James Ladyman is a professor of philosophy at the University of Bristol with a specialization in the philosophy of science and metaphysics.

He has published three books, Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized, Understanding Philosophy of Science, and (with Carolina Weisner) What Is a Complex System?.

In Every Thing Must Go, Ladyman describes naturalizing metaphysics along the lines of Willard van Orman Quine's naturalization of epistemology.

In 1969, Quine argued that epistemology, the justification of knowledge claims, should be "naturalized." All knowledge claims should be reduced to verification by the methods of natural science. "For suppose we hold," he says, "with the old empiricist Peirce, that the very meaning of a statement consists in the difference its truth would make to possible experience... Every term and every sentence is a label attached to an idea, simple or complex, which is stored in the mind."

Ladyman writes...

There is a tradition (in philosophy) which aims at domesticating scientific discoveries so as to render them compatible with intuitive or "folk" pictures of structural composition and causation. Such domestication is typically presented as providing 'understanding.' This usage may be appropriate given one everyday sense of 'understanding' as 'rendering more familiar'. However, we are interested here in a sense of 'understanding' that is perhaps better characterized by the word 'explanation', where an explanation must be true (at least in its most general claims). We argue that a given metaphysic's achievement of domestication furnishes no evidence at all that the metaphysician question is true, and thus no reason for believing that it explains anything.

Quine (1969), in arguing for the naturalization of epistemology, claimed that the evolutionary processes that designed people should have endowed us with cognition that reliably tracks truth, on the grounds that believing truth is in general more conducive to fitness than believing falsehood. This is an empirical hypothesis, and it may well be a sound one. However, it does not imply that our everyday or habitual intuitions and cognition are likely to track truths reliably across all domains of inquiry...

the deep metaphors of English, which govern everyday inferences made in that language, are structured according to an implicit doctrine of `containment'.' On this doctrine, the world is a kind of container bearing objects that change location and properties over time. These objects cause things to happen by interacting directly with one another. Prototypically, they move each other about by banging into one another. At least as important to the general picture, they themselves are containers in turn, and their properties and causal dispositions are to be explained by the properties and dispositions of the objects they contain (and which are often taken to comprise them entirely)...

The modern mereology has in some ways strengthened the commitments of the containment metaphor. Aristotle, famously, had a complex and multi-faceted concept of causation. Causation to the modern domesticating metaphysician is, by contrast, typically identified with what Aristotle called `efficient causation'. A characteristic of efficient causation, in the context of the containment metaphor, is that it is imagined to `flow' always from `inside out'. Thus the ultimate constituents of the world that halt the regress of containment are also taken to be the ultimate bearers of causal powers, which somehow support and determine the whole edifice of (often complex) causal relations that constitute the domain of observable dynamics.

The metaphysics of domestication tends to consist of attempts to render pieces of contemporary science-and, at least as often, simplified, mythical interpretations of contemporary science-into terms that can be made sense of by reference to the containment metaphor. That is, it seeks to account for the world as `made of' myriad `little things' in roughly the way that (some) walls are made of bricks. Unlike bricks in walls, however, the little things are often in motion. Their causal powers are usually understood as manifest in the effects they have on each other when they collide. Thus the causal structure of the world is decomposed by domesticating metaphysics into reverberating networks of what we will call `microbangings'-the types of ultimate causal relations that prevail amongst the basic types of little things, whatever exactly those turn out to be. Metaphysicians, especially recently, are heavily preoccupied with the search for `genuine causal oomph', particularly in relation to what they perceive to be the competition between different levels of reality. We will argue that this is profoundly unscientific, and we will reject both the conception of causation and levels of reality upon which it is based.

We will argue in this book that, in general, the domesticating metaphysics finds no basis in contemporary science. Some successful science, and some reasonable metaphysics, were done in the past on the basis of it. However, the attempt to domesticate twenty-first-century science by reference to homely images of little particles that have much in common with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mechanistic and materialist metaphysics is forlorn. There are, we will argue, no little things and no microbangings. Causation does not, in general, flow from the insides of containers to their outsides. The world is in no interesting ways like a wall made of bricks in motion (that somehow manages not to fall apart), or, in the more sophisticated extension of the metaphor dominant since modern science, like a chamber enclosing the molecules of a gas. Indeed, it is no longer helpful to conceive of either the world, or particular systems of the world that we study in partial isolation, as `made of' anything at all.

As we will discuss in Chapter 5, the containment metaphor and its accompanying ontology of little things and microbangings has more problems than its mere failure to follow from science. It cannot be defended by someone on the grounds that psychological repose and cultural familiarity are values that might be defended against the objective truth. This is because the increasing heights of abstraction in representation achieved by science over the past century have now carried its investigations so far beyond the reaches of our ancestral habitation that the containment metaphor can no longer be applied to the scientific image without doing at least as much violence to everyday intuitions as does our denial of the metaphor. This emerges most clearly in the struggles of professional domesticators-that is, (some) philosophers. Much recent metaphysics, in trying to save a version of the habitual picture that has already been transformed by half-digested science, ends up committed to claims that are as least as shocking to common sense as anything we will urge. For example, Trenton Merricks (2001) is led to deny the existence of tables and chairs because he thinks physics tells us that they decompose without residue into atoms, and he denies that baseballs can break windows because he thinks that windows must be broken by particular atomic constituents of a baseball, thus rendering the effects of the ball as a whole causally otiose.

We thus have philosophers, all seeking "objective truth," some who deny that there are composite objects, others who deny that objects contain components - myriad `little things, microbanging into one another'.