Department of Philosophy
Daryl Tyrer
Postgraduate researcher
Thesis
Thesis
Can the evolutionary naturalist account for realism in metaphysics and science?
Supervisors: Professor Mary Leng and Professor Tom Stoneham
Research
Research
My research will focus on reformulations of Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism. Specifically, I aim to show how Plantinga’s argument can be recast as an argument for scientific anti-realism and anti-realism regarding claims about metaphysics. I propose to do this by showing how Plantinga’s argument is structurally similar to other arguments for scientific anti-realism. Then I intend to demonstrate how Plantinga’s narrower form of his argument, that the reliability of our metaphysical belief-forming mechanisms is questionable given evolutionary naturalism, can also be used to support anti-realism in metaphysics. This approach differs from Plantinga’s in that it rejects global scepticism; I am instead arguing for local scepticism regarding metaphysical claims. The result is that if we are sceptics about certain metaphysical claims underpinning the sciences, then this scepticism also affects science more generally.