, but I’ve never been able to really grok any of them and even when I thought I had a working definition it slipped out of my head when I tried to use it later. Right now its default function in my brain is, when uttered, to raise a flag that signifies “I can’t tell if this person is speaking at a level significantly above my comprehension or is just spouting bullshit, but either way I’m not likely to make sense of what they’re saying” and therefore tends to just kind of kill the mental process that that was trying to follow what somebody was saying to me / what I was reading.
Given how often it comes up, and often from people I respect, I’m pretty sure that’s not the correct behavior Figured it’s worth asking here. In case it wasn’t obvious, I have virtually no background in philosophy (though I’ve been looking to change that).
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.
This is in no way an answer to your actual question (Anatoly’s is good) but it might amuse you.
“Meta” in Greek means something like “after” (but also “beside”, “among”, and various other things). So there is a
Common misapprehension: metaphysics is so called because it goes beyond physics—it’s mode abstract, more subtle, more elevated, more fundamental, etc.
This turns out not to be quite where the word comes from, so there is a
Common response”: actually, it’s all because Aristotle wrote a book called “Physics” and another, for which he left no title, that was commonly shelved after the “Physics”—meta ta Phusika* -- and was commonly called the “Metaphysics”. And the topics treated in that book came to be called by that name. So the “meta” in the name really has nothing at all to do with the relationship between the subjects.
But actually it’s a bit more complicated than that; here’s the
Truth (so far as I understand it): indeed Aristotle wrote those books, and indeed the “Metaphysics” is concerned with, well, metaphysics, and indeed the “Metaphysics” is called that because it comes “after the Physics”. But the earliest sources we have suggest that the reason why the Metaphysics came after the Physics is that Aristotle thought it was important for physics to be taught first. So actually it’s not far off to say that metaphysics is so called because it goes beyond physics, at least in the sense of being a more advanced topic (in Aristotle’s time).
In my experience people use “metaphysics” to refer to philosophical exploration of what kinds of things exist and what the nature, behavior, etc. of those things is.
This is usually treated as distinct from scientific/experimental exploration of what kinds of things exist and what the nature, behavior, etc. of those things is, although those lines are blurry. So, for example, when Yudkowsky cites Barbour discussing the configuration spaces underlying experienced reality, there will be some disagreement/confusion about whether this is a conversation about physics or metaphysics, and it’s not clear that there’s a fact of the matter.
This is also usually treated as distinct from exploration of objects and experiences that present themselves to our senses and our intuitive reasoning… e.g. shoes and ducks and chocolate cake. As a consequence, describing a thought or worldview or other cognitive act as “metaphysical” can become a status maneuver… a way of distinguishing it from object-level cognition in an implied context where more object-level (aka “superficial”) cognition is seen as less sophisticated or deep or otherwise less valuable.
Some people also use “metaphysical” to refer to a class of events also sometimes referred to as “mystical,” “occult,” “supernatural,” etc. Sometimes this usage is consistent with the above—that is, sometimes people are articulating a model of the world in which those events can best be understood by understanding the reality which underlies our experience of the world.
Other times it’s at best metaphorical, or just outright bullshit.
As far as correct behavior goes… asking people to taboo “metaphysical” is often helpful.
The rationalist taboo is one of the tools I have most enjoyed learning and found most useful in face-to-face conversations since discovering the Sequences. Unfortunately, it’s not practical when dealing with mass-broadcast or time-shifted material, which makes it of limited use in dealing with the scenarios where I most frequently encounter the concept of metaphysics.
I tend to (over)react poorly to status maneuvers, which is probably part of why I’ve had a hard time with the word; it gets used in an information-free way sufficiently often that I’m tempted to just always shelve it there, and that in turn leads me to discount or even ignore the entire thought which contained it. This is a bias I’m actively trying to brainhack away, and I’m now tempted to go find some of my philosophically-inclined social circle and see if I can avoid that automatic reaction at least where this specific word is concerned (and then taboo it anyhow, for the sake of communication being informative).
I still haven’t fully internalized the concept, but I’m getting closer. “The kinds of things that exist, and their natures” is something I can see a use for, and hopefully I can make it stick in my head this time.
This seems like a broader concern, and one worth addressing. People drop content-free words into their speech/writing all the time, either as filler or as “leftovers” from precursor sentences.
What happens if you treat it as an empty modifier, like “really” or “totally”?
Leaving aside the fact that, by default, I don’t consider “totally” to be content-free (I’m aware a lot of people use it that way, but I still often need to consciously discard the word when I encounter it), that still seems like at best it only works when used as a modifier. It doesn’t help if somebody is actually talking about metaphysics. I’ll keep it in mind as a backup option, though; “if I can’t process that sentence when I include all the words they said, and one of them is ‘metaphysical’, what happens if I drop that word?”