LAUSR

In his excellent book, Chakravartty builds a strong case for a particular conception of the relationship of science to metaphysics. Metaphysics, he contends, is inescapable: even the most diehard empiricist must make use of metaphysical presuppositions. Conversely, science is essential to metaphysics: an ontology that is divorced from empirical scrutiny is just too epistemically risky. So empirical inquiry and metaphysical inference must work together to inform our picture of the ontology of the natural world. The main novel feature in his account of scientific ontology is his construction of a metaphysical distance measure. Some ontological claims are close to the science that informs those claims, and some are further away. The distance is a measure of the epistemic risk one takes in asserting the claim: the further from the empirical base, the greater the risk. But conversely, claims far from the empirical base can serve explanatory and unificatory purposes regarding claims closer in. Since different philosophers have different (reasonable) attitudes toward epistemic risk, Chakravartty endorses a pluralism about scientific ontology. If you are risk-averse, you might reasonably endorse only a narrow range of ontological claims lying very close to the empirical base, but if you are more risk-tolerant, you might reasonably endorse a wider variety of ontological claims, including claims that are further from the base. Chakravartty illustrates his arguments concerning scientific ontology by considering two case studies: the existence of dispositional properties, and the existence of