Anjan Chakravartty, “Scientific Ontology: Integrating Naturalized Metaphysics and Voluntarist Epistemology” (Oxford UP, 2017)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Sep 17, 2018 · 1h 2m

A scientific ontology is a view about what a scientific theory says exists. Longstanding philosophical debate on this issue divides into two broad camps: anti-realists, who think scientific theories are committed to the existence only of those things that can be observed, and realists, who hold that these theories are also committed to unobservables, such as subatomic particles. In Scientific Ontology: Integrating Naturalized Metaphysics and Voluntarist Epistemology (Oxford University Press, 2017), Anjan Chakravartty argues that the debate is philosophically “indefeasible” because the views…