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  1. Keep the chickens cooped: the epistemic inadequacy of free range metaphysics.Amanda Bryant - 2020 - Synthese 197 (5):1867-1887.
    This paper aims to better motivate the naturalization of metaphysics by identifying and criticizing a class of theories I call ’free range metaphysics’. I argue that free range metaphysics is epistemically inadequate because the constraints on its content—consistency, simplicity, intuitive plausibility, and explanatory power—are insufficiently robust and justificatory. However, since free range metaphysics yields clarity-conducive techniques, incubates science, and produces conceptual and formal tools useful for scientifically engaged philosophy, I do not recommend its discontinuation. I do recommend, however, ending the (...)
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  2. Epistemic Infrastructure for a Scientific Metaphysics.Amanda Bryant - 2021 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 98 (1):27-49.
    A naturalistic impulse has taken speculative analytic metaphysics in its critical sights. Importantly, the claim that it is desirable or requisite to give metaphysics scientific moorings rests on underlying epistemological assumptions or principles. If the naturalistic impulse toward metaphysics is to be well-founded and its prescriptions to have normative force, those assumptions or principles should be spelled out and justified. In short, advocates of naturalized or scientific metaphysics require epistemic infrastructure. This paper begins to supply it. The author first sketches (...)
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  3. Grounding interventionism: Conceptual and epistemological challenges.Amanda Bryant - 2022 - Metaphilosophy 53 (2-3):322-343.
    Philosophers have recently highlighted substantial affinities between causation and grounding, which has inclined some to import the conceptual and formal resources of causal interventionism into the metaphysics of grounding. The prospect of grounding interventionism raises two important questions: exactly what are grounding interventions, and why should we think they enable knowledge of grounding? This paper will approach these questions by examining how causal interventionists have addressed (or might address) analogous questions and then comparing the available options for grounding interventionism. I (...)
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  4. Naturalizing grounding: How theories of ground can engage science.Amanda Bryant - 2018 - Philosophy Compass 13 (5):e12489.
    This paper surveys some of the grounding literature searching for points of contact between theories of ground and science. I find that there are some places where a would-be naturalistic grounding theorist can draw inspiration. I synthesize a list of recommendations for how science may be put to use in theories of ground. I conclude that the prospects for naturalizing the metaphysics of ground are bright.
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  5.  54
    A Thousand Flowers on the Road to Epistemic Anarchy: Comments on Chakravartty's Scientific Ontology.Amanda Bryant - 2021 - Dialogue 60 (1):1-13.
    I introduce the symposium on Anjan Chakravartty’s Scientific Ontology by summarizing the book’s main claims. In my commentary, I first challenge Chakravartty’s claim that naturalized metaphysics cannot be indexed to science simpliciter. Second, I argue that there are objective truths regarding what conduces to particular epistemic aims, and that Chakravartty is therefore too permissive regarding epistemic stances and their resultant ontologies. Third, I argue that it is unclear what stops epistemic stances from having unlimited influence. Finally, I argue that Chakravartty’s (...)
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  6. Physicalism.Amanda Bryant - 2020 - In Michael J. Raven (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Metaphysical Grounding. New York: Routledge. pp. 484-500.
    This chapter considers potential applications of grounding to the formulation of physicalism. I begin with an overview of competing conceptions of the physical and of physicalism. I then consider whether grounding physicalism overcomes well-known and seemingly fatal problems with supervenience physicalism. I conclude that while grounding physicalism improves upon supervenience physicalism in certain respects, it arguably falls victim to some of the same difficulties.
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  7. Naturalisms.Amanda Bryant - 2020 - Think 19 (56):35-50.
    The word ‘naturalism’ has a bewildering array of uses in philosophy. Roughly speaking, it connotes pro-scientific attitudes and approaches. This article introduces the subject of naturalism by sketching a history of pro-scientific attitudes and approaches in philosophy, from their origins in the early modern period through to the present day. It then distinguishes a number of distinct families of naturalism: metaphysical, logico-linguistic, epistemological, and methodological. The resulting taxonomy encompasses a plurality of loosely related views rather than a number of variations (...)
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  8. The Supposed Spectre of Scientism.Amanda Bryant - 2022 - In Moti Mizrahi Mizrahi (ed.), For and Against Scientism: Science, Methodology, and the Future of Philosophy. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. pp. 47-74.
    This chapter considers the assumptions required to make scientisms of different forms genuinely threatening to philosophers, where a genuine threat would consist of a concrete risk to their statuses, the value of their teaching and research, their livelihoods, their preferred research methods, or the health of the discipline. I will find that strong and weak forms of scientism alike require substantive assumptions to make them threatening in those regards. In particular, they require sometimes heavy-handed circumscriptions of philosophy and science, as (...)
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  9. Modal naturalism: science and the modal facts.Amanda Bryant - 2024 - Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.
    How do we know what is possible or impossible, what is inevitable or unattainable, or what would happen under which circumstances? Since modal facts seem distinctively mysterious and difficult to know, the epistemology of modality has historically been fraught with uncertainty and disagreement. The recent literature has been dominated by rationalist approaches that emphasise a priori reasoning (sometimes including direct intuition of possibility). Only recently have alternative approaches emerged which recognize a broader range of sources of modal knowledge. Yet even (...)
     
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  10. Rethinking Emergence.Amanda Bryant & David Yates (eds.) - forthcoming - Oxford University Press.
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  11.  80
    Resolving Quine's Confict: A Neo-Quinean View of the Rational Revisability of Logic.Amanda Bryant - 2017 - Australasian Journal of Logic 14 (1).
    There is an apparent conflict in Quine’s work between, on the one hand, his clear commitment to the rational revisability of logic and, on the other, his principle of charitable translation and ‘change of logic, change of subject’ argument. I argue that the apparent conflict is mostly resolved under close exegesis, but that the translation argument normatively rules out collaborative revision and allows only revision by individuals. However, I articulate a Neo-Quinean view that preserves the rational acceptability of collaborative revision. (...)
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