Realism And Other Metaphysical Half-Truths
The deepest, most elegant, and most beautiful explanations are the ones we find so overwhelmingly compelling that we don't even realize they're there. It can take years of philosophical training to recognize their presence and to evaluate their merits.
Consider the following three examples:
REALISM. We explain the success of our scientific theories by appeal to what philosophers call realism—the idea that they are more or less true. In other words, chemistry "works" because atoms actually exist, and hand washing prevents disease because there really are loitering pathogens.
OTHER MINDS. We explain why people act the way they do by positing that they have minds more or less like our own. We assume that they have feelings, beliefs, and desires, and that they are not (for instance) zombie automata that convincingly act as if they have minds. This requires an intuitive leap that engages the so-called "problem of other minds."
CAUSATION. We explain the predictable relationship between some events we call causes and others we call effects by appeal to a mysterious power called causation. Yet, as noted by 18th century philosopher David Hume, we never "discover anything but one event following another," and never directly observe "a force or power by which the cause operates, or any connexion between it and its supposed effect."
These explanations are at the core of humans' understanding of the world—of our intuitive metaphysics. They also illustrate the hallmarks of a satisfying explanation: they unify many disparate phenomena by appealing to a small number of core principles. In other words, they are broad but simple. Realism can explain the success of chemistry, but also of physics, zoology, and deep-sea ecology. A belief in other minds can help someone understand politics, their family, and Middlemarch. And assuming a world governed by orderly, causal relationships helps explain the predictable associations between the moon and the tides as well as that between caffeine consumption and sleeplessness.
Nonetheless, each explanation has come under serious attack at one point or another. Take realism, for example. While many of our current scientific theories are admittedly impressive, they come at the end of a long succession of failures: every past theory has been wrong. Ptolemy's astronomy had a good run, but then came the Copernican Revolution. Newtonian mechanics is truly impressive, but it was ultimately superseded by contemporary physics. Modesty and common sense suggest that like their predecessors, our current theories will eventually be overturned. But if they aren't true, why are they so effective? Intuitive realism is at best a metaphysical half-truth, albeit a pretty harmless one.
From these examples I draw two important lessons. First, the depth, elegance, and beauty of our intuitive metaphysical explanations can be a liability. These explanations are so broad and so simple that we let them operate in the background, constantly invoked but rarely scrutinized. As a result, most of us can't defend them and don't revise them. Metaphysical half-truths find a safe and happy home in most human minds.
Second, the depth, elegance, and beauty of our intuitive metaphysical explanations can make us appreciate them less rather than more. Like a constant hum, we forget that they are there. It follows that the explanations most often celebrated for their virtues—explanations such as natural selection and relativity—are importantly different from those that form the bedrock of intuitive beliefs. Celebrated explanations have the characteristics of the solution to a good murder-mystery. Where intuitive metaphysical explanations are easy to generate but hard to evaluate, scientific superstars like evolution are typically the reverse: hard to generate but easy to evaluate. We need philosophers like Hume to nudge us from complacency in the first case, and scientists like Darwin to advance science in the second.
