Warning: Naive Meta-metaphysical Comments Ahead

I have a lot of sympathy with James Ladyman’s perplexity with certain approaches to metaphysics. (Craig Callender’s comment best summarises my view on the matter.) I, too, could not understand how the question he mocks is interesting. But never mind that — the thing that I find most disturbing about large parts of contemporary analytic metaphysics is how so much of it depends on “intuitive” principles like Locke’s principle that Callender mentions. I read The Plurality of Worlds just last year, and perhaps I was/am too philosophically naive to appreciate it, but for large parts of the book I kept thinking, “OK, this argument would be interesting if I actually agreed with any of the principles it begins with, but since so many of these principles are poorly justified, I don’t really care about this argument any more than I care about the average crossword puzzle.” Those who buy into more of Lewisian metaphysics doubtless disagree with me about the strength of the justification of said principles. But so much metaphysics seems to be spun out, in ever longer threads of argument, on the basis of those principles, and to someone who doesn’t accept those principles, those swathes of metaphysics look pointless.

For complicated reasons, my writing sample addressed a question that interests largely contemporary metaphysicians, and I started out being interested in it because someone had put forward a seemingly good case for a counterintuitive conclusion — interested in it as a mere puzzle. But as I worked on it I became convinced that the question itself was not important. It was important if you bought into a certain strand of Lewisian metaphysics; if you rejected the basic principles of that strand of metaphysics, it would be hard to see what implications an answer to that question would have. By the time I was seriously sick of the topic, it was rather too late to produce a different writing sample, so I stuck with it, but the final weeks polishing it were painful, to say the least. In any case, it’s served its purpose, and I did learn a lot from the process. It also pretty much forced my introduction to Lewisian metaphysics, and I don’t suppose I could have escaped such an introduction indefinitely.