Scientific Essentials A Study in the Metaphysics of Science Paperback - 1985

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Metaphysics of Science is a recent development in Philosophy of Science which was primarily an epistemology of science which is evidenced by the fact that Philosophy of Science was called, somewhat clumsily, 'scientific epistemology'. It is an area which grapples with ontological issues that emerge from concepts, models and theories employed by scientific community. What is significant about metaphysics of science unlike traditional metaphysics is that it is neither transcendental nor a prioristic. It is fundamentally a posterioristic and firmly grounded on the scientific practices, historical and contemporary. Scientific Essentialism which is the subject matter of this thesis presupposes scientific realism of some kind or other. According to scientific essentialism the world science inquires into is constituted by natural kinds which are objective and which possess certain fundamental properties. These fundamental properties are essentially dispositional and are the loci of laws of nature. The first Chapter is an attempt to answer the following question: "What are the conceptions of science - metaphysics relation available historically and currently?" Since this thesis concerns essentialism as 'contextualized to science' and since essentialism is a metaphysical thesis, with the result that the controversy over essentialism is a metaphysical dispute, it is in the fitness of things, I begin with to detailed discussion of the relation between metaphysics and science as conceptualized in the history of Philosophy of Science down to the present - a task undertaken in Chapter I. I trace the historical trajectory of science - metaphysics relation starting from Aristotle who could find the possibility of science via method and aim of science in the possibility of knowability and hence, definability of a thing.