 Rather than thinking of scientific pluralism as an entirely new paradigm that displaced the unity of science in a linear historical development, the historical context therefore suggests a more complex process of negotiating the identity of post-positivist philosophy of science in metaphysical, epistemological, and social terms. First, metaphysical negotiation is exemplified in the work of the Stanford School such as Cartwright’s (1999) account of a “dappled world” and Dupré’s (1993) case for the “disorder of things”. This metaphysical case for plurality focused less on logical empiricism but rather challenged post-positivist reformulations of the unity of science thesis that heavily relied on assumptions about intertheoretic reduction (Oppenheim &amp; Putnam 1958; E. Nagel 1961) and increasingly interpreted physicalism as a metaphysical thesis about what fundamentally exists (Hellman &amp; Thompson 1975; Smart 1978).