After having taken metaphysics last semester, it is easy to spot metaphysical attitudes in a variety of disciplines, despite a widespread distaste for this branch of philosophy.  The word metaphysics is, for most scientists, psychologists, etc., like the word "government aid" to extremely right wing republicans.  Perhaps it disgusts you, but you simply would not function without it.  Similarly, I see no inquiry of any sort, academic, technical, or even practical, to be completely devoid of a metaphysical mindset/spirit.  

To "do" metaphysics is to assess the reality of something.  The pure metaphysics of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Hegel, Heidegger, and many others, are, granted, rather up-in-the-clouds. But the general principle involved in a metaphysical inquiry is looking "behind," "underneath," "around," and "through" what we see and hypothesizing about its foundational components.  It's an attitude of envisioning plausible frameworks, of hypothesizing about possible models.  This sounds exactly like science to me.   

Granted, the grand difference, as anyone in the whole world will tell me immediately, I'm sure, is that there is no plausible way to test the findings of a purely metaphysical inquiry.  And although I can think of some ways (perhaps unconvincing) that kinds of testing of such hypotheses occur, I understand this problem.  At the end of the day, as Csikszentmihalyi points out, like any good scientist would, that a scientific inquiry ought to be objective and testable. 

He poses a question at the end of his conversation about van Gogh: even if his work had not been "interpreted...in terms of new aesthetic criteria and transformed...from substandard efforts into masterpieces," would the work of Van Gogh still be creative "even if we didn't know it?"  But he ultimately rejects the question itself calling it "too metaphysical to be considered part of a scientific approach" (321). 

I find it paradoxical that disciplines that use metaphysical approaches to answer tough problems refuse to evaluate metaphysical problems.  In any case, I would claim that many topics he handles could be considered metaphysical topics disguised as testable social scientific concepts.  For example, I'd like to know more about Durkheim's "organic solidarity."  It sounds a bit up-in-the-clouds, if you will.  Perhaps Csikszentmihalyi is a metaphysician after all and simply didn't know it.