The shaky game +25, or

on locavoracity

Laura Ruetsche

pp. 3425-3442

in: Benjamin C. Jantzen, Deborah G. Mayo, Lydia Patton (eds), Ontology & methodology, Synthese 192 (11), 2015.

Abstract

Taking Arthur Fine’s The Shaky Game as my inspiration, and the recent 25({ extit{th}}) anniversary of the publication of that work as the occasion to exercise that inspiration, I sketch an alternative to the “Naturalism” prevalent among philosophers of physics. Naturalism is a methodology eventuating in a metaphysics. The methodology is to seek the deep framework assumptions that make the best sense of science; the metaphysics is furnished by those assumptions and supported by their own support of science. The alternative presented here, which I call “Locavoracity,” shares Naturalism’s commitment to making sense of science, but alters Naturalism’s methodology. The Locavore’s sense-making projects are piecemeal, rather than sweeping. The Locavore’s hypothesis is that the collection of local sense-making projects fails to issue a single overarching unifying framework deserving of the title “the metaphysics that makes the best sense of science.” I muster some examples supporting the Locavore hypothesis from the interpretation of quantum field theories.

Cited authors

Fine Arthur