User:Phlsph7/Metaphysics - Relation to other disciplines

Relation to other disciplines
Metaphysics is related to many fields of inquiry by investigating their basic concepts and relation to the fundamental structure of reality. For example, scientists often rely on concepts such as law of nature, causation, necessity, and spacetime to formulate their theories and predict or explain the outcomes of experiments. While the main focus of scientists is on the application of these concepts to specific situations, metaphysics examines their general nature and how they depend on each other. Physicists formulate specific laws of nature, like laws of gravitation and thermodynamics, to describe how physical systems behave under various conditions. Metaphysicians, by contrast, ask what all laws of nature have in common, for example, whether they merely describe contingent regularities or express necessary relations. At the same time, new scientific findings have also influenced existing and inspired new metaphysical theories. Einstein's theory of relativity, for instance, prompted various metaphysicians to conceive space and time as a unified dimension rather than as independent dimensions. Empirically focused metaphysicians often rely on scientific theories to ground their theories about the nature of reality in empirical observations.

Similar issues pertain to the social sciences where metaphysicians investigate their basic concepts and analyze their metaphysical implications. This includes questions like whether social facts arise from non-social facts, whether social groups and institutions have mind-independent existence, and how they persist through time. Metaphysical assumptions and topics in psychology and psychiatry include the questions about the relation between body and mind, whether the nature of the human mind is historically fixed, and what the metaphysical status of diseases is.

Metaphysics is similar to both physical cosmology and theology in its interest in the first causes and the universe as a whole. Key differences are that metaphysics relies on rational inquiry while physical cosmology gives more weight to empirical observations and theology is additionally based on divine revelation and faith-based doctrines. Historically, cosmology and theology were considered subfields of metaphysics.

Metaphysics in the form of ontology plays a central role in computer science to classify objects and formally represent information about them. Unlike metaphysicians, computer scientists are usually not interested in providing a single all-encompassing characterization of reality as a whole but instead employ many different ontologies, each one concerned only with a limited domain of entities. For example, a college database may use an ontology with categories such as person, teacher, student, and exam to represent information about academic activities. Ontologies provide standards or conceptualizations for encoding and storing information in a structured way, which makes it possible to use and transform the information by computational processes for a variety of purposes. Some knowledge bases integrate information belonging to various domains, which brings with it the problem of handling data that was formulated using different ontologies. They do so by providing an upper ontology that defines concepts on a higher level of abstraction to apply to all domains. Influential upper ontologies include Suggested Upper Merged Ontology and Basic Formal Ontology.

Logic as the study of correct reasoning is often used by metaphysicians as a tool to engage in their inquiry and express insights using precise logical formulas. Another relation between the two fields concerns the metaphysical assumptions associated with logical systems. Many logical systems like first-order logic rely on existential quantifiers to express existential statements. For instance, in the logical formula $$\exists x \text{Horse}(x)$$ the existential quantifier $$\exists$$ is applied to the predicate $$\text{Horse}$$ to express that there are horses. Following Quine, various metaphysicians assume that existential quantifiers carry ontological commitments, meaning that existential statements imply that the entities over which one quantifies form part of reality.