The career of epistemological philosophy. Pre-Socratic philosophy was a radical random variation on the arguments of rational level culture, and it may also have been tried out in other civilizations. But only in Western civilization did it give rise to epistemological philosophy and put the linguistic structures generating social institutions on the philosophical level of neurological organization.

Ancient and medieval epistemological philosophy. Epistemological philosophy began when Plato discovered a convincing way of constructing an argument that would explain the validity of all first level arguments based on perception and desire. It was also an explanation of everything, but it was not based on a theory about change and diversity, that is, about efficient causes. Instead, it was a theory about the nature of reason based only reflective understanding, or the capacity of subjects to use rational imagination to explain rational causation. It did entail an explanation of the nature of the substances constituting the world, but that was an afterthought, for its approach to philosophy was epistemological. The theories about the nature of reason and the nature of consciousness that we have derived from our ontological foundation fit together as a way of understanding the basic structure of epistemological arguments. We need only consider what rational subjects had to work with, when they turned to reflective understanding for a theory about how we know about the world, because there are only certain ways that those elements can be used to explain the validity of the reasons used in the ordinary arguments of rational level culture.

What represents the current scene to the subject are the telesensory images that are currently being used (in conjunction with input from the current bodily condition) to construct a local image, and together with the representation of the body itself, that is the subject’s perception of the world. But the local image (and the body image to which it is related) generated from current sensory input are embedded within a faculty of rational imagination, and thus, rational subjects are able to see actual states against the background of what is possible by efficient causation by using covert behavior to call up all sort of images in relation to them. Consider the aspects of the world that are represented in rational imagination.

Spatial imagination makes it possible to call up sequences of images representing the effects of the locomotion (or motion) in relation to other objects within the local scene and to call up sequences of local images (that have been recorded in memory as a map of one’s territory) representing locomotion beyond the local scene. Or spatial imagination can be used more generally to think about the effects locomotion and turning (or motion and change of direction) within the local scene, in relation to a purely imaginary local scene, or in the abstract (because the same behavioral schemata are used relative to different local images).

Structural imagination makes it possible to call up sequences of telesensory images, or object images, representing the effects of manipulating objects in the local scene, such as rotating and twisting them, and it too can be used abstractly to think about the geometrical structures of objects in space.

Naturalistic imagination, which comes with the ability to use natural sentences, makes it possible to call up sequences of images, or naturalistic images, representing the states of affairs that make natural sentences true, so that together with (particular and general) beliefs about regularities (which are either built into the structure of imagination or acquired from experience), rational imagination can represent their effects in the natural world.

Rational imagination, which comes with the ability to use psychological sentences, makes it possible to call up sequences of images as psychological predicates (or psychological images) and to predicate them of objects in space that are subjects, and this ability to think about psychological states is the ability to understand how they are causes or effects of other psychological states, including their role as reasons (or causes that are represented as causes as part of the process of causing beliefs or behavior).

Perception and rational imagination both have an appearance to the subject. These images are certain configurations of neurons firing in various 2-D arrays of neurons that are connected by projections between the thalamus and neocortex (or between regions of neocortex), and their firings are all synchronized by the thalamus insofar as they have to do with the same objects. That is, the brain processes the information contained as patterns of firing in 2-D arrays of neurons, and thus, what happens in the brain is a highly structured in both space and time. But what is more, the joint firings of those neurons is like a complex antenna that generates a steam of photons, and the intrinsic natures of the photons being given off by the active brain are phenomenal properties which make the rational subject conscious.

Perception and rational imagination have different appearances, because the images they involve are caused in basically different ways. Perceptual images come from sensory input (and involve projections from the sensory organs through the thalamus to the neocortex), whereas images of rational imagination come from covert behavior operating on memory (and involve only regions of neocortex beyond those registering sensory input). This makes these two kinds of images appear quite different from the point of view of the subject reflecting on them. But in both cases, objects seem to be present to the subject, in one case, as objects of perception, and in the other case, as objects of reflection.

The only plausible way to construct an epistemological argument is to assume that the appearances of these objects in consciousness involve an intuition of objects that exist independently of the subject, for there is nothing else to reflect on, except the feelings or emotions associated with desires (that is, the goal selection system).

The images of perception naturally appear to be objects in space, because the local image represents the objects as having locations in space relative to one’s body. Though the telesensory images are certain groups of neurons firing in 2-D arrays that are located in certain regions of the thalamus and neocortex, they seem to be located in space, because as we have seen, they are combined with other telesensory and somatosensory images as part of a local image, and with spatial imagination, the subject is able to think about the effects of motion relative to them by calling up sequences of images in imagination. The sensory images of objects are seen, therefore, against the background of what is possible by motion, and since that is how the subject understands the structure of space, the objects appear to be located in space. And it is a qualitatively rich appearance, because in conscious subjects, what is happening throughout the brain is registered in the structures of the photons being generated by it.

Naïve (or direct) realism about perception, as this way of interpreting perceptual images is called, is the natural attitude, because there is ordinarily no reason to recognize the difference between perceptual representations in the brain and the objects in space they represent outside the brain. The overt behavior of one’s body actually changes the perceptual images in just the ways one expects. Thus, it is natural to think of perception as an immediate intuition of objects in space, including one’s own body, as if the objects themselves were immediately present to the subject.

Objects of reflection, such as the object images representing objects of various kinds that evolve as the meanings of some general terms, also have an appearance, albeit one that is less vivid, detailed, and persistent, because they are images in rational imagination. They might also ordinarily be taken as objects present to mind by way of intuition, but they do not act like objects in space. They may be imagined as located in space relative to objects that are perceived, but unlike the latter, what changes them is not the overt behavior of one’s body, but the covert behavior by which one calls up images from memory. Imagined object are easier to handle. Not only are they not constrained like objects in space, but neither do they appear to be in time. Though object images involve sequences of images in imagination, such sequences are simply the meanings of the general terms. The meaning of “cube” or “tree,” for example, may include a sequence of images representing the effects of rotating it or moving around to see it from the other side, but that is understood to be just a way of thinking about the nature of the cube or the nature of the tree. The object itself is unchanging and, thus, not in time. The natural attitude is, therefore, to assume that the objects of reflection are in the mind, that is, merely subjective.

However, since objects of reflection are appearances quite on a par with objects of perception, it is possible to think of both as intuitions of objects that somehow exist independently of the subject. Thus, just as the tree that is perceived is seen a located outside the subject in space, so the image of reflection that is the meaning of “tree” can be seen as located outside the body in some other way. The connection between these independently existing objects affords an explanation of the objects of perception, for it is possible that the objects of reflection are also somehow what causes the objects of perception to have the natures they seem to have. That is what Plato did by positing the existence of Forms in the realm of Being beyond the visible objects in the realm of Becoming.

This theory about the nature of reason overcomes, therefore, the dichotomy between the objects of naturalistic and reflective understanding. It uses it as an explanation of what exists in the world. But that was not, of course, the only cause of Plato’s metaphysics. Plato was looking for a metaphysics that would also explain the nature of goodness, that is, a way of overcoming the dichotomy between the true and the good and the dichotomy between the good of satisfying animal desire and a higher good (self interest and spiritual interest).

The dichotomies that philosophy must overcome include not only the difference between the science of nature and the science of subjects, but also the difference between the true and the good. In addition to cognizing the true, reason has the power to guide behavior, and thus, it also seeks to know what is good. Practical arguments became the focus of attention after the Persian wars, when Athens was the dominant city-state and the exchange of arguments was supported by the hiring of teachers, called sophists, to train the sons of the wealthy to be leaders in the promising, new age of independence.

The sophists were itinerants, traveling from one city state to another, gathering knowledge as well as teaching, and this cosmopolitan experience led them to conclude that the standards of justice and other virtues are conventional, that is, true merely because they are believed to be true in a society. In this context, Socrates was on the side of traditional religion, holding that the good is objective, or something about the world that could be known like natural science. But instead of the dogmatism of traditional religion, Socrates insisted that knowledge of the good must be a kind of knowledge that makes the knower virtuous, so that a rational being does the good because it is good and he understands why it is good. That is the meaning of the Socratic principle, that knowledge is virtue. There must be an understanding of the nature of goodness that is so deep that it explains to rational beings why they ought to pursue it. The Socratic principle posed very sharply the problem that philosophy must solve in explaining the relationship of the good and the true. For how can any mere fact about the world show that something is good in a way that gives rational beings a sufficient motive to do it?

Socrates was implicitly asking for a philosophical argument, because he wanted to know what makes all good thing good, which would explain why ordinary arguments about what is good are valid (when they are). And it was his attempt to answer Socrates’ challenge that led Plato to discover the epistemological approach to explaining all the arguments of rational culture. Recognizing that it is possible to think of certain objects of reflection as objects existing independently of the subject in much the same way as objects of perception, as explained above, Plato argued that what makes visible things good is that they are participating or imitating Forms in the realm of Being. This meant that he had to hold that the Forms in the realm of Being are themselves good, and so he argued that all the other Forms follow from the Form of the Good. This was not very satisfying explanation of the nature of goodness, but the transcendence of the realm of Being, or its existence outside space and time, made it possible to think that Being could somehow be the source of goodness. Thus, his metaphysics of Being and Becoming could be used to justify arguments about what is good in a fundamentally different way from ordinary arguments of rational culture, and it was the same way in which he could justify arguments about what is true in the natural world. In both cases, it had to do with visible objects imitating the Forms.

That Plato’s goal was to construct a new kind of argument that would explain the validity of the arguments of rational culture is also evident in his use of this metaphysics to overcome the third dichotomy, between individual and spiritual interest. He argued in The Republic that the state is the individual “writ large.” He showed that the soul of the individual rational subject has three parts: reason, appetites, and a “spirited element” which enabled reason to take control of the body away from the appetites (or what we have found to be the desire to submit to reason). He showed that the functions of these three elements also had to be served in the state by three classes of citizens: rulers, ordinary producers, and an army/police force to enforce the rule of the leaders. He suggested that both are good for the same reason, because of the harmony among the three parts required by their Forms. In both cases, it meant that reason, with the aid of an animal-like power (the spirited element), would prevail over mere animal desire. Thus, Plato defended a view which subordinates the individual to the good of the spiritual animal as a whole in a way that seems almost totalitarian from the contemporary perspective.

The subsequent developments of epistemological philosophy during the ancient and medieval period are a story about attempts to solve problems it caused and how its marriage with Christianity eventually made philosophy the foundation of subsequent Western culture. Only the highlights need be mentioned here, for our goal is merely to sketch the career of epistemological philosophy in order to show how its various forms are variations on the same theme.

As even Plato recognized, the gulf between Being and Becoming is a major problem with his metaphysics. How is it possible for such opposite kinds of entities as unchanging objects of rational intuition and changing objects of perception to be related as parts of the same world? Plato found himself holding (even in the Timaeus, where Becoming is explained as being constituted by the “receptacle,” or space, and “moving images” of the Forms) that they are different substances, and in order to defend his epistemological argument for the independent existence of the Forms, it was necessary to explain how these two substances are related to one another. It was Aristotle who attempted to solve that problem.

Aristotle accepted Plato’s epistemological approach to philosophy and posited objects of rational intuition as fundamentally different from the objects of perception. However, he insisted that they were not different substances, but merely irreducibly different aspects of the same substances: essential forms and matter. This afforded Aristotle a more convincing explanation of the natural world, because he could insist that just as the material aspect of particular substances makes them able to act on one another and, thereby, account for efficient causes, so the formal aspect of particular substances makes them subject to final causation, that is, the tendency of essential forms that are merely potential to become actual, and thereby account for functional explanations. This teleological view of nature enabled Aristotle to account for the regular changes observed in biological organisms, and he extended the same kind of explanation to physics and astronomy.

Teleology gave Aristotle a theory about how the good is related to the true that resembled Plato’s, because he could hold that what is good for any substance is the full actualization of its essential form. The difference is that, having denied the existence of a realm of Being, Aristotle could not hold that the essential forms are explained by the nature of goodness (The Good Itself, as Plato called it). He had to argue that the good is different for different substances (and, thus, that the only reason it is good is that its essential form happens to exist in the world). Aristotle attempted to explain the relationship between individual interest and spiritual interest by holding that rational animals are essentially social (though he did not explain how substances with one essential form could jointly constitute a higher level organism with its own essential form without giving up their essential form as individuals).

The difference between essential forms and matter confronted Aristotle, however, with the same kind of problem that faced Plato, for as he recognized, there had to be an explanation of the relationship between them. This led Aristotle to argue in the Metaphysics that individual substances are basically essential forms and that the material cause is merely their particular existence, or as it came to be called, a mere “principle of individuation.” (In terms of the nature of substance as explained here, Aristotle tried to avoid holding that form and matter are basically different substances by reducing the difference between form and matter to the difference between the essential and the existential aspect of each particular substance.)

Though Aristotle tried to naturalize Plato’s metaphysics by denying the existence of a separate realm of Being, Plato and Aristotle were both realists about forms. Both believed that, in addition to perceptible objects, there are intelligible objects. But since what they were talking about were actually images in the faculty of perception and (certain) images in the faculty of rational imagination, which have a phenomenal appearance to the subject, it is not surprising that there is no adequate explanation of the relationship between them when they are taken to be objects existing independently of the subject, regardless whether it is conceived as a relationship between visible objects and Forms or between matter and essential forms. The inability of realists about forms to formulate a metaphysics that could explain adequately how they are parts of the same world as material objects in space led to doubts about their existence, and thus, realism gave rise to anti-realism. Anti-realism was acted out mainly during the Roman era.

Philosophy continued to be discussed by educated people in the Roman empire, but the two most popular philosophical systems abandoned realism about forms in favor of materialism. The Epicureans believed in atoms and the void, and the Stoics believed that the world is constituted by two kinds of matter, ultimately, active matter and passive matter. (Active matter replaced essential forms as the cause of the order found in nature, for it was supposed to give passive matter into all the proper structures and behavior.)

Neither was much concerned about overcoming the dichotomy between naturalistic and reflective understanding, for both simply took it for granted that rational subjects are part of nature. But they called themselves philosophers, because they were interested in overcoming the dichotomy between the true and the good. They prized Greek philosophy as the model for the higher form of reasoning that would give them wisdom, though the kind of wisdom they sought was practical. Epicureans followed Democritus in defending hedonism, the view that pleasure is the one and only ultimate good and pain the only ultimate evil. They used the determinism of atomism to argue that rational beings cannot help but pursue pleasure and avoid pain. Stoics held that the good life is to suppress all desire for anything different from what happens. The believed that everything happens for the best, because active matter pushed passive matter around in a way that makes the world as a whole a perfect being.

