Scientific Metaphysics and Ontology

Abstract

The phrase scientific metaphysics is controversial and reveals some of the key developments in twentieth‐century analytic philosophy and philosophy of science. This entry reviews some of the major arguments concerning scientific metaphysics in the twentieth century. The logical positivists thought that metaphysics was meaningless and, as such, could have only a pernicious role in science. However, with the demise of logical positivism, other philosophers—that is, Karl Popper (1902–94), Imre Lakatos (1922–74), and W. V. O. Quine (1908–2000)—had much more positive conceptions of the role of metaphysics in science. Other scholars have explicated the more specific roles of metaphysical statements in science.