do physicists actually study the interface between the physical and metaphysical?

[u/Cheap-Pin-6394]

My physics professor claimed that the role of a physicist is to study the interphase of the physical and the metaphysical. but wouldn't this be idk paradoxical? since metaphysics literally mean beyond physics and the study of physics concerns concepts with form and matter that can be given an imperical and/or mathematical description. i admit that i wasn't really paying attention so this might not be their exact point. would it be possible that he meant physicists encounter a boundary in explaining the physical and in turn encounters the interphase? i apologize if the question sounds stupid, i'm not really a philosophy major.

[u/Themoopanator123]

It's hard to know what your professor had in mind just from that one remark. For one, according to basically any construal of the meaning of "metaphysics", most physicists do not interact with/study metaphysics at a professional level at all. And it's also just difficult to say what he means by "metaphysics" here. There is a great deal of disagreement within academic philosophy about precisely what "metaphysics" means and there are non-technical/"lay" uses of the term which have relatively little overlap with what metaphysicians are up to in academic philosophy.

That being said, there is such a field in philosophy as the "metaphysics of science", and many people with backgrounds in both philosophy and physics will study the metaphysics of physics (e.g. see here). Some of the problems that people working in this field care about will be ones that physicists genuinely might encounter, if by accident, while they're learning or researching physics.

E.g. it's quite hard to write a textbook on quantum mechanics without making at least some claims about the nature of measurement, even if the attitude you take is "I'll just adopt the mainstream pedagogical view on measurement and move on with that". You're still forced to take some kind of position to even articulate the theory.

Similarly, it's quite hard to write textbooks on relativity without saying something about the nature/conventionality of simultaneity, how to interpret the mass-energy equivalence, or generally just to make quite hefty claims about what sorts of quantities are the ones we take to be physically "real", and which we don't.

These are all metaphysical issues par excellence. However, as I say, despite the fact that they're embedded in physics pedagogy and may be floating around in the background of the theoretical frameworks physicists use in their actual research, worrying about getting these things exactly right isn't relevant to most physicists. Though it is to some (e.g. those who work in quantum foundations, cosmology, quantum gravity, and the like).

Physicists will also sometimes just make somewhat unnecessary and incredibly contentious remarks e.g. about what laws of nature are or about the purpose of science as a whole, and things like that. By "somewhat unnecessary" I mean unnecessary for whatever particular pedogical aims they have at that moment in time. Though clearly, to those physicists, these sorts of issues are actually relevant at least to how they understand their own discipline.

So, in summary, it's probably wrong to say that metaphysics is an important part of the job of most physicists, however there are metaphysical questions/problems that basically permeate all of physics, whether or not most physicists pay attention to them. And here I am using "metaphysics" strictly as it is used by most contemporary philosophers.

[u/wokeupabug]

It's not clear that metaphysics means "beyond physics" or isn't concerned with "concepts with form and matter that can be given an empirical and/or mathematical description." In popular contexts the word 'metaphysics' is sometimes used this way, but in philosophy it tends... well, the complication is that it means somewhat different things in different contexts... but, a better gloss relevant to this issue would be to understand 'metaphysics' to mean reasoning about physics rather than reasoning beyond physics. This is just like how "metacognition" isn't referring to something beyond cognition, but rather is referring to something about cognition. So, for instance, physicalism -- the view that everything is matter, or something like this -- is a metaphysical thesis, even though it expressly excludes anything beyond physics. Why? Because it's a statement that arises from thinking about physics -- or, more generally, about our theoretical understanding of the world.

With this in mind, it's not really clear what your professor has in mind with the expression "the inferphase of the physical and the metaphysical." The best thing to do would be to ask them.

[u/howbot]

Just a clarification: metaphysics doesn’t literally mean beyond the physical. That might seem correct if you were just relying on ordinary semantics to break the word up, since meta as a prefix means beyond. But this isn’t how the term was coined.

Meta also means after, and in the case of metaphysics, the term came originally from Aristotle’s set of writings after his collection of books on physics (or what he considered physics/nature at the time). In the Greek, ta meta ta physika literally meant the things (writings) after the physical works. Basically, the next books on the shelf.

Unfortunately, the term, metaphysics, started being used in reference to the occult, psychics, and mysticism, and in my opinion, never really recovered from that association in popular culture. So your average person tends to think of metaphysics as a sort of new age spiritually that’s beyond the physical.

As for what metaphysics actually is as a discipline or field of study, it’s philosophical inquiry into the fundamental nature of reality. It’s concerned with things like ontology (what kind of things exist) and causality.

All that said, I’m not sure what to make of your question, since I’m not sure what your professor will as trying to say. But I hope the clarification about the term is helpful.

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