Can Science Change our Notion of Existence?

I explore the question of whether scientific changes can induce mutations in our ordinary notion of existence. I conclude that they can’t, partially on the grounds that some of the proposed alternative-notions of existence are only terminologically-distinct from our ordinary notion, and so don’t provide genuine metaphysical alternatives, and partially on the grounds that the ordinary notion of existence is criterion-transcendent. 1. It’s a truism that science discovers things about the world we live in that we didn’t expect (that we didn’t even see coming). Certainly the science of the early modern period did just that: that our sun is only one among the stars, that other planets have moons, that there are micro-organisms too small for the naked eye to see; and science was both acclaimed and reviled as a result. Nearly as much of a truism, as the one about science discovering new things, is that science transforms the inherited concepts of ordinary life. We have ordinary ideas about motion, roughly encapsulated in Aristotelian physics, perhaps belonging to a folk-physics that’s conceptually innate (in some sense of “conceptually innate”).1 These concepts were drastically transformed by Newton. More recently, most of the popular literature of physics has been motivated by attempts to communicate to ordinary people drastically-changed notions of space and time, shape and velocity, as much perhaps as it has been motivated by the desire to present what the world we live in is actually like. Philosophers, of course, worry about whether basic notions of causality and identity scale down to the quantum level; and many argue that they don’t. Are all of our concepts open to mutation from empirical pressure? Quine thought that this was even true of the concept of existence. Having attached our concept of existence to the first-order quantifier, he serenely contemplated the possibility of a future shift in logic accompanied by a shift in quantifierapparatus, or even a replacement of the quantifiers altogether with something else far too alien to allow ontology to survive. Logic for Quine was open to mutation; so, therefore, he thought, are all the concepts dependent on its structure. 1 Pylyshyn (2003, 282, footnote 1) notes then unpublished work of Ian Howard that seems to show “that people’s naïve physics, as measured by their predictions of falling objects, conformed to Aristotelian rather than Newtonian or Galilean principles.”