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Metaontology
The Ontological Question 'What exists?' dates back over two thousand five hundred years to the dawn of Western philosophy, and attempts to answer it define the province of ontology. The history of the Western philosophical tradition itself has been one of the differentiation and separation of the various sciences from the primordial stuff of ancient philosophy. Physics was first to break away from the tutelage of philosophy and established its independence in the seventeenth century. The other sciences followed suit fairly rapidly, with perhaps psychology being the last to separate.
The results for modern philosophy - of this breakup of what was once a great empire over human reason - have been mixed. An inevitable result has been that questions considered in ancient times to belong to philosophy have fallen within the ambit of other disciplines. So speculations about the material composition and genesis of the universe that interested Thales, Heraclitus and Leucippus, are continued by contemporary cosmologists in well equipped research laboratories, and not by philosophers. However ontology, unlike cosmology, has not broken away from its parent discipline and the Ontological Question as to what exists is still argued by philosophers today.
That ontology has failed to make the separation that cosmology has, is a reflection on the weakness of the methodology for settling ontological arguments. Unlike their great Rationalist predecessors, most modern philosophers do not believe that logic alone is sufficient to provide an answer as to what is. But neither do observation or experiment, in any direct way, seem to help us in deciding, for example, whether sets or intentions should be admitted to exist or not. In consequence, the status of ontology as an area of serious study has to depend on the devising of a methodology within which the Ontological Question can be tackled. The pursuit of such a methodology is the concern of metaontology and is also the concern of this thesis
Natural anti-realism
The thesis defines and examines a position ('natural
anti-realism') which combines an anti-realist semantics with an
evolutionary epistemology. An anti-realist semantics, by requiring
that a theory of meaning be also a theory of understanding, cries
out for an explicit epistemological component. In urging an
evolutionary epistemology as such a component, I seek to preserve
and underscore the semantic insights of the anti-realist whilst
deflecting the common criticism that the anti-realist must perforce
embrace some form of noxious idealism.
An evolutionary epistemology, I argue, can provide a distinctive
content for the belief that reality is independent of human thought
without needing to claim that anything we can say or think about
the world can be conceived as being true or false in full independence
of our capacity to know it as such. This content is to be secured
in two ways. The first is to observe that language is best understood
as a tool of minds which are themselves best understood as the
products of a natural process operating in an independently real
world. The second is to form a non-transcendent conception of
transcendent facts. The accessible evidence concerning the form
of the selective process, it is argued, warrants the claim that
reality may exceed its humanly accessible contours. For it warrants
the claim that man is probably cognitively limited and biased in
ways rooted in our peculiar, and somewhat contingent, evolutionary
past. The natural anti-realist thus conceives of reality as both
independent of, and potentially transcending the limits of, man's
particular mental orientation. A largely realistic metaphysics may
thus accompany an anti-realist semantics without the lapse into
vacuity or incoherence which some commentators seem to fear