On my view, once all the dust settles, Science-as-ontology—that is, metaphysical naturalism/physicalism plus strong scientific realism—is best seen as one powerful Tier‑2 tradition among others, not as the neutral frame in which all other outlooks must be judged.

By “Science-as-ontology” here, I mean not laboratory practice or domain‑specific theory, but a thick metaphysical package: whatever exists is physical or wholly dependent on the physical; our best or future natural science will, in principle, fix the complete ontology of the universe; anything that cannot be described in that vocabulary is not ultimately real. This is the form of scientific realism with a capital R that Putnam later abandoned—the “God’s‑eye” picture of a single, theory‑independent total description which our mature science is supposedly converging toward.

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Historically, this Tier‑2 formation has roots in 19th‑ and 20th‑century successes of physics, chemistry, and biology, in Victorian and early modern naturalisms, and in the secular humanisms of figures like Einstein and Dewey who explicitly rejected any “supernatural” realm and identified reality with what a completed science would describe. In contemporary philosophy, it shows up as the default physicalism reported in surveys of professional metaphysicians and philosophers of mind, frequently coupled with robust scientific realism about unobservables and with the assumption that scientific ontology is the answer to Quine’s “What is there?”. In psychiatry and medicine, it underwrites biopsychosocial models that, in practice, treat every legitimate phenomenon—pain, mood, “stress,” religious experience—as something that must have, in the end, a discoverable physical mechanism.

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Seen through the Tier‑1/Tier‑2 distinction, this is not “the view from nowhere”; it is one thick, historically situated worldview: secular, physicalist, empiricist, wedded to a particular image of Nature as a closed, law‑governed totality. It sits alongside other Tier‑2 traditions (religious, philosophical, ideological), overlaps with them in some places and conflicts in others, and exerts a strong cultural and institutional pull—especially in universities, philosophy departments, and clinical sciences. But it is still a tradition: it has origins, exemplars, canonical texts, tacit norms, and blind spots. It is powerful and often epistemically privileged in many domains, yet it remains one tradition among many, not a metaphysically guaranteed map of Reality as a whole.

On reflection, treating physicalist scientific realism as the ontology of reality is speculative metaphysics because its strongest claims go far beyond what even the best scientific practice actually delivers. Science gives us a patchwork of powerful, domain‑specific theories, impressive technologies, and an evolving set of models that work astonishingly well in many contexts. What it does not give us is a single, unified, evidence‑based demonstration that there is a closed, fixed “object domain” of all that exists, exhaustively characterizable in current or foreseeable physical terms. In practice, we see unresolved fractures (GR vs. QM, dark matter/energy, the hard problem of consciousness, the messy state of psychiatric aetiology), interpretive underdetermination (quantum interpretations, competing models in cosmology and neuroscience), and extensive use of idiopathic and functional labels where mechanisms are unknown. Elevating this fallible, fragmentary picture into a final account of “Nature/Reality as a whole” is an extra philosophical move, not something forced on us by the data.

The view is also structurally incoherent in the way it polices its own boundary. By asserting that “everything is physical or wholly depends on the physical” and “there is no supernatural,” it defines “nature” in purely negative, a priori terms: whatever turns out to be real must, by stipulation, be natural. Any future discovery—panpsychist micro‑subjects, radically new field‑like phenomena, forms of experience that do not fit current categories—will simply be reclassified as “natural” after the fact. This makes “naturalism” unfalsifiable as a global thesis: no possible observation could count as evidence that reality exceeds the current frame, because the frame expands by definition. The same picture then downgrades or redescribes first‑person qualia, thick moral concepts, and religious or depth‑psychological experiences from a purported “view from nowhere,” even though its own third‑person methods depend in practice on precisely those inner perspectives and normative judgments (about what counts as evidence, reliability, harm, or improvement) that it claims to reduce. In that sense, physicalist scientific realism is not just an overgeneralization from good scientific practice; it is a self‑insulating metaphysics that quietly relies on, and then disowns, the very first‑person and normative phenomena it needs in order for science to function at all.