Even as an attempt to overcome the dichotomy between the true and the good, however, Epicureanism and Stoicism were less philosophical arguments than the attempt to have an alternative to traditional religions in thinking about how to live. Neither even attempted to explain how the true makes the good good except to insist that the highest wisdom of philosophy is to make peace with natural necessity. Epicureans never tried to explain why there ought to be rational beings in the world who must pursue pleasure, and the Stoics never explained what it is that makes the world shaped by active matter perfect.

Medieval epistemological philosophy. Toward the end of the Roman era, there was a revival of interest in Greek philosophy as a way of overcoming the dichotomy between naturalistic and reflective understanding. (Plotinus formulated a variation on Plato’s metaphysics that tried to overcome the dualism of Being and Becoming by taking the ultimate source of everything to be the One and explaining the rest of the world as levels of emanations from it.) But Plato’s dualism is what sealed the marriage of Greek philosophy with Christianity, giving Western civilization a uniquely philosophical religion. Later, with the inclusion of Aristotelian philosophy, its rationalism was complete, and the effect on subsequent civilization was profound.

The Judeo-Christian belief in a God who created the natural world combined easily with Plato’s metaphysical dualism of Being and Becoming. Being could be reinterpreted as a supreme rational being, that is, a person. (Plotinus had already portrayed the Forms as aspects of a self-thinking being in the first emanation from the One.) Since God created the natural world, it was possible to take God to be the objective source of goodness that Socrates and Plato were seeking. Thus, Plato’s way of overcoming the dichotomy between reason and nature was resurrected.

But Augustine was the matchmaker, and his belief that it was simply the will of God that made the good good undercut the rationalistic intent of Socrates and Plato by implying that it is arbitrary. However, with the rediscovery of Aristotle in the Middle Ages, that defect was corrected by Aquinas. He argued that what God knows, rather than his will, explains why the good is good. That is, God’s self-understanding includes an explanation of the nature of goodness that reveals why the good ought to exist. And since that knowledge of the nature of goodness is what guided God to create a world like ours, His will was free. God turns out to have the wisdom that Socrates was seeking.

The upshot is that the belief in wisdom as a higher form of argument that can give us a seamless and complete understanding of the true, the good, and the beautiful became, though its adoption by Christianity, a basic principle in the evolution of the arguments about social roles that generated the institutions of Western civilization as the Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance and the modern era began. The belief that social roles had to be justified by basic principles about the nature of morality and justice that could be known by reason, and the belief that each rational subject has a free will which makes him ultimately responsible for his behavior (and the eternal fate of their souls) led to institutions that recognized the autonomy of individuals and the sanctity of contracts. That gave the edge to institutions of private property and market exchange that would make it possible for capitalism to evolve, helping to pave the way for ontological philosophy.

Modern epistemological philosophy. In the modern era, epistemological philosophy took a fundamentally different form, though its theories of reason were based on the same two elements: perceptual and rational intuition. The difference was caused by modern science, another offspring of ancient and medieval epistemological philosophy which forced the recognition that the ancient atomists had been right to reject naïve realism about perception.

By the renaissance, mathematical arguments had evolved far enough for it to be recognized that there are quantitatively precise regularities about what happens in the physical world and that they can be represented mathematically. Ever since Plato (or even Pythagoras), mathematical knowledge had been the model for the deeper kind of knowledge about the world that epistemological philosophy was supposed to make possible, and mathematical knowledge evolved as philosophers become mathematicians exchanged mathematical arguments.

On the other hand, the belief that the natural world had been created by God, a rational being, made it plausible to assume that nature had been designed using mathematical concepts. Mathematics was the “language of nature,” as Galileo put it, and thus, it was plausible to assume that the use of mathematics in physics would enable rational subjects to see into the mind of God.

The first advances in physics were all discoveries of quantitative laws of nature, including Kepler’s laws, Galileo’s laws, and before long, Newton’s laws. Even Copernicus had defended his revolutionary view of the universe as a mere mathematical possibility. Mathematics provided the tool that eventually pried open the lid that had long kept reason from understanding micro level processes, leading eventually to chemistry, biology and neurophysiology. Since it was a gift of the previous era of philosophical culture, it is ironic that its first main effect was to replace naïve (or direct) realism about perception with critical (or representative) realism.

The belief that the physical world is made up of substances whose ways of moving and interacting can be described by quantitatively precise laws of nature was recognized as materialism, but it was a form of materialism that had to deny that matter has any of the qualitative properties it seems to have. Those qualitative properties had to be explained as effects on the subject that are caused by the objects through chains of causation that could be explained by laws of nature, which is basically the conclusion to which ancient atomists, like Democritus, had been driven as the conclusion of Pre-Socratic philosophy two thousand years earlier, and for much the same reason. (The belief that shape and size were the only essential properties of atoms was also a quantitative view of matter.) Modern scientists understood that perception of objects in space, for example, by vision, had to be caused in some way by something that travels from the object across space over time to the subject. And since anatomy had made it clear by then that the brain was responsible for receiving sensory input and guiding behavior, there was, within the body, a second leg of the chain of causes and effects that were responsible for how it appears to the subject (implying thereby that the body also lacked the qualitative properties that seemed to be located in it, such as the feel of hot and cold).

This view had a profound significance for anyone who would attempt to take the epistemological approach to showing how the validity of all the arguments of rational culture can be shown by a theory about the nature of reason that was based on reflective understanding. Ever since Plato, epistemological philosophy had been founded on naïve realism, the assumption that the perceptual appearance of the world is an intuition of objects that exist independently of the subject (or else are properties of the same kind as those that exist independently, as Aristotle held). But in the modern period, it was recognized that the appearances of object in perception have a basically different nature from what actually exists independently of the subject. It is called “critical realism,” because it reject the naïve view, or “representative realism,” in contrast to the :direct realism” of ancient and medieval philosophy. Since the perceptual appearances must someone be part of the subject, the subject himself must be a basically different kind of entity from the objects in space. It was called the “mind,” and the appearances of objects in perception were called “ideas of perception.”

Since the implications of this line of reasoning are not well recognized, it is worth emphasizing something about them that confirms our explanation of how the brain works. It is not only the qualitative properties of the objects of perception that are in the mind, but also the appearance that they have locations in space. That is, ideas of perception include the perception of space itself, not just objects in it. Consider, for example, the distance between your face and what you are reading right now. That is a part of space that seems to be as immediately present as the material object on which these marks are inscribed. That is, of course, what we would expect, since the qualitative properties, or sensory qualia, are parts of the telesensory images that are combined along with input about the condition of the body in constructing a local image to represent the local scene. The perception of the distance between your face and the material object embodying the written words is part of the understanding one has of space because of how one can imagine it changing as a result of certain ways of behaving, such as moving your head, turning the object around or moving your body around in the local scene, which is itself seen as just part of an entire world of objects in space. The upshot of this is that what is contained “in mind” is not just sensory qualia, but also a phenomenal space in which all those qualia are located. What one naively takes to be the whole natural word, in other words, is contained in the mind, and what exists independently of it has an entirely different nature, even if it is also assumed to be made up of objects in space. The physical world is made up of material objects in real space.

The modern philosopher who took up the tradition of philosophy and applied it in the modern era was Descartes, and the form of his epistemological argument can also be derived from this ontological explanation of the nature of reason and consciousness. With only perception and rational intuition to use, Descartes used the latter to argue for the existence of the objects represented by the former.

Descartes recognized that the ideas of perception are located in the mind, distinct from objects existing independently as an external world. (That was the point of his doubts about perception based on its similarity to dreaming and the possibility of the ideas being supplied by an evil demon.) For him, therefore, the way to explain the validity of the first level arguments about the natural world by which science was discovering the laws of nature was to show that a world of the kind discovered by empirical science actually exists. That is how he would overcome the dichotomy between naturalistic and reflective understanding. But since his higher level of forensic organization was based on reflective understanding, the only other resources that Descartes could use as a deeper “cause” were other objects of reflection. The ideas of memory and imagination were of little use, since they obviously came from ideas of perception. But there were other ideas, which he called “clear and distinct ideas,” which are certain principles that derive from the structure of the faculty of rational imagination. They differed from perceptual ideas in the same way that Plato’s Forms differed from visible objects, and the prime examples of such ideas were, once again, those of mathematics. But since Descartes was a critical realist, he recognized that clear and distinct ideas are as much part of the mind and the ideas of perception. Plato’s rational intuition of independently existing Forms had become a rational intuition of necessary truths. Thus, in order for this theory of reason to provide a deeper cause explaining the validity of the first level arguments of natural science, he had to argue that clear and distinct ideas could prove that a world of extension exists outside the mind.

His famous argument started with the Cogito, “I think, therefore I am,” his first clear and distinct idea, and proceeded to use other clear and distinct ideas to argue for the existence of a God. God’s perfection precluded His deceiving the finite rational beings He had created, and thus, Descartes concluded that there is a world existing external to mind with the essential nature that rational beings can grasp clearly and distinctly through geometrical reasoning. Thus his theory about the nature of reason explained the validity of the arguments of both reflective and naturalistic understanding, and the proof of the existence of God allowed him to adopt a traditional theological explanation of the nature of goodness.

Descartes’ new way of doing epistemological philosophy was a form of realism, because it took the ideas that are immediately present to mind as its foundation and it tried to prove the existence and nature of a world beyond them. But Descartes’ argument for the existence of the external world was not convincing in the end, and no one has been able to formulate an argument that does what he wanted. Nevertheless, Descartes set the agenda for all of modern philosophy. It would be a battle between realists and anti-realists about the external world. The main obstacle to a proof of the existence of an external world was the fundamentally different natures of mind and body. As Descartes pointed out, body is extended and divisible, whereas mind has a unity that does not admit of such division. That was his argument for holding that God had created them as different substances.

The unity of mind, as we have recognized, is how all the sensory qualia that seem to be located in different places all have an appearance at once to the same subject to which other ideas are also appearing. Consciousness does have a unity that truly does not admit of division like a material object in space.

It may be worth noticing, by the way, that ontological philosophy provides the kind of argument for the existence of the external world that Descartes was seeking. He wanted a clear and distinct idea that would prove the existence and nature of the world external to mind from the point of view of the rational subject, and that is what is provided by this explanation of the wholeness of the world. On the assumption that nothing exists but space and matter (of kinds that explain the truth of the basic laws of physics), not only does it derive reproductive global regularities that explain the essential nature of rational subjects and their place in the world, but it also explains the nature of their consciousness as the intrinsic natures of bits of matter continually given off by active brains. Together, as we have seen, they explains the clear and distinct ideas that Descartes takes to be indubitable. But this explanation is itself a clear and distinct idea in Descartes’ sense. It is distinct in Descartes’ sense (that is, separate from and independent of any idea that is not before the mind), because it is an idea of the whole world, which is everything that exists. And it is clear in Descartes’ sense (that is, with nothing obscure or vague about any of the parts of the idea that is before the mind), because it is an explanation of the entire world and everything in it by the basic substances that constitute its existence. If the rational subject would just look in the right direction, therefore, he would have a clear and distinct idea that entails not only his own existence as a conscious mind, but also the existence and nature of a world that exists independently of mind.

Mind-body dualism was nevertheless an intractable problem in modern philosophy, because it is a form of epistemological philosophy which attempts to explain the validity of ordinary, first level arguments by a theory about the nature of reason that is based on what can be known about reason by reflective understanding. Reflective understanding makes reason seem to be a form of intuition, because all the ideas in the mind seem to be objects of intuition and clear and distinct ideas are just a special kind. But if the subject knows that he has ideas (and, thus, that he exists) because of how they appear, or he knows that clear and distinct ideas are true because of how they appears, the reasons that determine his beliefs can hardly be efficient causes like those that determine what happens in the natural world. Mind must be a fundamentally different kind of substance from body.

The subsequent history of modern philosophy can be predicted, for it is the attempt to vindicate Descartes’ new way of doing epistemological philosophy by overcoming the problems he encountered — or else arguing that it cannot be done, that is, defending anti-realism. In either case, it has to provide some explanation of the validity, if any, of the arguments of rational level cutlure, not only in the science of subjects, but also in the science of nature. At first, it seemed that there must be a way of defending realism about the external world, since mathematics provides an understanding of its essential nature. But the difference in nature between body and mind was even deeper than the difference between Becoming and Being, the two substances of Plato’s metaphysics. Modern philosophers recognized that both realms to which Plato was referring are in the mind (as the ideas of perception and the clear and distinct ideas of rational intuition), and thus, what they meant by the external world was something whose existence Plato did not even recognize.

Continental rationalists like Spinoza and Leibniz hoped to defend realism about the external world by explaining the relationship between mind and body in a different way from Descartes. Spinoza thought mind and body were two different essential natures (“attributes”) of a single substance that constitutes the existence of the entire world, and Leibniz thought that mind and body were both kinds of minds (“monads”) whose relationships, like the monads making up the rest of the world, were a pre-established harmony that God had built into the world from the beginning. But instead of showing how reason could know the existence of an external world, the implausibility of their metaphysical systems brought the whole approach of rationalism into disrepute.

British empiricists, like Locke, Berkeley and Hume, rejected the attempt to use reason to prove the existence of the external world. But they did not give up the Cartesian project. Locke attempted, instead, to explain the validity of the first level arguments of natural science by showing how they are based on ideas of perception alone. But this merely confirmed that the existence of the external world cannot be known in that way, and Berkeley embraced anti-realism about it. Hume agreed, though he focused his anti-realism on causation, showing that perception provides no reason for believing efficient-cause explanations except the regular conjunction of events of those kinds. Though scientists could not share the philosopher’s skepticism about the natural world, they had to agree with empiricists in rejecting rationalist metaphysics, and empiricist skepticism about causation put a real limit on the ambitions of natural science, encouraging natural science to think of its goal as merely discovering the basic laws of nature.

Kant sought to overcome the obstacle that mind-body dualism posed for epistemological philosophy by insisting that the first level arguments of natural science are really about the phenomenal world, that is, the world constituted in part by the mind, not about what exists independently of it. Though Kant did not deny that something does exist independently of mind, he did deny that such “things in themselves” are in space or time. Space and time were mere forms of intuition in the mind. This transformed Cartesian mind-body dualism, because it was no longer possible even to conceive the nature of what exists besides mind. But it did not eliminate metaphysical dualism, because Kant was still a realist about things in themselves outside the mind. And the acknowledgment of a reality that reason could not grasp meant that epistemological philosophy had to admit explicitly that its way of explaining the validity of all the first level arguments of rational culture did not explain the wholeness of the world, but only the wholeness of reason itself. This discovery was more than some defenders of traditional philosophy could accept.

