Part of a book symposium about Anjan Chakravartty's Scientific Ontology: Integrating Naturalized Metaphysics And Voluntarist Epistemology.
Anjan Chakravartty's book Scientific Ontology is centrally about how metaphysics is embrangled with epistemology. I begin by discussing the broader literature in science and values, where arguments akin to Chakravartty's have been much-discussed. Then I talk about my own preferred approach, middle range ontology, which does not fit neatly into any of the three stances Chakravartty discusses. Finally, I use these considerations to pose a dilemma.
@ARTICLE(magnus2018d, AUTHOR = {P.D. Magnus}, TITLE = {Cautious realism and middle range ontology}, JOURNAL = {Metascience}, YEAR = {2018}, MONTH = nov, VOLUME = {23}, NUMBER = {3}, PAGES = {365--370}, DOI = {10.1007/s11016-018-0342-y} )
The first on-line draft of this paper was posted 15dec2017.