Contingent Metaphysics and the A Priori
Final Report Abstract
The fundamental working hypothesis of the research project was that the contingentist view of metaphysics, whereby truths of metaphysics (or at least an important subset of such truths) hold at some worlds but not others, must be addressed and rejected as it poses a methodological threat to the possibility of metaphysics as a distinctive (a priori) armchair exercise. The aim was then to save a certain methodological approach to metaphysics by showing how metaphysical claims are metaphysically necessary and establishing a close link between metaphysical necessity and a priority. The objectives of the research project were motivated by this working hypothesis. I began by forming a characterization of metaphysical necessity in terms of logical truth given metaphysical analysis, where such analysis involves substituting derived facts with those from which they are derived. Such a characterization could then be used as a foil for contingentist arguments, avoiding the debate from becoming merely terminological. With this in place, I distinguished between two main kinds of contingentism, which I labelled a priori and a posteriori contingentism; with the latter but not the former making an at least in principle empirically detectable difference between worlds of which the contingency held. I then developed an epistemological worry against (a priori) contingentist metaphysics, arguing that if faced with two opposing metaphysical claims that are consistent with the qualitative facts (with no in principle way of qualitatively discerning between them) where each such claim is contingent, the metaphysical debate at hand becomes pointless. In light of this, I proposed a deflationary methodological approach – where we seek to find a nonredundant qualitative basis from which other facts are then derived a priori – which allows us to reject the contingentist arguments, and in turn avoid the epistemic worry that threatened to leave metaphysical debate pointless.
