Reduction and Elimination in Philosophy and the Sciences

Does this mean that metaphysics should be reduced
to science? How does this discussion bear on what was
said in this paper? Here, I want to suggest one last
antireductionist idea. Another possible way of looking at
metaphysics, alternative to the view of it as a mere ‘byproduct’
of science, is as an autonomous discipline having
to do with hypotheses rather than truths; and as an inquiry
aiming to account for the same reality described by
science but by moving at the level of the conjectural rather
than at the level of the ‘verifiable’. More specifically,
metaphysics is perhaps best understood as an attempt to
provide general categories and concepts that transcend
the empirical and yet find their best application when they
are employed for interpreting what science tells us. On this
construal, certainly metaphysics should not be entirely a
priori but – crucially – it does not reduce to science either:
what emerges is rather a two-way relationship of mutual
support, according to which metaphysics provides the
conceptual tools for the interpretation of science, and
science the data to make sense of our metaphysical
hypotheses.
The suggestions made in this paper, based on a
prior definition and defence of trope ontology and on a
subsequent implementation of it on the basis of our best
science, demonstrate that this understanding of the
relationship between science and metaphysics may be
fruitful.
Properties and Reduction between Metaphysics and Physics — Matteo Morganti
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