Hegel sought to overcome the obstacle of recognizing the existence of something whose nature reason cannot grasp by constructing from the elements of Kant’s theory of mind a dialectical theory of reason. Instead of helping to constitute a merely phenomenal natural world, as Kant held, Hegel argued that reason constituted the actual natural world and everything about it. By taking individual rational subjects to be merely moments in its dialectic, Hegel could insist that he had shown how reason is able to know the existence and nature of a world existing independently of each particular mind, thereby defending realism, in a sense, and giving a philosophical explanation of why the first level arguments of rational culture (mere “understanding,” in Hegel’s view) are valid. But such absolute idealism merely exposes the real nature of epistemological philosophy as the attempt to discover the deeper cause of the world that is known to rational culture in the nature of reason, rather than in the nature of the world that exists independently of rational beings.

As far as goodness is concerned, the medieval theological explanation was taken more or less for granted during the modern era — until Hume tried to explain what is good in terms of natural desires and Hegel tried to explain the nature of goodness by the perfection of the outcome of his dialectic.

Contemporary epistemological philosophy. As modern philosophy was exploring its crippling tribulations during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, modern science (sponsored by capitalism, the other offspring besides modern philosophy of ancient and medieval epistemological philosophy) was advancing, probing ever deeper beneath the perceptual appearance of the natural world, discovering the smaller and stranger bits of matter that help (along with space) constitute what is found in nature. The manifest success of natural science made it difficult to take absolute idealism seriously in the end.

Even epistemologists turned away from Descartes’ starting point. Instead of taking the natural world to be something whose existence had to be inferred on the basis of ideas in the mind, they reverted to common sense and took the existence of a public world for granted. But that did not mean that epistemological philosophy had to be abandoned, because there was another way for philosophers to deploy the same elements that reflective understanding makes present to rational subjects as a theory about the nature of reason. And even if the deeper rational cause it would use to explain the validity of first level arguments did not add any new kinds of substances to be realists about, analogous to the Forms (or God) of the ancient/medieval era or the external world of the modern era, it could hope to avoid the embarrassing excesses of past metaphysics and yet root the arguments of rational culture in a firm, epistemological foundation.

Language is the object of reflection that had been overlooked by earlier forms of epistemological philosophy. Plato had simply assumed that words are simply a way of referring to the Forms that everyone could rationally intuit, making it possible to describe the visible objects by the Forms they imitate. Descartes had recognized that the Forms were just clear and distinct ideas of rational imagination in the mind, but since the same ideas were supposed to be in every rational mind, he could also assume that words are just ways of communicating which abstract ideas speakers were talking about. In both cases, language played a decidedly secondary role to the main objects of reflection by which reason was supposed to know about the world.

Words, and the sentences that they make up, are nonetheless objects that rational subjects are aware of, and they are different from the objects that were central to the ancient and modern theories of reason. Words are perceptible, like other objects in space, when they are spoken or written. But they are unlike other objects in space, because they have meanings and they can refer to objects or properties in the world. To be sure, their meanings had been explained in ancient and modern philosophy by Forms or ideas in the mind. But the words were nonetheless different from them, because they could exist as perceptible objects, and that somehow made it possible for rational subjects to communicate with one another through their animal bodies in a world of objects in space. Thus, to those how accepted natural science, it was plausible to suppose that the analysis of language would provide an explanation of the nature of reason that would explain the validity of all the (valid) arguments of rational level culture (including arguments about natural and social science, practical as well as theoretical arguments, and about what is moral as well as what is in one’s self interest). And it would avoid the pitfall of modern philosophy, for it would not depend on anything that can be known only privately, if the analysis of language rested on a kind of knowledge about language that is inherently intersubjective.

Developments in logic would make language analysis all but irresistible. Given how important mathematics is to the advance of natural science, problems encountered in the evolution of mathematical arguments was bound to focus attention on the nature of formal proofs and logic. As we have seen (in Relations), such developments took place in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, giving rise to symbolic logic and the logical analysis of language (notably, in the work of the early Russell and Frege). Thus, much as natural science was prospering by making use of developments in mathematics, it would inevitably occur to some philosophers that philosophy might prosper by making use of the new developments in logic.

When natural science makes modern epistemological philosophy incredible, therefore, there is another way of doing epistemological philosophy. Hence, our ontological explanation of the nature of reason and consciousness leads us to expect some philosophers to make use of it during a late phase of evolution during the philosophical spiritual stage. That would explain what became known as “analytic philosophy” in Anglo-American philosophy, as we shall see. Much the same explanation might also be given of contemporary Continental and its trajectory toward deconstuctionism, though it will not be pursued here. By the same token, however, ontological philosophy implies that analytic philosophy (and Continental philosophy) are doomed to fail for much the same reason as earlier forms of epistemological philosophy.

Like all forms of epistemological philosophy, analytic philosophy is the attempt to found a theory about the nature of reason on what is known about how we know by reflection (that is, reflective understanding). It may not seem that public language is an object of reflection. Words (and sentences) may seem to be objects of perception, because they occur as material objects in the natural world when they are spoken or written. Indeed, they can be objects of perception along with other objects in space. But that is not how they are seen from the point of view of the rational subject — unless she is a critical realist and recognizes the difference between the immediate, phenomenal appearance of the world in perception and the natural world to which it corresponds. But critical realism is an insight into the nature of perception (and, thus, reason) that had to be abandoned in order to avoid the problems of modern philosophy.

Abandoning the problems of modern philosophy meant giving up the notion that the natural world is something beyond the world in which rational beings find themselves. This did not necessarily mean explicitly embracing naïve realism about perception. But it did preclude making philosophical hay out of the difference between the perceptual appearance of the world and what exists independently of it. Thus, though analytic philosophy did not embrace naïve realism about perception explicitly, most analytic philosophers did take naïve realism for granted in practice, because that is the inevitable effect of abandoning the distinction between the appearance of the world in perception and the world being perceived. Naïve realism is our natural attitude.

Thus, contemporary epistemologists were (or eventually became) naturalists in the minimal sense of believing in the existence of the world disclosed by perception, a world that seemed, at least, to be made up of material objects in space that move and interact over time. Naturalism in this sense is not only the view of natural science, but also the common sense view of the world, the vantage from which the arguments of rational level culture were made.

It was also Plato’s view of the natural world. But unlike Plato, analytic philosophers recognized that concepts are subjective, that is, parts of psychological states on which rational subjects could reflect, using reflective understanding. But they had to avoid making use of such private objects in their theory about the nature of reason.

Naïve realism, however, takes what is actually an object of reflection to be the natural world, and thus, even the public language that is analyzed by contemporary epistemological philosophy is also an object of reflection. To be sure, analytic philosophy thinks of words and sentences as public objects, along with the natural world in which they occur. But since it takes the words to be meaningful, they are actually objects of reflection, and their meanings connect the words to certain objects (or kind of objects) in the world (as their referents). That is the simplest way that reflective understanding can use language as theory about the nature of reason. Once the meanings of words are projected onto the world and appear as public references, it is possible to explain intersubjectively how sentences correspond to the world and to consider the validity of arguments for them.

As a result of naïve realism about perception, images in the brain representing words that are generated by overt verbal behavior are not distinguished from the words that exist as material objects independently of the brain. The images are confused with the material objects themselves, just like the perception of other objects in space. But since the perceptual images of the words are connected with images in the faculty of imagination as their meanings, it is natural to take their meanings to be public as well. That is, the word seems to be related to an object or objects of some kind, as if the semantic relation were a direct, public relationship between the word and object.

This is a theory about the nature of reason based on intuition, for it assumes, in effect, that users of language can intuit their meanings and references.

From our ontological perspective, however, both the words and their meanings are parts of the linguistic structure that is the structure of the spiritual animal under the cultural aspect. As such, they are properties of a material object, albeit a complex material object with a spiritual nature (that is, a organism in which the use of language entails both a social and a cultural structure as a whole). The linguistic structure is a structure of the spiritual animal as a whole, because it is, in principle, contained completely in every member’s brain, as well as in the overt verb behavior by which the use of language coordinates behavior, like the leader’s plan of social level behavior at the primitive spiritual stage.

What are called “abstract objects” are, therefore, just parts of a property of the spiritual animal (or an aspect of an aspect of a spiritual material object), and that gives words (and their meanings) a physical relationship to objects (or kinds of objects), because culture is part of the behavior guidance system by which the spiritual animal acts on other objects in space.

This is not how it appears, however, to contemporary epistemological philosophers, for they do not recognize the existence of spiritual animals. They cannot, because as practicing naïve realists, they do not recognize the existence of a faculty or rational imagination by which words as public, overt verbal behavior (spoken or written) is related to objects (or kinds of objects) in the world. To them it appears that words have a direct, public relationship to objects (or kinds of object), at least, at first.

Analytic philosophy is not always as naïve, however, as it was at first. In thinking about words as public objects, naturalists were forced to recognize that they are just sounds or marks made by speakers, which have only physical properties. But they do have meanings and referents, and if they are not physical properties of words as material objects, they must be explained in some other way. And since there is another way that meaning and reference can be just as public as the words themselves, it was still possible to do epistemological philosophy in the contemporary style. There must be a public way of determining meaning and reference, for otherwise children would be unable to learn a natural language and it would not be possible to translate one natural language into another for the first time.

A less naïve way of analyzing the meanings and references of words recognizes that any images that may be associated with the words are private and that only the words as material objects are public. But it still conflates the perceptual images of the words with the physical tokens themselves, and since the relationship between word and object (and its meaning, whatever that is) must be one that can be established in terms of what is publicly perceived, it assumes that language is governed by public rules. The public rules explain how everyone learns it as they grow up and how it is possible to translate from one language to another.

This is also a theory about the nature of reason that is based on intuition, though it is indirect. The intuition that users of language have is that the meanings and references of words must be determined by public behavior in relation to public objects, if it is not the public rules themselves.

In either case, whether meaning and reference are taken to be inherent in the public words (and sentences) or they are explained by the learning of public rules, analytic philosophy is still basically reflection on language from the point of view of the users of language, and such a reflective explanation makes the analysis of language inadequate as a theory about the nature of reason. The relationship between word and object is not just a relationship of the kind that can appear to the user of language as she reflects an language and how it is used, but one that depends on the nature of the faculties of perception and imagination in the brain and how those brains are coordinated as parts of a spiritual animal.

In either case, meaning and reference are taken to be something intersubjective in the sense that it either is or can be explained in terms of what is public to users of language as practicing naïve realists. That way of analyzing language is the foundation for the theory about the nature of reason used in analytic philosophy. And what dooms it, like other forms of epistemological philosophy, is that it is trying to explain reason by objects that have an appearance to the subject who reflects on how she knows, in this case, the world as it appears in perception to naïve realists and the way that language appears to be public to its users.

What it overlooks is how the relationship between word and object is mediated by a faculty of perception and imagination located in the brain of each user of language. Words have meanings that are images in a faculty of imagination, and their references to objects in the world depend how its representations correspond to aspect of the world — where the latter is explained, as we have seen, by an isomorphism between sequences of images that are called up in the brain over time and the effects of locomotion, manipulation and the like. But the use of reflection (reflective understanding) to think about language as something public makes language appear to have a public relationship to what it represents in the world that does not depend on a faculty of imagination in the brain, but only on intersubjectively correctable rules. It makes the semantic relation appear to be public or determinable by pubic rules.

This is not to deny that there are public rules of language. The analytic philosopher’s talk of such public rules is, in effect, a reference to the spiritual animal. What gives such organisms a “spiritual” natural is the use of language to coordinate the behavior of its parts, and that social level behavior guidance system does depend on representations in the brain that have both a possibly overt verbal side and a necessarily covert nonverbal side. On the covert nonverbal side, images in the faculty of imagination are the meanings of words, and since those images have a geometrically structured relationship to objects in space by way of the animal system of representation, words are made to refer to objects by the connections established in Wernicke’s area between such images and words as verbal behavior. Grammatical markers indicating the kind of activity in the faculty of rational imagination are likewise established in Wernicke’s area, as we have seen. In other words, what is called learning the rules of language is actually just the neurological development of the reflective brain, during which linguistic behavior schemata evolve by reinforcement selection to give the subject the capacity to speak and understand a natural language. It is more basic than rule following. That is, it would be more accurate to say that learning to use language is to acquire the capacity to learn to follow public rules, because rule following, in the sense that is distinctive of human beings, for example, in playing games, is, as we have seen, something that requires the language-based ability to see into one another’s minds (that is, reflective understanding). On our ontological view, public rules are mutually accepted arguments about how one should behave in certain situations of the kind that generate institutions as social level behavior. But none of this is evident to analytic philosophers, because their approach to philosophy is epistemological, with a theory about the nature of reason that comes from reflective understanding.

Analytic philosophy was doomed, therefore, to suffer the same fate as earlier forms of epistemological philosophy, because the relationship between language and the world cannot be explained as a public relationship in that world. Language and the world is a dualism of much the same kind that Plato faced between Forms and visible objects and that Descartes faced between mind and body, because the relationships that appear to hold between these objects in reflection from the point of view of the subject makes it impossible to explain adequately how they are related at all when both sides are taken to be parts of the same, independently existing world. That is, as I have pointed out from time to time, the problem of dualism that epistemological philosophy inevitably causes. Words (and sentences) as linguistic representations, that is, with meanings and references, are not public objects, but representations in the brain of each language user who considers them, and when they are projected onto the natural world, there is no adequate way to explain how they are even parts of the same world.

Analytic philosophy would take various forms, for there are various ways of explaining the nature of language intersubjectively, and different ways of using it as a theory about the nature of reason to explain the validity of the first level arguments of rational culture. But they are all different from earlier forms of epistemological philosophy, because using the analysis of public language as a theory about the nature of reason does not lend itself to any form of realism. It is not obvious that there are any entities beyond those that are immediately present to the subject whose existence and nature could be demonstrated by what is known about language and its relationship to the world, as the external world was for Descartes and the Forms were for Plato. The contemporary form of epistemological philosophy turns out, therefore, to be mostly a foundation for anti-realism, for there are entities and properties that it is possible to be skeptical about. The history of analytic philosophy is, therefore, another story about the discovery of the failure of another kind of epistemological philosophy. And in this case, the inability to construct an argument with a higher level of forensic organization that would explain the validity of the arguments of rational culture. Let us consider some of the main forms that analytic philosophy would take.

Logical positivism. The most obvious way to use the new form of epistemological philosophy is to explain the validity of the arguments of natural science, for even though they may depend on mathematics, they are basically arguments of rational level culture, which use perception and already established beliefs to justify new beliefs. This higher level argument was undertaken by the logical positivists as one of the earliest forms analytic philosophy. They took the most naïve view of language as a public objects, thinking of words and sentences as having meanings that are public, and that seemed to afford a way of explaining the validity of scientific arguments, because both the theories of natural science and the evidence on which such arguments were based were formulated in language. Thus, the logical positivists distinguished between theoretical statements and observational statements. Observational statements were sentences whose truth could be known by perceiving the objects and their properties, while theoretical statements were sentences used to formulate the theories that explained what could be observed. It seemed natural to assume that theoretical statements had to be based on observational statements, given traditional empiricism and its attempt to defend natural science in modern philosophy.

