1 Vikings or Normans? The radicalism of naturalized metaphysics 1 Don Ross School of Economics University of Cape Town Center for Economic Analysis of Risk Georgia State University don.ross931@gmail.com December 2014 The aim of the following paper is to investigate the extent to which naturalized metaphysics, as proposed and characterized by Ladyman and Ross (2007) among others, requires a radical break with the conceptual space of pre‐naturalized metaphysics. The investigation compares Ladyman and Ross’s methodology for metaphysics with that recently advocated by Steven French (2014). The comparison promises to be revealing because French shares Ladyman and Ross’s commitment to build a new metaphysics on the basis of a particular thesis developed in the philosophy of science literature, ontic structural realism (OSR). Thus differences between Ladyman and Ross’s and French’s approaches to metaphysics can be exhibited cleanly, without having to be pried apart from different respective views about the ontology implied by scientific theory and practice. Before sketching their basis for a naturalized metaphysics, by which they mean a metaphysics that is not merely consistent with but motivated by and derived from actual science, Ladyman and Ross (2007, chapter 1) argue that traditional analytic metaphysics has become so deeply detached from empirical inquiry that it can make no pretense to being a credible part of the collective inquiry into the objective structure of the world and should be “discontinued”. Analytic metaphysics, they contend, has remained serenely preoccupied with a general categorical framework that has been shown by contemporary fundamental physics (quantum mechanics, quantum field theory and general relativity) to be completely false. The venerable framework attacked by Ladyman and Ross imagines the world to be a structured set of individual entities with properties. Some of the properties are haecceities, which constitute the individuals’ ‘thisness’. Others are quiddities, which individuals share with some but not all other individuals and determine their ‘whatness’. Individuals have relations with one another, and relations are also properties, though what they are properties of has been a matter of vexation and controversy among metaphysicians. Individuals are typically regarded as having dispositions to respond to changes in certain ways rather than others, and also capacities to exert influence – causal powers – that might or might not be regarded as among their dispositions. Many possible accounts of the ways in which 1 I thank Steven French and James Ladyman for helpful comments on an earlier draft.