WiP - Harjit Bhogal / Special Science Naturalness
WiP - Harjit Bhogal / Special Science Naturalness
Wednesday 11/11, Work-in-Progress at 1:00, with Harjit Bhogal, on the notion of 'natural properties' in special sciences.
As Lewis showed us, there is a compelling theoretical need for a distinction between natural and unnatural properties. Notably, our scientific theorizing should be, as far as possible, in terms of the natural properties. This paper is about how to make sense of naturalness in the special sciences, in a way that is consistent with physicalism. The core idea of my account is that the natural properties of some particular special science form an explanatory cluster — most of the facts about these properties are explained well by other facts about those properties. The resulting account, I argue, has a variety of advantages. As well as getting attractive results about which properties count as natural, it helps make sense of the methodological autonomy of the special sciences from lower-level physics, and it helps understand why we should theorize in terms of the natural properties.