It was hoped that analyzing the arguments of natural science in this way would not only unify the arguments of natural science (the “unity of science” movement), but also explain why they were true in a way that would make clear which beliefs are, and which are not, scientific truths. Moreover, this was a theory about the nature of reason that promised to settle issues in traditional philosophy, for any statements about the world (that is, synthetic, as opposed to analytic statement) that could not be shown to be based on observational statements would be rejected as metaphysics, that is, as meaningless propositions.

Thus, logical positivism used a theory about the nature of language to claim, in effect, that a basically empiricist analysis of the method of natural science explained the nature of reason itself. Less sympathetic critics would dismiss it as “scientism,” because it rejected all the other arguments of rational culture as invalid. That was how they explained the validity of practical arguments: value judgments were cognitively meaningless (though logical positivists did not deny that they were nonetheless useful to express emotions and affect behavior by arousing similar feelings in others). But what brought logical positivism into disfavor among philosophers of science were its implications about natural science.

Theories in natural science commonly refer to entities that are not directly observable, such as electrons, force fields, quarks, and the like in physics. But since they are not observable, the meanings of such theoretical terms could not be analyzed in the same naïve way as observational terms. Only the meanings of observational terms could be explained by the kind of direct, public relationship that seems to hold between word and object that was taken for granted. Thus, the project was to show how theoretical statements are based on observational statements. But since it turned out that theoretical statements are not entailed by observational statements, it led to skepticism about the existence of unobservable theoretical entities.

Since physicists take it for granted that such theoretical entities exist, philosophical defenders of natural science were also inclined to be realists about theoretical entities. Thus, recognizing that they could not derive theoretical from observational statements, they might, as “scientific realists,” still be able to articulate the criterion by which science based them on observational statements. But to make a long story short, any criterion that would include the theoretical entities of science would also include metaphysical entities, unless the criterion was so specific that it was obviously contrived and ad hoc.

Even if a criterion for inferring to unobservable entities could be formulated, however, it was eventually recognized that it would be question-begging. The mere formulation of criterion would not provide any reason believing that scientific arguments for the existence of unobservable entities are valid. What they needed was an explanation of theoretical arguments that would explain why they are valid. A criterion for accepting them as scientific would be merely a principle to be used as a premise in first level arguments of natural science, where the validity of appealing to such principles is what is at issue, at least, judging by traditional philosophy.

The validity of arguments that entail the existence of unobservable theoretical entities cannot be shown by the success of such arguments in the history of science, because that would be circular. It would be using the very principle whose validity is at issue to justify its validity. At best, the history of science can be used to show that science is moving in a certain direction, perhaps, toward a unique outcome (as Kitcher 1992 argues). But even that would not show that what is believed at that ideal end of inquiry is true.

Finally, in the course of such philosophical disputes, the very distinction between theoretical and observational statements began to seem suspect. Since they had abandoned the starting point of modern philosophy, they could not explain the difference between observational an theoretical statements as the difference between ideas of perception and what they represent from the point of view of the subject (that is, parts of the external world). They had to define observational statements as what a normal observer could report from her perception in a given situation. But then it became clear that what normal observers would report depends heavily on their beliefs, and well informed observers would report observing theoretical entities in experimental situations where they were detected. This led to a form of “holism” about meaning, for as Quine would argue, what confronts experience is not individual sentences, but entire theories, worldviews, and even including logic itself.

Logical positivists had also expected to explain the validity of arguments in the science of subjects by showing that they were simply another form of the same empirical methods. The conclusions of a science of subjects are typically formulated as psychological sentences, but the attempt to base them on observational statements led to behaviorism in psychology (thereby justifying Skinner’s operant conditioning). But for those who believe that psychological states are real, it was another form of anti-realism. For similar reasons, logical positivists sided with methodological individualists in their battle with social holists, leading to anti-realism about spiritual animals.

Ordinary language philosophy. There was, however, another way that analytic philosophy would lead to anti-realism about psychological states and spiritual animals, because there was another way of analyzing public language that would account for the use of psychological sentences. Instead of analyzing the logical structure of language and explaining how it corresponds to the world, as logical positivism did, it was possible to analyze the use of language as a practice governed by public rules that children learn as they grow up and by which the use of language can be corrected. This way of using contemporary epistemological philosophy was introduced by the “latter” Wittgenstein in a development that was called “ordinary language philosophy.” The various game-like interactions making up the public phenomenon of language use were “forms of life,” and as Wittgenstein intended, this theory about the nature of reason was mainly negative, a critique of how the first level arguments of the science of subjects are understood even in rational culture.

Wittgenstein’s analysis of ordinary language revealed that language is used for many reasons, not just describing the world. In particular, he saw the use of psychological sentences, not as descriptions of psychological states that are somehow private to each individual, but rather as sentences with behavioral criteria for attributing psychological states to others (or, in the case of first person uses, expressing feelings). They were moves in a game, or part of a form of life that we share. His goal was to show that the problems of modern philosophy had been based on illusion, and thus, that its many problems could be dismissed as mere pseudo-problems. He argued from the nature of language as governed by public rules that there could not be a private language, that is, a language whose terms referred to objects or states that are essentially private, such as ideas in the mind. In the end, therefore, his ordinary language philosophy led to a form of behaviorism, which is called “philosophical behaviorism,” in order to distinguish it from scientific behaviorism, such as Skinner’s theory of operant conditioning, which is supported by logical positivism. Thus, just as logical positivism led to anti-realism, rather than realism, about theoretical entities, so both ordinary language philosophy and logical positivism led to anti-realism, rather than realism, about psychological states.

Ordinary language philosophy lent itself to explaining the arguments of social science, as well as those of a science of individual subjects. After all, it explained language as an interaction among individuals governed by public rules, and if that was an explanation of the nature of reason, it showed the validity of our ordinary way of understanding of institutions and, thus, the reflective science of the social world, which is an inevitable part of the culture of rational spiritual animals. See Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science.

Skepticism about metaphysical realism. Logical positivism led to skepticism about the existence of theoretical entities, but as we have seen, logical positivism led to problems that made it possible for defenders of natural science to continue to accept scientific realism. But more recently, analytic philosophy’s theory about the nature of reason has been found to lead to another kind of skepticism, this time, about the nature of the entities described by its theories. Thus, analytic philosophers could concede that theoretical entities exist and still have grounds for more subtle skepticism about natural science, for they could doubt metaphysical realism, rather than scientific realism. (Putnam calls them “internal realists.”) And these doubts could not be dismissed so easily.

Their way of analyzing language also gave analytic philosophers reason to doubt that natural science, even if it was right about the existence of theoretical entities, is correct about their real nature. That is, while the theories of science may not be mistaken by failing to refer to entities of kinds (unobservable or observable) mentioned by them, those theories could still be mistaken in the properties predicated of such entities, including the dispositional properties (described by laws of nature) that are involved in the efficient-cause explanations given by natural science. That means that science might even be mistaken in the causal explanations it gives of what happens in the world. The kind of realism that would be denied in this second way is sometime called “metaphysical realism,” to distinguish it from realism about the existence of the entities mentioned by scientific theories, or mere “scientific realism.” Metaphysical realism holds that science discovers not only the existence, but also the real nature of what exists in the world.

Skepticism about metaphysical realism is justified by a certain looseness in the relationship between language and the world that appears when language is explained in the way that analytic philosophy does. As Quine has argued, analytic philosophers cannot admit that words have meanings that are private to each subject. The meanings of words must be determined by the references they make as public objects to public parts of the world. But when the role of the faculties of perception and imagination in the brain in the semantic relation is ignored, different relationships between word and object (or language and the world) seem possible. Two forms of looseness can be distinguished, an indeterminacy about what words refer to in the world, and an inability to determine which of different possible properties they actually have.

Quine showed the indeterminacy of reference, or ontological indeterminacy, in a famous series of arguments that showed that there are different ways of translating a foreign language using as evidence only the behavior of speakers of the language in certain situations. For example, he showed that “gavagai” in such a language might refer to rabbits, rabbit-parts, or time-slices of rabbits, depending on how other words in the language were translated. That there are always different possible translation manuals based on such observational evidence shows that we are unable, in principle, to tell what another subject is referring to.

Putnam suggests the universality of this kind of argument by appealing to the Lowenheim-Skolem theory. It holds, as we have seen (in Relations), that, for any formal system as complex as set theory or arithmetic, there is an interpretation of all its sentences that makes them true in the realm of natural numbers. Thus, Putnam argues that even if a formal system were constructed that conjoined all the theories of science, including all the observational statements on which they rest, it would still not make its own references to the world determinate.

The other kind of looseness in the relationship between language and the world is the underdetermination of scientific theories by the evidence for them. Putnam makes this argument concretely by pointing to the existence of equivalent theories, or actual theories with different principles that are equally able to predict all the same phenomena. He mentions different forms of geometry (one postulating points and the other spheres shrinking indefinitely), different forms of quantum mechanics (Heisenberg matrix mechanics and Schroedinger’s wavefunction), and different views of the dates and locations of events by observers on different inertial frames (though he recognizes that Einstein’s special theory of relativity provides a single description for them all). But the arguments are all typified by a dispute between Carnap and the Polish logician about how many objects there are in a universe that contains nothing but x1, x2, and x3. Carnap would hold that there are three objects, but the Polish logician would hold that there are seven (or eight, if he counted the empty set as an object). (See Putnam (1987, p. 18ff; 1988, p. 109ff.) Putnam argues that there is no principled way of choosing between such theories and, thus, that there is no truth of the matter about which is true. (Putnam defends a Kantian view that holds that the conclusions of natural science are inevitably determined as much by the nature of the scientists as by the nature of the world they would describe.)

Analytic philosophy supports, therefore, a kind of anti-realism with respect to metaphysical realism. As long as the relationship between language and the world is indeterminate or loose in this way, there is reason to doubt that science discovers the truth about the world, where that means the way that things really are in themselves. Thus, Putnam can taunt defenders of science as foolish believers in “The One True Theory” or a “God’s Eye View of the World.”

Though defenders of natural science may not like to think of themselves as metaphysical realists, neither do they want to accept the “internal realism” that Putnam would saddle them with, for that is to admit that natural science, even at the ideal end of inquiry, may not have described the real nature of what exists. They need a defense against the more recent skepticism founded in analytic philosophy. But the obvious way of defending science from its attacks does not work. A brief account of one more step in the dialectic of contemporary epistemological philosophy will put us in a position to see why philosophical culture inevitably evolves from epistemological philosophy to ontological philosophy.

Since the analytic philosophy’s skepticism about metaphysical realism depends on its way of analyzing language, that is, taking words and sentences to be public objects whose (meanings and) references are determined by the public process in which animals use them in a mutually understood way, defenders of natural science can insist that there is a deeper, naturalistic explanation of the semantic relation. Though they do not have such a so-called “causal theory of reference” worked out in detail, they argue that when it is used to explain the relationship between language and the world, there will no longer be any indeterminacy about reference or uncertainty about which of equivalent theories is true, because science will know what each word and sentence refers to. This is called the “naturalistic” approach to language, and disputes currently rage about how to formulate such a theory.

Such naturalistic theories about language are vulnerable, however, to a rebuttal. The vulnerability comes from the way that even scientists understand the empirical method of natural science (though it can, perhaps, be traced in part to the alliance between science and empiricism in modern philosophy). They assume that the goal of natural science is to discover laws of nature, or more broadly, that it is the attempt to discover the best efficient-cause explanation of what happens in the world. That is why the naturalistic explanation of language is called a “causal” theory of reference. Regardless how science may explain the semantic relation, it will presumably be a causal relation of some kind. It will involve a regularity of some kind that can be described by a law of nature. This leaves defenders of science vulnerable to Putnam’s refutation.

Putnam argues that no such causal theory of reference can possibly eliminate the looseness that analytic philosophy has found in the relationship between language and the world because it will itself by subject to that same looseness. The terms used by a causal theory of reference will admit of different interpretations, which connect them to different objects or different properties, and thus, the indeterminacy about reference will merely be promoted to the level of the causal theory about language. Thus, the dispute about metaphysical realism is a standoff.

The argument between analytic philosophy and defenders of natural science is unresolved, because defenders of natural science do not have an explanation of the nature of reference that would show that Putnam is wrong. Nor do they understand natural science in a way that can show how their theories would escape indeterminacy about their own references. And though scientific realism is generally taken for granted, there is still no justification of inferences to the existence of unobservable entities mentioned by scientific theories. Ontological philosophy, however, would supply all three.

Ontological philosophy recognizes that, because of the reflective foundation of its epistemological argument, analytic philosophy’s explanation of the nature of the relationship between language and the world overlooks the role of the faculties of perception and rational imagination that are part of the brain of each user of language.

If naturalists recognized that brain mechanisms like these mediated the relationship between word and object (or sentence and state of affairs), they would see that reference is not a mere causal relation, but a geometrical isomorphism in space and time between states and processes in the brain, on the one hand, and states in the world. The structure of that correspondence between brain states and the world makes if clear that there is nothing indeterminate about a semantic relation that is mediated by it. It would be clear, for example, that “gavagai” refers to whole rabbits, because the basic structure of the faculty of spatial imagination represents the spatial relations among such objects. (And they would see that language is public because it is a mechanism that coordinates the behavior of individuals in generating social level behavior by coordinating the activity in their faculties of rational imagination.)

Nor is it plausible for analytic philosophers to argue that this isomorphism is itself infected by the same indeterminacy, for it involves not only a spatial isomorphism at each moment, but also a correspondence between sequences of images over time and the structure of space and the geometrical structures of objects. It is sequences of images of the kind that can represent change in the world that represent the possible against which the actual is seen in a faculty of imagination. And though that is a correspondence between images in imagination and the world, it is one that must, by the nature of the mechanism, correspond to what actually happens when the covert behavior operating imagination is overt. There can be no indeterminacy about references mediated by it, once the neurological mechanisms of imagination are understood.

Even without its theory about the nature of language, however, ontological philosophy would enable naturalists to show that scientific theories in general are not subject to any indeterminacy about reference, because it gives an ontological explanation of the validity of the arguments used in natural science (that is, of why efficient-cause explanations are true) that does not admit any indeterminacy. Instead of postulating the substances mentioned by scientific theories (matter, or matter and spacetime), it postulates space and matter, and by recognizing space itself as an ontological cause of their validity, ontological philosophy can show the determinacy of reference, because they all come down to references to particular objects located in a single three dimensional space. Moreover, scientific terms referring to properties will be determinate, because those properties are all explained as aspects of the basic substances constituting the world and how they exist together.

