sarahstarspspconferencejune19,2009.docVIP

Sarah Star SPSP Conference: June 19, 2009 Revisiting Ontology and Its Consequences This is a paper about the role of our ontological presuppositions in shaping our interpretations of scientific practice, and our self-conception as philosophers of science. It may seem obvious that our ontological commitments, our sense of what it is to “be” or to “exist”, should carry important consequences for how we understand the work both of the scientist and the philosopher, but because such commitments tend to be relegated to the liminal recesses of our awareness, they are rarely explicitly considered or thought “all the way down”. In recent decades, philosophers of science have all but institutionalised this uncritical attitude toward our ontological commitments as well as their confinement to the outer reaches of our discipline with the widely held belief that the question of what there is in the world should be left to the exclusive determination of scientists, for whom it is regarded as constituting a more natural line of research For the next twenty minutes or so, I’d like to engage in a series of very brief thought experiments designed to illuminate what happens to our conceptions of scientific and philosophic practice when our sense of what it is for us to be in the world shifts. In conducting these experiments, I’m hoping to do a couple of things. First, I’d like to be able to persuade you that to the extent that science does engage in ontology, it does so by default. To appreciate what I might mean by this, it will help to encourage at the outset a distinction between “ontology” as a determination or inventorying what there “is”, and “ontology” understood as a more qualitative line of philosophical inquiry aimed at accounting for the nature of something’s being, the “how” it is to “be” that thing. And, because I’m sensitive to the fact that philosophers of science have a history of resisting this sort of “Continental-speak”, I hope it won’t strike anyone as