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kisdead's review
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
There are reasonable criticisms of the positive picture Ladyman and Ross offer (ontic structural realism). I'm not totally convinced they're so easily able to discern no distinction between abstract and concrete structure, and they seem too quick to accept some form of causality despite recent skepticism. I think maintaining the distinction is extremely useful as well: it's important to recognize that there may be an epistemic gap between the posits of a science rooted in direct empirical confirmation vs. those structures and entities which are supposed via idealizations of theories. We may do well to treat them "as if they were real," but I'm not convinced there is nothing to be said for suggesting some kind of epistemic difference.
Despite all this, their reflections here are fantastic. Chapter one, in particular, is incredibly convincing and brutally argumentative against the current trends in metaphysics, not only demonstrating the continual issue of philosophers adopting scientific vocabularies without understanding them, but also of using outdated models or pictures in physics to make their points seem more realistic than they really are. Their general comments on the primacy of "intuitions" in metaphysics also result in some devastating criticisms. If one is skeptical about the general direction of post-Kripkean analytic metaphysics, this book offers some brilliant insights.
Despite all this, their reflections here are fantastic. Chapter one, in particular, is incredibly convincing and brutally argumentative against the current trends in metaphysics, not only demonstrating the continual issue of philosophers adopting scientific vocabularies without understanding them, but also of using outdated models or pictures in physics to make their points seem more realistic than they really are. Their general comments on the primacy of "intuitions" in metaphysics also result in some devastating criticisms. If one is skeptical about the general direction of post-Kripkean analytic metaphysics, this book offers some brilliant insights.
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