We have already seen (n Relations) how this resolves the problem posed by the Lowenheim-Skolem theorem in mathematics. It also works for the formal theory that includes all the theories and observations of science which Putnam uses.

Nor are there any equivalent theories in science, once the truth of its laws and efficient-cause explanations are explained ontologically by spatiomaterialism. We have seen how both Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics and Schroedinger’s wavefunction can be incomplete representations of bits of matter that really move continuously across space as time passes and that interact in determinate ways.

We have also see how a spatiomaterialist explanation of the truth of Einstein’s special theory of relativity denies that the dates and times assigned to events by observers on different inertial are equally true. One of them is correct and the others false, though it is not possible to tell which one has the truth.

The different ways of formulating geometry all turn out to be true when the truth of geometry is explained as a correspondence to the structure among the parts of space and, thus, among the bits of matter that coincide with them.

Finally, even the dispute between Carnap and the Polish logician is resolved by ontological philosophy, because it turns out that both of them are mistaken. In a spatiomaterial world with three material objects, x1, x2 and x3, there would be four objects: space and the three material objects. (Space can be counted as a single object because its parts cannot exist without one another.) In holding that there are only three, Carnap would be overlooking space, and in holding that there are seven (or eight, if the null class is counted), the Polish logician would be overlooking how space explains all the sets that can possibly be formed of material objects in space.

Even without its explanation of the truth of mathematics and the basic laws of physics, ontological philosophy makes it possible to justify scientific realism. There is a real difference between observational and theoretical statements, because there is a difference between the objects represented in images of perception and those that are not. Some objects to which scientific theories refer are too small, too transient, move too fast, or just not the right kind to be represented in the animal system of representation (such a force fields and photons). But spatiomaterialism justifies inferences to the existence of such unobservable entities, because it explains the truth of the efficient-cause explanations that mention them. Efficient causation is just what happens as a result of the motion and interaction of bits of matter in space as time passes. The observable evidence is the occurrence of certain kinds of events in well understood experimental situations (such as the vapor trail in a Wilson cloud chamber), and given how those events are located in space at that time, there is no other way they could be caused than by the existence of the entities postulated. If some other entity were responsible for what happen, there would be a violation of either the principle of local motion or the principle of local action, because it would have to act from outside the experimental apparatus. Thus, scientific realism has an ontological justification.

This is not a justification of the empirical method as such. It cannot be, since spatiomaterialism is itself the conclusion of an empirical argument, an inference to the best ontological-cause explanation. But it is still a justification of inferences to the best efficient-cause explanations of what happens in the world as a way of discovering basic laws of physics, because such basic laws are descriptions of the behavior of the substances that constitute what is being observed in nature. There is no reason to doubt inductive inferences from particular cases to general laws, because what is being described in the particular case are substances of certain kinds that endure through time and, as substances, they have essential natures that do not change over time.

Naturalized epistemology. The response of most defenders of science to analytic philosophy’s skepticism about metaphysical realism has been simply to walk away from such disputes and simply side with science. This now includes most philosophers of science (according to Kitcher, 1992, and Rosenberg, 1996). They are naturalists who recognize that what they are doing is rejecting philosophy, which they see as the belief that there is a “foundation” or “first principle” that would make it possible for a second order argument to so explain the first level arguments of science in a way that shows their validity. They admit that there is no non-circular way to defend the method of science against alternative methods of knowing, such as religion, new age mysticism, dogmatism, poetry, or literary criticism. For them, it is enough simply to affirm the validity of the empirical method of science and accept the conclusions that it draws about the nature of the world.

This does not mean that they are not concerned with the method of science. They do believe that it ought to be clarified and improved. But they expect to use the conclusions of science itself (discoveries about instruments, about psychological and social processes, and the like) to improve the methods of science. What they deny is that there is any standpoint outside of science from which its method can be judged or justified.

Those who describe and defend this attitude toward analytic philosophy (Kitcher) call themselves “naturalized epistemologists” (following Quine), because they are giving up philosophy and trying to give a naturalistic explanation of all cognitive capacities, not just language.

The evolution of ontological philosophy. There is, however, an alternative. That is shown by the argument presented here. Thus, instead of giving up philosophy and keeping epistemology by doing naturalized epistemology, it is possible to give up epistemology and keep philosophy by doing ontological philosophy. That is, instead of abandoning philosophy, this alternative does philosophy in a new way. And since it is both possible and functional, the evolution of ontological philosophy is inevitable.

Philosophy is a second level argument, that is, an attempt to explain the validity of first level arguments, or rational culture, from the foundation of a deeper cause of their validity. But there are basically two ways of doing this.

The reason there are two ways of doing philosophy is that rational beings have two different ways of understanding causes in the world: naturalistic understanding and reflective understanding. Naturalistic understanding enables them to explain what happens in nature by efficient causes, and reflective understanding enables them to explain how subjects behave by rational causes.

Epistemological philosophy uses reflective understanding to introduce a theory about the nature of reason by which they would explain the validity of arguments of rational level culture. And ontological philosophy uses naturalistic understanding to introduce a theory about the nature of substance by which they would explain the validity of arguments of rational level culture — first, the validity of the efficient-cause explanations of natural science and, then, by way of its implications about the inevitable course of evolution, the validity of the rational-cause explanations of the science of subjects.

One way of putting the difference between then is to say that, whereas epistemological philosophy argues for necessary truths from the wholeness of reason, ontological philosophy argues for necessary truths from the wholeness of the world. That is, epistemological philosophy constructs an argument on a higher level of forensic organization by offering an explanation of the nature of reason that shows how all the kinds of first level arguments are valid. That is to assume that reason has a wholeness that underwrites the validity of all parts of rational level culture. But ontological philosophy constructs such a higher level argument by first explaining how two opposite kinds of basic substances make the world whole. Then, from that foundation, it explains the nature of reason, and its nature and place in the natural world explains the validity of all (valid) first level arguments. But far from explaining the wholeness of reason, ontological philosophy shows that reason, as it is understood by reflective understanding, is not whole, because the arguments of rational culture are divided by at least three basic dichotomies. Thus, instead of trying to explain the wholeness of reason, ontological philosophy makes reason whole.

Though there is another way of doing philosophy, no one is doing it, to judge from what is being published. One would expect naturalists to be trying it out, at least. And if they did, it would be selected, unless these is something seriously wrong with the foregoing, because that would begin the career of ontological philosophy. That ontological philosophy would be inevitable because it is both functional and possible.

Ontological philosophy is functional, because it would not only enable naturalists to defend natural science against the skepticism of analytic philosophy, but as we have seen, it would also do what philosophy as aspired to do all along — to overcome the dichotomies of rational culture and explain how all its (valid) first level arguments are valid.

Moreover, ontological philosophy is obviously possible, because, as can be seen from this argument, it is actual. But that does not quite show that it is possible in the relevant sense, because it does not explain how it can be tried out as a random variation on the arguments that are already evolving at the philosophical spiritual stage.

Unless the defenders of natural science are so committed to naturalized epistemology that they prefer abandoning philosophy to doing philosophy in a new way, the reason that ontological philosophy has not evolved must be that something is has been keeping it from being tried out. Natural science has now evolved far enough with mathematics as its tool and capitalism as its sponsor to overcome the limitations encountered by the Pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece, but there are two causes that may be conspiring to keep it from being taken seriously, one having to do with contemporary naturalism, and the other having to do with contemporary natural science.

As defenders of natural science, naturalists assume that whatever can be known about the substances constituting the world must be discovered using the empirical method of natural science. They are scientific realists in the sense that they believe in the existence of the entities (observable and unobservable) mentioned by natural science. By the same token, however, they are skeptics about the existence of anything whose existence does not have to be posited in order to accept the conclusions of natural science as true. Thus, they let the conclusions of science determine their ontology.

Parsimony is a basic tenet of the empirical method of natural science. In making inferences to the best efficient-cause explanations of the natural world, science assumes that the best explanation is the simplest and most complete, and thus, if two theories have the same scope, it must prefer the one that that postulates the fewest and simplest causes.

Contemporary naturalists are skeptical to the point of being contemptuous of any claims about the existence of something not recognized by natural science. Natural scientists have long allied themselves with empiricism, because empiricism seemed to be the vaccine that would protect science from the embarrassingly implausible metaphysical systems of traditional philosophy.

That does not mean that naturalists reject ontology. They recognize that it is necessary to postulate substances as self-subsistent entities in order to explain the natural world as something whose existence does not depend on the individual rational subjects who know about it. But as defenders of natural science, they believe that the only substances they have to postulate are those that are entailed by the truth of the theories of natural science. Naturalists believe, therefore, that they are already doing everything that can be done with ontology as a way of explaining the truth of scientific theories.

Or to put it negatively, naturalists do not believe that ontology can explain the validity of the arguments of natural science, because ontology depends on those very arguments for its beliefs about which substances exist.

Natural science is, however, overlooking one of the two, opposite substances that constitute the world — or else it affirms the existence of a kind of substance along with matter that makes ontology a problem, rather than an explanation. It denies the existence of space as a substance enduring through time, because that would mean that space is absolute, and that is what contemporary physics rejected in accepting the Einsteinian revolution. Instead, contemporary physics affirms the existence of spacetime, if it affirms the existence of any substances at all in addition to matter (that is, in addition to particles and fields). Though Einstein admitted that his discovery of his special theory of relativity was inspired by empiricism (especially Mach), empiricist skepticism was not necessary for its acceptance. Spatiomaterialism would be excluded anyway by the empirical method of science, especially the form it takes in physics because of the importance of mathematics, and there are two steps to the banishment of substantival space from contemporary physics, one having to do with Einstein’s special theory of relativity, and the other having to do with his general theory of relativity.

When Einstein’s special theory of relativity was first accepted, there were, as we have seen, two theories that could explain all the phenomena covered by it: a theory of the kind proposed by Lorentz as well as Einstein’s theory. But the empirical method of science is to infer to the best efficient-cause explanation of what is observable in nature, and in the case of physics, where mathematics had long since become an indispensable tool, that meant making quantitatively precise predictions of measurements. Thus, when confronted with two highly mathematical theories covering the same phenomena, physicists had to prefer the simpler theory, and that was clearly Einstein’s theory. Einstein needed only two assumptions about the empirical equivalence of all inertial frames in order to derive mathematically descriptions of all the reluctant phenomena (namely, the principle of relativity and the constant value of the velocity of light in all inertial frames).

Minkowski recognized that all the measurements made by all inertial observers could be explained by postulating spacetime, instead of space as a substance enduing through time (that is, absolute space), and thus, when Einstein used the notion of spacetime to explain the nature of gravity, its status as a self-subsistent entity mentioned by the basic laws of physics could hardly be denied. Spacetime had to be a substance for its curvature to be the cause of gravitational acceleration.

This seems to leave naturalists who would consider ontological explanations of the world with a choice between a form of materialism that reduces space to the spatial relations of bits of matter (or to particles and fields, denying the vacuum like a contemporary plenum theory), and a form of spacetime substantivalism (or “spatiotemporalism,” as I called it in Spatiomaterialism) that reduces bits of matter to timelines in spacetime and implicitly denies that there is any unique moment in their careers that is present. In either case, ontology is not able to explain the validity of the efficient-cause explanations of natural science. The former, spatial relationism, affirms only the existence of what natural science already mentions, and thus, as scientific realism already postulates the substances needed to explain its theories. And the ontological explanations built into science would cease to be explanatory, if spatiotemporalism were taken seriously as the ontology of physics, because it denies that any substance endures through time.

Indeed, it is hard to see how spacetime would be used as an ontological cause to explain anything that exists in the natural world, since one of the deepest puzzles confronting contemporary physics is understanding how quantum mechanics, its theory of matter, is even related to Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Current attempts to find a single law of nature that would entail both theories lead to the belief that there are eleven or more dimensions to space!

Naturalists understandably make little use of spacetime in their attempts to understand why the arguments of natural science are valid. And it is easy for contemporary naturalists to settle for the believe in a materialism that affirms nothing but particles and fields, because the view that nature is constituted by a single kind of substance goes back to the beginning of modern science, before Newton. It was defended not only by Hobbes, the most famous materialist of the modern era, but also by Cartesians, for they believed in “extension,” or a plenum of substances whose only essential nature was geometrical structure. Though mind-body dualism was an untenable ontology, the belief that body itself consisted of two opposite kinds of substances would make it even more inelegant.

It is, therefore, possible to explain why naturalists do not take ontological philosophy seriously. Indeed, it is an inevitable result of the empirical method used in physics and the deference that philosophers of science pay to physicists. Though mathematics was an offspring of epistemological philosophy (along with its main sponsor, capitalism), the patent failure of traditional philosophy to provide the deeper justification of natural science (and other arguments of rational level culture) makes the decision of defenders of science to abandon philosophy understandable. But in choosing to naturalize epistemology, they are divorcing themselves from traditional philosophy. And they getting a worse settlement than is possible, because philosophy has a secret treasure stored in its early history, before it started down the road of epistemology.

The Pre-Socratic philosophers had another idea about how to do philosophy. They saw the possibility of an explanation of the wholeness of the world, before philosophy came to be seen as seeking just an explanation of the wholeness of reason. The Pre-Socratics saw how the basic nature of what exists in the world, including its categorical features, could be explained by identifying the basic substances that constitute it. Not only did they discover the concept of substance needed for ontology to be explanatory, but they discovered the best ontological explanation of the natural world as well. However, their ontological explanation of the world could not be convincing, as we have seen, without an adequate theory of the detailed nature of the “atoms” contained by the void, for that is needed to trace the course of evolution, distinguish the various levels of biological and neurological organization, and thereby explain the nature of reason. When philosophers turned to epistemology, the discoveries of pre-Socratic philosophy were forgotten. Though the tool and sponsor needed to discover that detailed explanation were provided by the easier road to philosophy taken by epistemologists, the desperate flight from its failure now threatens to deprive naturalists of what they need to defend natural science.

If, however, the decision of naturalists to take their stand with natural science and stop with scientific realism is caused by the factors mentioned above, then it is possible for ontological philosophy based on spatiomaterialism to be tried out at this point in the evolution of philosophical culture by a random variation on existing arguments. All that is needed is a rediscovery of pre-Socratic philosophy. That would be to take the opposite course from naturalized epistemology. Though it would abandon epistemology, it would be to do philosophy in a new way. But that would give naturalists an ontology that would explain the validity of the arguments of natural science in a way that makes it possible not only to justify the empirical method of science, but also to criticize it. That is, they would have reason to doubt that it is sufficient to infer to the best efficient-cause explanation of what is observed to happen in nature, for they would see that it is possible to infer to the best ontological-cause explanation of what exists in nature as well. This would lead them to consider in a fresh way the possibility of spatiomaterialism, for it is obviously the best ontological explanation of the categorical features of the natural world, including the fact that material objects have spatial relations, that they can change, and that they can change only by motion, not to mention mathematics and the principles of local motion and local action. And that could lead them to acknowledge that spatiomaterialism can explain the truth of both of Einstein’s theory.

