BOOK SYMPOSIUM Protecting rainforest realism

James Ladyman and Donald Ross’s broadside against traditional analytic metaphysics embodies the most admirable characteristics of a good slap across the face: it is forceful, frank, and delivered in response to sufficient provocation. Ladyman and Ross are quite right to point out that much of analytic metaphysics, when it seeks to take the findings of the empirical sciences into account at all, appeals instead to what they call a ‘‘domestication’’ of those findings into a more intuitively comfortable picture of the physical world that appeals to ‘‘little things’’, ‘‘microbangings’’, and a ‘‘containment metaphor.’’ And they are right to suggest that