Haktan Akcin

My research lies at the intersection of philosophy of science and metaphysics, with particular interests in scientific realism, scientific theory change, structural realism, naturalized metaphysics, and modality. My doctoral work addresses a tension between naturalized metaphysics and the pessimistic meta-induction: if metaphysical inquiry takes its lead from our best scientific theories, how should it accommodate the fact that even successful theories and their ontologies are subject to substantial change? I develop a structural realist response, focusing on structural continuity across theory change and exploring the modal character of retained structures as a basis for a historically informed naturalized metaphysics.

I continue to work on these problems while also extending my research on scientific theory change into the historical sciences, particularly archaeology. A developing strand of this work examines how evidence from Göbekli Tepe complicates earlier understandings of Neolithisation, represented especially clearly by Çatalhöyük, and asks which elements of earlier accounts are retained, revised, or abandoned in response to such archaeological evidence.