Inevitably yes. That aspect of philosophy is inescapable but there is a way of increasing the degree of confidence which we can have in the explanatory authority of our models. I call this the way of the old-fashioned Natural Philosopher, which is the the synergy of physics and metaphysics where two different sets of criteria must both be satisfactorily met. Metaphysics is a process of understanding the nature of being through deductive reasoning from first principles, whereas physics is a process of inductive inference from observation. Each must be compatible with the other in order for a model to have any explanatory value. What first principles?, I hear you ask, and justifiably so. Since first principles are not further reducible by definition we have no option but to take a shot in the dark and propose the ones we need as axiomatic. I don't deny that this is cheating but metaphysics is impossible otherwise and we've got to start somewhere. We may be fairly confident that if our first principles are wrong then this will be detected further down the chain of reasoning by throwing up a paradox. It is also essential that first principles be as simple as possible and as self-evident as possible and in my philosophy I adopt only two of them.raw_thought wrote:But isnt any metaphysical theory also a model (human narrative )?
1. The universe is everything that exists
2. All effects must be preceded by a cause.
All the metaphysical conclusions which I draw in my philosophy can be linked directly by a specific chain of reasoning to only these first principles, but that's only half the job done. There is also the small matter of the epistemology available to us through science because the most beautiful of well-reasoned arguments can be quickly laid waste by a single inconvenient fact. In physics we construct a narrative of the world called a theory, or a model, and then we subject this theory to rigorous testing by asking questions of it which yield testable predictions. If our predictions are confirmed our theory is confirmed but it can never ever be proven true. There always exists the possibility of a question which we haven't thought to ask of our model which would in fact falsify it. This is the problem of induction.
The history of physics has very much been this interplay between the deductive logic of metaphysics and the inductive processes of the empirical method, but all this went badly off the rails with Minkowski's spatialisation of time in SR. That time is a Cartesian dimension is quite simply horseshit because Cartesian dimensions are bi-directional. It is quite simply ludicrous to make the universe time invariant when it quite obviously isn't and that the philosophers were asleep at the wheel while the geeks were pulling this stunt was a crime against humanity. That time can be epistemically modelled as a spatial dimension is unquestionably useful but that this mathematical trick should somehow confer some ontological validity onto the spacetime paradigm is a philosophical proposition which beggars belief and naturally it immediately threw up a suite of paradoxes of staggering absurdity, of which a cat simultaneously dead and alive is not even the silliest.
History will judge the pioneers of 20th century physics harshly and deservedly so. They spat in the face of millennia of human wisdom and decided that henceforward no distinction need be made between the map and the territory. The geeks sacked the philosophers because they had models of unparalleled predictive power and the fact that these models were describing a universe which made no sense was dismissed as a trivial inconvenience. A century on this non-science is still saddled with exactly the same models, each of which contradicts the others, and a tower of paradoxes which could stretch to the moon. Still nobody knows what gravity is. And yet only a very small number of renegades within this cloistered priesthood of geeks has ever dared to poke his head above the parapet and suggest that maybe they fucked something up somewhere.