Such philosophers of science would then recognize that physicists made a mistake when they rejected Lorentz’s Newtonian explanation in favor of Einstein’s relativistic explanation. They would see that, even though physicists were merely following their empirical method, what physicists gave up for mathematical simplicity was not just the intuitive intelligibility of theories in physics, as if that were a mere subjective bias. What they gave up was a better ontological explanation of the natural phenomena, that is, as we have seen, one that explains more of what is observed in nature with less in the way of substances.

Furthermore, they would recognize that it is possible for spatiomaterialism to explain the truth of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, even though it entails the existence of absolute space. And in the process, they would finally understand how the quantum theory of the other three basic forces of nature are related to gravitation.

If naturalists did that, they would quickly recognize the other consequences that follow from spatiomaterialism, all the necessary truths of ontological philosophy, including the global regularities, the course of evolution, and how it leads up to the discovery of what is represented in the diagram of the wholeness of the world.

Ontological philosophy is, therefore, inevitable. It is possible for such a random variation to be tried out at this point in the evolution of philosophical spiritual animals, and thus, since it is functional, it follows that ontological philosophy based on spatiomaterialism will evolve.

Ontological philosophy will be rationally selected, once it is understood, because as an explanation of the wholeness of the world, it has all possible objections completely surrounded. All the issues currently being disputed in intellectual culture can be located within the structure of its argument, that is, within the diagram of the whole, and ontological philosophy shows how they can all be resolved. When that is recognized, the only issue will be whether ontological philosophy is true, for all those objections to it will stand or fall together.

The evolution of ontological philosophy does not, of course, depend on tWoW.net. It would eventually evolve even if there were no such website, because it is a possible random variation on the arguments that have been accumulated as Western culture and, in spiritual animals that are as populous, healthy and powerful as those that exist today, there are enough rational subjects with the love of argument and the respect for rational judgment to try it out. That much is ontologically necessary — and it will happen in the near future, barring some unforeseen catastrophe that derails evolution at this point, like the impact of another giant asteroid like the one that doomed the dinosaurs.

On the other hand, tWoW.net will not fail to convince rational subjects, even if there are mistakes in the details of some of its arguments, because if it is on the right track, that will be obvious and mistakes can be corrected without upsetting the project as a whole. Thus, it is reasonable to expect tWoW.net to be the random variation whose rational selection will be responsible for the evolution of ontological philosophy — though such a contingent detail cannot be ontologically necessary.

The diagram of the wholeness of the world is, therefore, included in the diagram of the wholeness of the world. Ontological philosophy based on spatiomaterialism is itself something that inevitably evolves in the kind of world that it describes, because the sort of evolutionary change that it entails, given the specific nature of space and matter in our spatiomaterial world, includes the evolution of reason and reason evolves toward the natural perfection of understanding how the world is whole. Thus, reason comes to understand itself as an inevitable product of evolution by reproductive causation.

The rational selection of ontological philosophy is, however, just the beginning of its career. The discovery of an argument that explains the validity of all the arguments of rational level culture will make it possible to sort out which arguments are valid and which are not in every area of inquiry, and that will make it possible to discover what is true much more quickly and reliably than currently seems possible. Many of those discoveries are predictable, including those that have been mentioned in this argument to show the possibility of an ontological approach to philosophy.

The discovery of the true is, however, only part of the significance of ontological philosophy. Reason is not just a cognitive machine. It is an animal behavior guidance system, which uses its knowledge of the true to guide behavior. And reason is the most powerful cause in the world, because it guides the behavior of spiritual animals as well as individual rational subjects. What it does will determine the future course of evolution. Not only will reason take control of biological evolution, with rational selection constraining where natural selection works, but reason will create the other forms of natural perfection that comes to exist during the career of ontological philosophy.

The wholeness of the world is not, therefore, just the wholeness of space or how all the aspects of the world are constituted by two basic substances. Nor is its wholeness that those aspects entail an evolutionary change in which the wholeness of the world comes to be understood by rational subjects. Reason is a part of the world, and thus, it has a role to play in the world. As rational subjects recognize reason as the inevitable product of biological evolution, they will recognize that they are responsible for the future of evolution in their planetary system. What reason will do is not something that reason knows by predicting what it will do. It is something that is known by discovering what reason ought to do.

Some of what reason will do is, of course, predictable. Rational beings will continue to pursue most of the same goals they currently pursue, because those goals are good. And they will use their new understanding of what is true to figure out how to solve all the social, economic and political problems that now seem intractable. These goals are predictable, because they are goals that reason already has.

However, not all of the goals pursued by rational beings are predictable even in this way, because some goals of reason are optional. Some goals are good for reason to pursue because they are chosen by reason. And since not only individual rational subjects, but also spiritual animals can have optional goals, there are aspects of the future of evolution that cannot be predicted even in principle.

Finally, as we shall see, there is one kind of goal that reason can have only because practical reason recognizes, as ontological philosophy evolves in philosophical level culture, something that is so absolutely perfect that it is worthy of worship. Though that is necessarily true, if it is true at all, it is a necessary truth that can be discovered only by practical reasoning.

At this point, therefore, the argument of ontological philosophy must switch from theoretical reason to practical reasons, that is, from arguments about what is to arguments about what ought to be. Knowing the true is only half the way that reason makes the world whole. The other half is how it does what is good.

Ontological philosophy reveals, therefore, that reason is far more important to the world than it supposed, when it assumed that a theory about the nature of reason based on reflection would explain the validity of the arguments of rational level culture. Instead of assuming that reason is whole, ontological philosophy explained how the world itself is whole. That revealed that reason is not whole, but divided by inherent dichotomies. But understanding why rational culture is limited makes reason whole, and as reason recognizes its place in the world, it accepts responsibility for continuing evolutionary progress and making the world itself whole.

Epistemological philosophy of causation. This ontological explanation of change has implications about the nature of efficient causation that solves various problems that have arisen in epistemological philosophy of science, and following them out here may help clarify the significance of ontological philosophy.

More central issues in epistemological philosophy of science, about realism, which arise from its attempt to show the validity of natural science, have already been discussed in describing contemporary philosophy, the last era in the history of epistemological philosophy. We have seen in discussing the philosophical spiritual stage how ontological philosophy would join the issue about scientific realism and metaphysical realism and defend the truth of the conclusions of the empirical method of natural science.

The problems about causation in epistemological philosophy of science fall into two main categories. One arises in natural science about the nature of efficient causation, and the other arises in social science about the nature of rational causation (and, thus, about the basic nature of human society as such).

The difference between natural and social science arises, as we have seen (in Stage 9), from the difference between naturalistic and subjectivistic understanding. It illustrates one of the dichotomies of rational culture that epistemological philosophy has not adequately overcome, and though we already know how it is over come, it may be useful to see how it works out in the context of current discussions in philosophy of science.

Efficient causation. Efficient-cause explanations show that the events and conditions identified as causes produce the events and conditions identified as their consequences.

Efficient causes are different from ontological causes, because efficient causes precede their effects in time (though when both are static conditions, the temporal priority may not be obvious). Ontological causes are simultaneous with their effect, because they produce their effect by constituting them. That is, the existence of ontological effects is part of what already exists in the ontological causes.

Ontological cause explanations are, therefore, self contained and do not call for any deeper explanation. Ontological causes are substances, which are self-subsistent, and the connection between them and their effects is a kind of identity. Ontological effects are identical to parts or aspects of their ontological causes. Seeing the connection between ontological cause and effect is, therefore, just a matter of recognizing that the substances involved have a certain aspect, and as we have seen, the power of rational beings to single out aspects of the natural world is explained by the nature of rational imagination. (Rational imagination includes spatial and structural imagination as well as naturalistic and reflective imagination -- that is, imagination that depends on natural and psychological sentences, respectively).

Efficient-cause explanations, on the other hand, require further support, because the efficient causes and their effects are distinct events or states (or even less general regularities, in the case of reductive efficient-cause explanations). The connections cited in empirical science are laws of nature, which are descriptions of regularities about change that are observed in nature. Though epistemological philosophy of science does not recognize anything more basic than laws of nature, it has recognized, ever since Hume, that something more seems to be required. Efficient-cause explanations call for a deeper explanation.

By efficient-cause explanations, I mean explanations that conform to the "covering law model" of explanation. As represented in the so-called deductive-nomological model, each such explanation is a deductive argument in which the conclusion describes what is explained (a particular event or condition or else a regularity that holds under certain conditions). The premises are of two kinds, laws of nature and descriptions of relevant initial and/or boundary conditions. The explanation depends on deducing a description of what is being explained from the premises, that is, showing them to be instances of the relevant laws of nature.

Something about the nature of efficient causes can be inferred from the standard for judging the best explanation, which is part of the empirical method itself. As we saw in Method, that standard is explaining the most with the least. Applying it to the case of efficient-cause explanations, the best explanations of any given phenomenon is the one that uses the fewest and simplest laws of nature, for that means it uses the fewest and simplest causes. But science aspires to explain all natural phenomena, and thus, more generally, the best explanation is not merely the simplest, but also the one with the largest scope. (There can be tradeoffs between simplicity and scope that make it difficult to tell which explanation is best, though in practice, such conflicts tend to be resolved by further discoveries.) In general, therefore, the goal of science is to discover the fewest, simplest and most general laws of nature that are able to explain all the particular events and conditions (and less general laws) by their efficient causes.

The covering law model is not a very satisfactory explanation of the nature of efficient causes, because it comes down to the nature of laws of nature, and that is no less problematic than the nature of efficient causes. The problem is not solved by discovering the most basic laws of nature (the basic laws of ideal physics), because even at the bottom, there is no explanation of why there is a connection between efficient causes and their effect. There is only the description of a regularity.

In less general branches of natural science, there is nevertheless hope of explaining how efficient causes produce their effects, for it seems possible to reduce them to explanations in more basic branches of science and ultimately to the laws of physics. But this expectation is not satisfied for two reasons. First, the laws and explanations given in physics do not reveal the nature of the casual connection in the most basic efficient causes. And second, many of the laws and explanations of less general branches of science cannot be reduced to those of physics.

As we shall see, the second problem comes down to the first, because the irreducibility of the laws, properties and efficient causes cited in the less general branches of science to physics is a result of the lack of any deeper explanation of the truth of the basic laws of physics.

But first, let us consider the basic laws and explanations of empirical physics and how they are explained ontologically. That will enable us to see how the apparently irreducible laws, properties and efficient-cause explanations of less general branches of natural science can be reduced to ontology, albeit not to the laws of physics.

Basic laws. The most basic laws of nature are the basic laws of physics. They describe relationships between basic quantitative properties that require mathematics to be stated exactly and completely, and what they predict are usually precise measurements that are otherwise unpredictable. Considering their vulnerability to refutation by observation, the success of physics in discovering such laws make it undeniable that physics is on to something real about the world. And the search for the holy grail in physics has been for many decades now the attempt to find a single, most basic law that would include all four of the basic forces of nature (not only electromagnetism, the strong force, and the weak force, but also gravitation).

But as we have seen, its conception of the holy grail shows the limitation of the empirical method of physics. Physics infers to the best efficient-cause explanation of what is observed in nature and uses that to determine its ontology instead of inferring to the best ontological-cause (and best efficient-cause) explanation. It discovers basic laws and affirms the existence of what those laws must refer to, instead of trying at the same time to explain the basic features of the natural world (why bits of matter have spatial relations and how change is possible). But even if there were a single law from which all the other could be derived — and we have seen why that is not possible in our ontological explanation of the truth of Einstein’s general theory of relativity — it would not reveal the nature of the efficient causes.

Ever since Hume, it has been recognized that even though physical laws describe causal connections, there is a problem about what such laws correspond to. As Hume argued, the most that science can know about the causal connections described by its laws of nature is just that certain regularities hold in nature. That does not reveal the nature of the power or necessity by which causes produce their effects. Hume recognized that the problem about causation is not solved by explaining regularities about observable processes by appealing to physical laws describing how their more elementary parts behave, because that merely shifts the problem to the basic laws of physics. Hume was a skeptic who took this difficulty to its extreme, arguing that since all we really know is that certain regularities have so far been observed to hold in nature, we are not even rationally entitled to predict that the same will be true in the future.

Skepticism is not, however, what leads us to expect that, if science were to know the truth about efficient causes, it would be able to explain how efficient causes produce their effects. It is rather that, since laws are just descriptions of regularities, there must be something that makes the regularities true. That is what is offered by an ontological explanation of the basic laws of physics. Even the ontology of generic spatiomaterialism is able to explain some aspects of the regularities described by laws of physics and show them to be ontologically necessary. Consider how the ontologically necessary principle of local motion contradicts Hume’s view that we can never know the necessity of any regularity, but only the constant conjunction itself.ⁱ

When one billiard ball hits another, it causes the second ball to start moving. Apart from such events being constantly conjoined in experience, he argued, we could not know anything about what would happen. To an extent, Hume is correct, for experience does tell us that the first ball will not just stop when it reaches the second ball, that it will not bounce back nor go around the second ball and proceed on its way. But Hume is wrong to hold that we can have no knowledge of what is necessary. For if we are spatiomaterialists, we know that the first billiard ball cannot simply disappear from the front side of the second billiard ball at one moment and then simply reappear on the other side at the next moment. The principle of motion does not tell us precisely what will happen, but it does limit the possibilities. But neither does it depend merely on the experience of that constant conjunction. Its necessity depends on our reasons for believing that spatiomaterialism is the best way of explaining the natural world by substances existing in time. Inferring to a deeper kind of explanation of nature than science gives us a foundation for showing the necessity of at least certain aspects of the constant conjunctions that science discovers by inferring to the best efficient-cause explanations.

The principle of local action is also ontologically necessary, and it can also tell us something about the billiard ball that is prior to the experiences of what happens to them that Hume is talking about. Experience of constant conjunctions of events in the past may be the only way of predicting precisely what will happen, but we do know prior to experience that the first ball will not change the motion of the second ball without either contacting it or exerting a force or modifying space in a way that reaches out across space as time passes to affect it. Thus, spatiomaterialism shows that another aspect of the regularities that science knows only from experience of constant conjunctions is ontologically necessary.

What these examples are pointing to, however, is a deeper, ontological explanation of all the aspects of the regularities described by the basic laws of physics. The ontological explanation of the connection between efficient cause and effect comes from showing how the causes and effects are constituted by substances enduring through time. Efficient causes and effects are just aspects of those substances (that is, states of affairs or events constituted by them), and since the natures of the substances and how they exist together as a world constrains what can happen to them, there are certain ontologically necessary truths about how change can and cannot take place. Thus, when space and matter are assumed to have more detailed essential natures, further aspects of the regularities about change are also explained ontologically. That is how the truth of the basic laws of physics were explained ontologically in discussing contingent laws (Local regularities).

