Anjan Chakravartty, “Scientific Ontology: Integrating Naturalized Metaphysics and Voluntarist Epistemology” (Oxford UP, 2017)
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Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figor, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. I'm co host of the channel along with Robert Talise, professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books, drawing from a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Anjan Chakravarty, a Pinyani Foundation Chair and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami. His notebook, Scientific Ontology, Integrating Naturalized Metaphysics and Voluntarist Epistemology, is just out from Oxford University Press. A scientific ontology is a view about what a scientific theory says exists, but
Longstanding philosophical debate on this issue divides into two broad camps anti realists who think scientific theories are committed to the existence only of those things that can be observed, and realists who hold that these theories are also committed to unobservables such as some atomic particles. In his new book, Chakravarti argues that this debate is philosophically indefeasible because the views rest on different backgrounds. Background epistemic stances or bundles of attitudes that generate different assessments of the epistemic risk attached to scientific claims. Chakavarti elaborates his view that scientific ontology always includes an a priori metaphysical element and that epistemic stances are voluntarily adopted.
He also considers the implications of his account regarding worries about whether ontological claims are inevitably perspectival and about the rationality of opposing stances and the ontologies that they ground. Let's turn to the interview. Uh hello, Anjon. Are you there? I'm here, Carrie. Welcome to New Books in Philosophy.
Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here.
Um, I'm really excited to be talking about your new book, Scientific Ontology. Um, and it's a i there's a lot of moving pieces here, um, but I think they fit together in a very interesting and uh informative and and provocative sort of a way. Um and I hope we will get to at least the major elements of it. But before we get into start getting into the book, uh I always like to start with a question about about you, the author. Um, you know, tell us a little bit about yourself and uh you how you came to philosophy and how you came to write this particular book. Sure.
Well, uh how did I come to philosophy? I suppose I was one of those kids that really uh loved everything. So when it came to university and trying to decide what I was going to do, it was uh torturous, really. I loved the sciences, I loved the humanities, uh, and the prospect of having to choose one or the other was uh something I really didn't relish.
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