Metaphysical poison or cure.

Axiologist, I see you are puzzled by my previous post. Well, I was just trying to make things clearer and I still hope we may achieve this goal. I know It is difficult to let go of 'knowledge' in the sense of 'knowledge about the world' that has become so familiar and reassuring (you talk of permanence...). But I think it is worth doing so since it is the cause of so much confusion. I would be interested to know what you find about that in the works of Quine. Many people contrast him with Wittgenstein so it is certainly well worth trying to confront them once more.

Your allusion to christian miracle myths (Christ walking on water) is an additional occasion to attempt to make myself clear. In my view, a belief in miracles is just like the beliefs we derive from physical theories, such as 'the big and the small sphere will reach the ground simultaneously'. Both are of the same nature. They are beliefs about the world and as such may turn out to correctly predict events we may experience. The big difference is the degree of justification they have in our eyes. In the case of miracles, it is very thin. For Galileo's theory of free fall, it is very strong (though not perfect, as we have seen previously). What seem clear to me is that none of them belong to the realm of metaphysics. In a sense, we may say that beliefs in miracles are part of physics. They are just a branch of physics whose credibility rating has fallen quite low of late. This is another instance of the advantage of doing away with 'knowledge' in the traditional sense. If you accept all this, you no longer need to trouble your mind with the question whether 'metaphysics [can] become physics', which is really an unnecesary and artificial problem. As Wittgenstein would put it, this is another case of 'bewitchment of our mind by means of language'.

The other cases you mention can be dealt with in the same manner. Of course, the smallpox vaccines is BETTER than the smallpox gods. And I like the BETTER very much. Indeed, the beliefs behind the vaccines have a much BETTER justification than the beliefs in the smallpox gods. Jenner's belief in his vaccine became better justified when he had tested it and shown it to work. Our beliefs in Jupiter's anger at the sight of a lightning becomes less justified (to the point of fainting completely) when we start to adopt beliefs in electromagnetism and justify them with a lot of empirical evidence, etc.

Metaphysics, in my view, is something else. It is also a category of beliefs, or ontological commitments if you wish, but in abstract entities. The Christ of the miracle myths is not abstract, since he can walk on water. Indeed, the Christ is supposed to be God embodied as a human being; a very concrete creature. He is therefore a piece of physics; religious physics but physics nonetheless. By contrast, platonist ideas, Leibnitzian monads, Whitehead's events or, in my view, knowledge in the scientistic sense, are unmistakably metaphysical. Beliefs in abstract entities are a very powerful medicine because they act largely unseen (abstract = invisible) but can impact all of our decisions (is it good or bad ?, should I check ?). As you know, a powerful medicine can be a blessing or a curse.

Now the question of LP and the Unabomber. Obviously, there is no necessary relationship between the two. The way I see it is more like the relationship between tobacco and Lung cancer. Something that, coupled with a predisposed terrain, and some additional stress, will greatly increase the likelihood of the dreaded outcome. However, I do not think that the importance of stressful events, like the psychological experiments, should be overestimated. Everyone's life includes some kind of stress, sometimes far worse than that confronted by the Unabomber (think of concentration camp inmates or torture victims). A sound cultural backround is what normally helps you overcome stressful events without loosing your balance. Very few concentration camp victims became terrorist madmen. What I think LP did to the Unabomber was that it dissolved whatever background he had (probably not very strong) and replaced it with a perverse 'mistrust everyone' nightmare. He was then naked in front of stress, probably suffered from it inordinately, and therefore overreacted. Those who escaped that fate either had a stronger background to begin with, or were helped along the way by others or, like Wittgenstein, managed to reinvent everything by themselves. In most cases, it is probably a combination of the three, in varying proportions.