Liberal Naturalism, Ontological Commitment and Explanation

Liberal naturalism has been recently presented by several authors as the most credible form of philosophical naturalism. Generally speaking, it is the view according to which there are nonscientific entities, and related forms of inquiry, which nevertheless fall under the scope of the “natural”. In this paper, I argue that there are a few weaknesses in liberal naturalism as it has been formulated so far in the literature, and suggest some amendments. The result is a view which is (1) primarily based on considerations concerning explanatory usefulness rather than on a fixed differentiation among types of entities; and (2) at the same time stricter and more liberal in the definition of the domain of non-scientific yet naturalistically acceptable entities.