Such an ontological explanation of the truth of the basic laws of physics does not, of course, show that they are among the necessary truths proved by ontological philosophy. They do not follow from spatiomaterialism by itself. Instead, the theories about the nature of space and matter that were proposed are, rather, inferences to the best ontological explanation of the basic laws of physics, given the truth of spatiomaterialism. Their role in this argument was to show that it is possible, despite appearances to the contrary from contemporary physics, that the natural world is constituted by space and matter enduring though time as substances.

But even though the basic laws of physics are not ontologically necessary truths, the ontological explanation of why they are true within the constraints of spatiomaterialism is an ontological explanation of the connection between the efficient causes and their effect mentioned in the explanations of physics. It explains the "necessity" of the connection between cause and effect, or the "power" by which the efficient cause produces its effect.

There is, therefore, a way of explaining ontologically the connections between efficient causes and their effects, and as we shall see, the reason that regularities discovered by the less general branches of science are not reducible to physics is its failure to take the role of space as an ontological cause into account.

Irreducible regularities. Even when it was assumed that there is no solution to the problem about the nature of efficient causation in physics, it seemed that efficient-cause connections in less general branches of natural science could be solved by reducing their efficient-cause explanations to efficient-cause explanations in physics. Though that would not solve the basic problem, it would locate all the problems in physics, and the other branches of science could hope to explain the regularities they discovered by those discovered by physics.

On the deductive-nomological model of explanation, such reductive explanations would involve deducing the laws of less general branches of natural science from the basic laws of physics together with relevant initial and boundary conditions. Regularities would be explained in the same way as events or states of affairs, because they would be shown to depend on certain deeper initial and boundary conditions as their efficient causes. This was a project proposed by logical positivists to show what they called “the unity of science.”

Attempts have been made to reduce the theories discovered by less general branches of science, from chemistry and biology to physiology and psychology, to physics. But this project encountered various obstacles. They all involve the discovery of what seem to be irreducible laws of nature.

To be sure, it is often assumed that properties, such as functional properties, can be irreducible in the sense of being supervenient without holding that there are any irreducible laws. But as we shall see, supervenient properties presuppose irreducible laws. It is just that those laws are not the kind that support efficient cause explanations. The regularities they describe have to do with constant conjunctions that are explicitly assumed not to be causal. But they are nonetheless irreducible in the sense of not being explainable by physics, except as accidents.

We will consider the obstacles to reductionism in natural science in three classes, those having to do with thermodynamics, those having to do with mechanical principles, and those having to do with evolution. These problems correspond to three kinds of global regularities, material, structural and reproductive, respectively. Thus, it should not be surprising that what makes it possible to overcome the irreducibility to physics is the recognition of the role that the wholeness of space plays as an ontological cause, for that is what made it possible to explain the global regularities ontologically.

This does not, of course, show that these less general laws of nature are reducible to physics. They still cannot be deduced from the laws of physics and initial and boundary conditions, at least, not in a way that anyone takes to explain the regularity. But it does show that they are ontologically reducible in a spatiomaterial world like ours. That is, they could be explained by an “ontological natural science,” or a natural science in which empirical ontology was recognized to be a more basic branch of natural science than physics, because physics would then formulate its efficient-cause explanations on the assumption that space is a substance enduring through time. In other words, the solution to the puzzles posed by the apparent irreducibility of less general laws of nature does not depend on any of the theories about the more specific natures of space and matter required to explain the truth of the basic laws of physics. What is crucial is only the recognition that space is a substance, because when it is seen as one of the substances constituting the regularity, its nature can be seen as constraining what happens in the world, that is, as an ontological cause. What seems to be irreducible regularities are, in fact, ontological effects, specifically, global regularities.

The advantage of this ontological reduction of physically irreducible regularities is that it takes the steam out of the engine that is currently pulling epistemological philosophy of science toward the acceptance of emergentism, or laws that deny that physics offer a complete efficient-cause explanation of what happens in the world. It shows that the irreducibility of laws to physics is not a reason to suppose that there are other kinds of efficient causes at work in nature. What I mean by this tendency are illustrated by the following examples.

Self-organizing systems. There are thermodynamicists, such as Prigogine (1980), who see the phenomena described by the second law of thermodynamics as evidence of "self-organizing" systems. The systems that are supposed to organize themselves are made of matter, but if matter is doing anything more than obeying the laws of motion and the laws about the attractive and repulsive forces that are recognized by physics, it is hard to avoid the suggestion that it is a holistic kind of matter exerting an emergent force of order in some way.ⁱⁱ

Stratification of nature. Emergentism is more explicit in the belief that nature itself is "stratified" according to branches of science, so that the laws discovered in chemistry, biology, physiology, psychology, and social science are each as basic as any discovered by physics.ⁱⁱⁱ This would mean that every branch of science discovers not only properties, but also laws of nature, that are emergent with respect physics, because to accept the stratification of nature is to assume that there is something sui generis about the laws of each higher branch of science that makes them irreducible to lower level laws (and relevant initial and boundary conditions), or at least not reducible to laws of physics and physical conditions.

Emergent evolutionism. The defense of emergentism has a long history.^iv A view called "emergent evolutionism" was defended, for example, by philosophers like C. Lloyd Morgan (1920) and Samuel Alexander (1920). They postulated a kind of matter whose essential nature included emergent powers that were supposed to account for the order that exists in nature, including the "new forms of relatedness" that show up in the course of evolution over time at several levels of complexity. Their emergentism is not all that different from "process philosophy," which began with Alfred North Whitehead (1927, 1929) and has been taken up by Charles Hartshorn (1970), Errol Harris (1965), and others. Although they deny that nature is stratified, they assume that what accounts for the apparent truth of the laws of physics as well as the order in nature is a subjective nature that is found in even the simplest particulars.

Chaos theory. Emergentism seems to be what is being suggested by defenders of the recently popular "chaos theory." They point to the way in which random motion and interaction sometimes seems to break out into order to suggest that there is some heretofore unrecognized emergent aspect of matter.^v But instead of defending emergentism explicitly, they are content to present these phenomena in the vein of a mystery yet to be solved.

Second law of thermodynamics. The second law of thermo-dynamics may not seem like an issue in the nature of efficient causation. Its main philosophical implications are usually portrayed as the discovery of the inevitability of the so-called “heat death” of the universe. But since it is a global regularity about change, it does describe states of affairs that are temporally related, like efficient cause and effect, and having seen how it is related to the other global regularities, we can see that it involved in every connection between efficient causes and their effects. Dispositions, such as the shattering of a fragile object, which are the paradigm case of efficient causation, are irreversible structural global regularities, and structural causes doing work are the stuff of which reproductive cycles and their ontological effects are made. To start with the second law of thermodynamic is, therefore, to go the heart of the problem with apparently irreducible laws.

The received explanation of thermo­dynamics, statistical mechanics, is often cited as a successful reduction of a theory to physics, but it is not completely successful in reducing these laws to the basic laws of physics. It is undoubtedly correct in taking heat energy to be the kinetic energy of the constituent molecules on the micro level, but statistical mechanics is not a reduction of the second law of thermo­dynamics to the basic laws of physics, because they do not entail that law.

The problem with the materialist reduction of the simplest case of entropy increase can be suggested by a very abstract puzzle about the direction of change in time. The second law of thermo­dynamics describes a regularity about change that is asymmetrical in time. But all the more basic laws of physics to which it would be reduced are temporally symmetrical. That is, the basic laws of physics can tell us, given the state of a system, how it will unfold over time. But those laws are just as valid for another system, just like the first, except that the objects (and photons) all have exactly opposite momentums. And they imply that the second system will unfold as if time were reversed in the first system. Thus, the basic laws of physics are symmetrical in time. But the second law of thermo­dynamics is not. It denies that time could be reversed. Entropy cannot decrease over time in an isolated system; it can only increase. The problem is how a time-asymmetrical law can be derived from time-symmetrical laws. This is sometimes called the puzzle about the “arrow of time.”^vi It is, as we shall see, the source of Loschmidt’s paradox.

The time-asymmetry of the tendency to randomness has an obvious explanation, according to spatio-materialism, because it is a regular change about the geometrical structures that holds of whole regions of dynamic processes over time. It is plausibly explained by space as an ontological cause, because both tendencies responsible for it are global change in the direction of a geometrical structure that resembles that of space itself. Potential energy becomes kinetic energy which becomes evenly distributed heat. It is the second tendency, the way in which kinetic energy is randomized, that is at issue in the reduction of the second law. What makes the tendency to randomness seem mysterious is overlooking the role of space itself.

Science does not recognize the existence of any substances not entailed by its efficient-cause explanations, and as we have seen, than means that space itself is not taken as a cause in explaining any phenomenon. Instead, physics gets by affirming only the truth of highly mathematical laws of nature and using them to predict quantitatively precise measurements. Though in this case, the mathematics is statistics, it still abstracts from the nature of space. Statistical mechanics is the attempt at a materialist reduction, rather than a spatiomaterialist reduction, and its inadequacy is shown by a paradox described by Loschmidt. The advantage of explaining the tendency to randomness to spatio-materialism can, therefore, be seen in how it removes that paradox.

It was Boltzmann who first showed that random states of closed or isolated systems of material objects could be analyzed statistically. He defined randomness for a gas contained in a box as a statistical equilibrium about the positions and momentums of its constituent molecules. Although the microstate of a gas depends on the positions and momentums of all its molecules, many different microstates are indistinguishable from a macroscopic standpoint, and Boltzmann’s idea was to measure the probabilities of different kinds of macrostates by the number of different microstates that could realize them. This makes sense statistically, if the possible microstates of a gas are all equally probable. But that requires a way of measuring how many different kinds of microstates would realize each kind of macrostate, and so Boltzmann introduced the notion of a six dimensional phase space to represent the state of each molecule in the gas. Three dimensions of phase space were used to represent its spatial location, and another three dimensions were used to represent its momentum in each of the three spatial dimensions, giving each molecule of the gas a certain location in six dimensional phase space. Thus, if this phase space were divided up into very many, equally sized cells, each molecule would be located in one or another of the cells of phase space (the limits of phase space being determined by the total energy of the gas and the size of its container). But since exchanging any two molecules in different cells of phase space would leave the gas in the same kind of macrostate, Boltzmann argued that the most probable macrostate of the gas would be the one in which the number of ways that molecules could be exchanged (or permuted) among the cells is maximum, for it would correspond to the largest number of different possible microstates. That state can be shown mathematically to be the one in which the molecules are most evenly distributed among the cells of six dimensional phase space. In that kind of macrostate, the molecules are said to be in statistical equilibrium.

Boltzmann’s definition clearly refers to the same kind of macrostate that was described in explaining the tendency to randomness, because an even distribution of molecules among the cells of his six dimensional phase space is equivalent to an even spatial distribution in three dimensional space of the three causally relevant factors: (1) the locations of molecules of each rest mass, (2) their kinetic energies, and (3) their directions of momentum. But these are basically different ways of defining randomness. Boltzmann’s definition is statistical, whereas the definition of randomness we have been using is geometrical. And whereas Boltzmann’s explanation is based on the assumption that all the possible microstates of a gas are equiprobable, no such assumption is needed to define randomness as evenness in the distribution of each of the causally relevant factors in real space. That is, instead of using a six dimensional phase space to count possible microstates of certain kinds, we used a geometrical fact about the distribution of causally relevant factors in uniform, three dimensional space not only to define non-randomness, but also to explain why such systems evolve in the direction of randomness over time. The unevenness in the spatial distribution of any of those factors is what causes it to be evened out, because any such unevenness entails that certain (symmetrically interacting) molecules will be in asymmetrical situations, and that will make them interact in ways that tend to equalize their distribution in space. That tendency will continue until there is no longer any unevenness to drive it. It is a change in the geometrical structure of the whole region.

The authority of mathematics may lead some contemporary naturalists to argue that Boltzmann’s statistical definition of randomness is just a mathematically more rigorous way of stating the geometrical definition. But it is not, for his six dimensional phase space is a mathematical abstraction that precludes explaining the tendency to randomness geometrically. To be sure, Boltzmann’s definition of randomness as a statistical equilibrium implies that it is overwhelmingly probable that any system we happen to examine will be random. But that does not explain why the system has a tendency to become more random over time. Indeed, his statistical explanation denies that there is any real tendency toward randomness, if that means that change really has a direction in time, for it holds only that we will almost always find them in random states, if one samples many such systems at many different times. But that does not explain the tendency to randomness by showing that change really has that direction over time.

On the contrary, Boltzmann’s definition of randomness gives rise to Loschmidt’s reversibility paradox. The basic laws of physics are time-symmetrical, which means that, if the molecules all have the same locations, but exactly opposite momentums, change will take place as if time were reversed. That means, as Loschmidt pointed out, that for every non-random microstate that evolves toward randomness, there must be another microstate that evolves toward non-randomness. Indeed, since the statistics by which Boltzmann defines randomness assume that every possible microstate is equally probable, his definition implies that for every non-random microstate that evolves toward randomness, there must be another microstate—the one in which the momentums of all the molecules are exactly reversed—that proceeds towards the non-random state. Changes in either direction should occur equally often. But in fact, we never observe closed systems becoming non-random spontaneously.^vii

The basic source of Loschmidt’s reversibility paradox is overlooking space as an ontological cause. It was Boltzmann who first overlooked space when he argued that randomness is a “statistical equilibrium” about the molecules in the gas. And the reason our ontological explanation does not generate Loschmidt’s reversibility paradox is that it does not have to assume that all possible microstates of the system are equally probable. This is not to deny that, among the abstractly possible microstates that would appear to be random from the macroscopic standpoint, there are some that would evolve into non-random macrostates, if they occurred. That possibility is a consequence of the time symmetry of the basic laws of physics, which we accept as part of the essential nature of matter. But the geometrical explanation need not admit that such microstates ever actually occur as the result of the motion and interaction of molecules that are already random. Nor is that problematic, since no one has ever given a good reason to believe that all mathematically possible microstates are equally probable.^viii

Loschmidt’s paradox is a rigorous way of showing that the statistical definition of randomness does not explain the time-asymmetry of this most basic instance of the second law of thermo­dynamics. We can now see that his reversibility paradox comes from using a statistical approach that abstracts from the geometrical structure of space. Our ontological reduction of the tendency to randomness avoids Loschmidt’s paradox and explains why the change has a direction in time, because instead of relying on mathematical abstractions, it takes the wholeness of space into account as an ontological cause. The material objects (with their kinetic energies and directions of motion) have certain locations in the whole region, and that gives the region the geometrical structure as a whole which is, as we have seen, the cause of the tendency to randomness. Our ontological causes enable us to see intuitively why non-random states tend to become random over time. In the uniform geometrical structure of space, any unevenness in the distribution of causally relevant factors is a geometrical structure about the whole region of molecules that causes them to be evened out. It puts molecules in local situations where their motion and symmetrical, elastic interactions will add up over time in the structure of space to randomness, that is, toward their being evenly distributed on the micro level.

