Eric Hochstien: Carving joints or ladling stew

"I am currently working on my first book manuscript, which is intended to tie together my previous research on scientific modelling, explanation, and classification in science into a single framework. I propose that we have compelling reasons to think that mind-independent ontic structures, regularities, patterns, and dependencies exist in nature, and can be exploited, studied and characterized.

This work highlights that science and metaphysics are necessarily intertwined, but also that they are guided by pragmatics. On this view, the gulf between “realism” and “instrumentalism” is far less wide than most realize, and it would force us to re-evaluate what counts as a “natural kind” and why."

Eric Hochstien