Introduction

My motivation for breaking with the long tradition of Anglo-American philosophy to become an essentialist derives from reflection on the aims of scientific theorizing. The French philosopher Pierre Duhem, writing in 1905, said that there are two principal views about this. According to one – that favoured by Duhem – science aims only to “summarise and classify logically” the laws discovered by observation and experiment, to represent them mathematically, to postulate general principles that can usefully systematize our knowledge in the relevant field, and develop a theoretical structure within which the experimental laws can be derived as special cases. It does not aim to explain the phenomena, he said, or to discover the nature of the reality that gives rise to them. The other view is that science seeks to dig beneath the surface to discover and expose the underlying causes of things, and so reveal a deeper reality. On this view, science seeks not merely to represent things, but also to explain them, where explaining is here understood to be a matter of “strip[ping] reality of appearances covering it like a veil, in order to see the bare reality itself” (Duhem 1954: 7). If a scientist seeks to explain anything in this full-blooded sense, Duhem argued, then he is going beyond his brief as a scientist, and engaging in metaphysics.