This is not to deny that Boltzmann’s statistical definition may provide thermo­dynamics with a useful way of measuring randomness (and lack of randomness) or representing them mathematically. Indeed, the confirmation of quantitative predictions of statistical mechanics suggests that it is. But a measure of randomness is not the same as an explanation of why systems tend to become random over time. For that, we must reduce the mathematical representations to spatio-materialist ontology.

This is to resolve one of the anomalies that arises in the program of reductionistic materialism, where it is assumed that regularities are explained by deducing them from the basic laws of physics, initial and boundary conditions, and relevant mathematical theorems. Bus as we can now see, the attempt to give an efficient-cause explanations of the second law of thermodynamics is the mistake. It requires an ontological explanation, that is, an explanation of the same kind that explains why the basic laws of physics are true. Those time-symmetrical laws physical laws are relevant in explaining this time-asymmetrical regularity, but only because they characterize the essential nature of the matter contained in the region of space. It is the how such bits of matter work together with the wholeness of space that explains the tendency to randomness, for as we have seen, it is the geometrical structure about the distribution of any of the three causally relevant factors that puts material objects in situations where their behavior in accordance with physical laws will tend to even out their distribution, resulting in evenly distributed heat. Indeed, geometrical structures about the locations, motions and interactions of the material objects in which entropy can increase are what geometrical structures of material objects must coincide with in order for them to use the free energy to do work.

The explanation of the second law of thermodynamics requires thinking outside the box. In this case, the box is the assumption that to explain is to give an efficient-cause explanations. What does not come under discussion in disputes about the status of the law of entropy increase is the assumption that any adequate explanation must fit the deductive-nomological model. It must be shown to follow from the laws of physics together with relevant initial and boundary conditions. And since there is nothing temporally asymmetrical about those laws (or the initial and boundary conditions), the second law of thermo­dynamics seems to be irreducible.

The time-asymmetry can be explained ontologically, because it replaces the laws of physics with matter of the appropriate kind and recognizes that they coincide with a substance with an opposite kind of essential nature. Though the regularities in the motion and interaction of such matter in space can be described by laws of physics using the language of mathematics, that is to abstract the local regularities about what happens in a spatiomaterial world like ours and to leave the global regularities behind. By bringing the ontological causes of the laws of physics to the surface, we recognize that they depend as much on the structure of space as they do on the nature of matter. But the structure of space entails its wholeness. All possible spatial relations among bits of matter fit together as part of the geometrical structure of space, and by seeing the distribution of the causally relevant factors (their locations, kinetic energies and directions of motion) against the background of the wholeness of space, we see it as a geometrical structure in the region as a whole. That is to recognize the efficient cause that produces the greater randomness, for it is that geometrical structure that puts material objects in situations where they tend to wipe out the geometrical structure.

To be sure, this efficient cause is what is measured by the statistical improbability developed by Boltzmann. But by abstracting geometrical structure as an arithmetic measure of randomness, Boltzmann hides the connection between this efficient cause and its effect. We can see how the geometrical distribution of causally relevant factors in the region tends to wipe itself out, because we have a factual of rational imagination, which includes spatio-temporal and structuro-temporal imagination, and we understand how the motion and interactions of the material objects tends to change their spatial relations, kinetic energies and directions of motion. As time passes, it adds up in the region to randomness. The connection between the efficient cause and its effect is necessary, because it is caused ontologically by the endurance of these substances through time. But this causal connection cannot be represented in a deductive-nomological explanation, because the only way it can be represented by a mathematical formula, like a law of nature, it as a basic law, like the second law of thermodynamics, which is irreducible to the other basic laws of physics. Hence, there is no solution as long as the only kind of explanation that is recognized to be legitimate are efficient-cause explanations. That is to be locked in the box of the deductive-nomological model of explanation.

Mechanical principles. A less obvious doubt about the reducibility of the causal connections in scientific explanation to the basic laws of physics has to do with the principles of mechanics. The irreducibility of the structural aspects of mechanical principles has been used by Hilary Putnam and others to cast doubt on using physics as the foundation for a complete explanation of the world. Their arguments have contributed to general consensus about rejecting all forms of reductionism. But the problems to which they are pointing are solved by spatiomaterialism. Just as Loschmidt’s’ reversibility paradox arises from failing to recognize how material global regularities can be explained ontologically, these critic are pointing to three problems that arise from failing to recognize how structural global regularities can be explained ontologically. The significance of ontological philosophy is, in part, therefore, the restoration of the good name reductionism.

Putnam’s Board-and-Peg Argument. Many years ago, Hilary Putnam (1975, 296-7) cited a simple regularity that he argued was not reducible to the basic laws of physics as required by the materialists’ reductionistic program. It can, however, be reduced to spatiomaterialism by way of the ontological explanation of structural global regularities.

Putnam illustrated a basic problem about reductive explanations with a simple physical system – “a board with two holes, a circle one inch in diameter and a square one inch high, and a cubical peg one-sixteenth of an inch less than one inch high.” The peg passes through the square hole, but not the round hole. This regularity would not be explained, Putnam holds, even if it could be deduced from the laws of physics governing the behavior of matter in this system.

“One might say that the peg is, after all, a cloud or, better, a rigid lattice of atoms. One might even attempt to give a description of that lattice, compute its electrical potential, worry about why it does not collapse, produce some quantum mechanics to explain why it is stable, etc. The board is also a lattice of atoms, I will call the peg ‘system A’, and the holes ‘region 1’ and ‘region 2’. One could compute all possible trajectories of system A (there are, by the way very serious questions about these computations, their effectiveness, feasibility, and so on, but let us assume this), and perhaps one could deduce from just the laws of particle mechanics or quantum electrodynamics that system A never passes through region 1, but that there is at least one trajectory which enables it to pass through region 2.”^ix

Putnam argued that a deduction of this regularity from physics, if it is possible at all, is not really an explanation. What explains why the square peg fits in the square hole, but not in the round hole, is not the basic laws of physics governing the ultimate constituents. It is the higher level structure. All that matters is that “the board is rigid, the peg is rigid, and as a matter of geometrical fact, the round hole is smaller than the peg, the square hole is bigger than the cross-section of the peg.” This explanation would hold regardless of what the peg and board are made of, as long as they are rigid, and so Putnam argues that such higher-level structural explanations are “autonomous” and not reducible to physics. It is our interests, Putnam claims, that make it look as if irreducible higher-order structures like these are causally relevant.

What Putnam is getting at in his example is obviously, however, structural ontological causation. It is just an instance of a reversible structural global regularity, like our example of the box of gas. What is regular in this case is that certain material objects moving and interacting in the region always have unchanging geometrical structures. That is a global regularity, even though all of the global changes are reversible, for it means that the region itself has a kind of geometrical structure that does not change over time. The bare existence of those material structures moving around randomly in the region includes the fact that the peg is sometimes in one hole, but not the other. By denying that the structure of this dynamic process can be deduced from the laws of physics, Putnam is, in effect, making the case for recognizing material structures and the global aspect of space (that is, its wholeness) as ontological causes.

Putnam is not, however, arguing for spatio-materialism. He accepts the materialist ontology, and he argues that these explanations refer to geometrical structures only because “we are much more interested in generalizing to other structures which are rigid and have various geometrical relations, than we are in generalizing to the next peg that has exactly this molecular structure.”^x That role of special interests is what leads him to argue that “structural features” are a “higher level” that is “autonomous” from physics.

Let me emphasize, however, that space is an ontological cause of this simple global regularity in two ways.

First, the global aspect of space, which is entailed by its structure, is an ontological cause, along with these derivative ontological causes, of the simple global regularity being explained. It connects the geometrical structures of different material objects as parts of the same world and enables them to interact as geometrical structures.

Second, the global aspect of space is an essential ontological cause of the formation of the unchanging geometrical structures of these material objects, since material structures are derivative ontological causes. They are by-products of the tendency of potential energy to become kinetic. And since the spatial relations of the parts of the material object are constituted by the space that contains them, the geometrical structures of the board and peg are not universals, but no less concrete than the material objects that embody them. What enables the board and peg to move across space without changing their geometrical structures is that every region of space contains every possible geometrical structure. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the anomaly in this case comes from materialists overlooking that space is a substance, because to account for this simple global regularity, all we need is to recognize that space has the same ontological status as matter.

The Supervenience of Dispositional Properties. Other philosophers trying to carry out the materialist reductionistic program have noticed certain anomalies that arise in the reduction of dispositional properties. For example, Bigelow and Pargetter (1987, p. 190) call fragility a “supervenient” property, because it cannot be reduced to the laws of physics.

Properties are said to be “supervenient” when they cannot be reduced to physical properties in the sense of being defined in terms of them. A definition would pick out exactly the same objects by identifying in terms of physical properties what is meant by the supervenient property, which would be another way identifying the same property. But such definitions cannot be given in some cases.

The most obvious are functional properties, such as “being a clock,” which may be realized by objects whose physical structures range from machines worn on the wrist to tree rings, sun dials, and the amount of radioactive decay. There is no way to pick out all clocks by their physical properties, because when one looks for physical properties, one is force to start listing all the different kinds of physical objects that could serve as clocks.

In particular causes, supervenient properties are thought to be identical to the physical properties of the object having the supervenient property. Thus, they hold that any object that is physically similar to one that has a supervenient property must also have the supervenient property. But supervenient properties are not reducible, because it is not possible to describe the physical properties that are both necessary and sufficient for supervenient properties. There are just too many different kinds of cases and no principle by which a list of them can be completed. The reduction involves, at most, therefore, only an identity between the tokens on the two levels, not an identity between types. That is what it means to say that the properties supervene on physical traits.

Reduction would require an identity between the functional and the physical types, or what is called “type-identity.” But since functional properties are supervenient, all the holds is that the functional property in this case is nothing but the physical properties. Since only the token of the functional property is identical to the token of the physical property, or what is called “token-identity.”

In the case of the disposition, fragility, what Bigelow and Pargetter (1987, p. 190) apparently mean by “supervenience” is that fragile objects of the same and different kinds can break up or shatter in different ways in different situations. Different physical properties are responsible for what happens in different cases, and there is no physical property that they all have in common by which all the kinds of cases can all be included.

Supervenience theorists are eager to reassure us, however, that they are not saying that non-physical causes are responsible for the exhibition of such supervenient properties. In each particular case, it is possible, in principle, to explain physically what happened, and any case that is physically like it in all relevant respects will also break up in the same way (or not break up at all). But the disposition is not reducible to those physical properties (and their effects according to basic laws of physics), because there is no natural physical kind or type that is identical to this type of disposition, that is, which includes all and only fragile objects, making fragility a supervenient property.

Physical dispositions can be explained, as we have seen, by spatiomaterialism as forms of structural global regularities. In addition to the wholeness of space, the structural ontological causes of the global regularities are the geometrical structures of the material objects involved and free energy that is supplied somehow by the conditions under which the disposition is exhibited.

What makes fragility irreducible to the laws of physics is the difficulty in identifying the structural cause of the irreversible change in the object before it occurs. A fragile object will break up in different ways, depending on the precise way free energy is supplied under the test conditions. That is because different structural causes are embedded in the same material object. The structural cause in each case is all the parts of the composite object that do not come apart (though breaking up may involve a series of such structural causes), for they are the unchanging structures that determine how objects break up. That is, fragile objects are just machines that use the free energy provided by the conditions of its expression to do the mechanical work of separating chucks of itself from one another. But they are complex machines that do it different ways in different cases, depending on how free energy is supplied.

Does the existence in the material object of many different structural causes generating many different global regularities mean that fragility is a supervenient property? That can’t be correct, for if it were, we wouldn’t be able to see how all the global regularities are alike. And we can. Given that the bonds among the parts of the object are inelastic and cannot absorb much of the free energy supplied by the impact, we can see how the forces are communicated by their bonds and spread out geometrically so that whole groups of bonds break together or not at all. For example, we can see why a wine glass dropped on concrete will shatter, but when dropped on a rug which absorbs some of the initial shock, it is more likely to break at the stem. What happens is just a result of how the motion and interaction of bits of matter add up in space over time, including how forces are communicated among the parts of the fragile object, and with our capacity for spatio-temporal imagination, we can “see” the similarity about what happens in each case. The similarities among cases of objects breaking up under impact (including different kinds of fragile objects) are basically geometrical, but nonetheless real. Thus, there is a type-type identity between the ontological causes and the disposition (or global regularity) they determine.

Supervenience is just an appearance that a spatiomaterialist world has because science seeks only efficient-cause explanations. What makes fragility seem to be irreducible is the assumption that the reductive explanation must be formulated as a deductive argument from laws of physics together with initial conditions and mathematics theorems.

The basic laws of physics are local regularities about change that are constituted jointly by space and matter. They depend on the structure of space as much as the essential natures of the forms of matter contained by space. Thus, when the laws of physics are taken as basic in an efficient-cause explanation, only some of the relevant aspects of the ontological causes are represented. The structure is space is included only insofar as it helps constitute the local regularities described by the laws, but that is to abstract from the wholeness that is also entailed by the geometrical structure of space. The wholeness of space is just as relevant to how change unfolds over time as the aspects of space that are represented by the laws of physics. It includes all the geometrical aspects of the motions and interactions of the bits of matter that add up over time to a certain structural effect. But the wholeness of space is excluded, according to the deductive-nomological model, from efficient-cause explanations.

It is not easy to translate the geometrical factors that are relevant such an ontological reduction of dispositions into mathematical formulas that can be used in conjunction with the laws of physics to derive a description of the breaking up or shattering. The motion and interaction of material structures do not add up to simple quantities, like those involved in the conservation of momentum and energy. They add up to geometrical structures. But limitations in the capacity of mathematical formulas to represent geometrical structures should not be taken as grounds for denying their role or the role of the geometrical structure of space itself in the ontological reduction of dispositions.

It is not necessary to construct deductions using mathematical formulas, because the cause that explains the kind of structural global regularity is a material structure and how its motion and interaction add up in the wholeness of space, and that can be understood by using spatio-temporal imagination. It is a matter of seeing how the forces imposed by the impact are communicated to other parts and how they build up in certain locations. Insofar as the structural effects depend on quantitative aspects, such as the strength of the forces and the distances over which they are exerted, they can be approximated by computer models that take into account both the forces and the geometrical structures of each molecule or atom and their spatial relations to one another in the composite whole. This is, of course, how materials science has been explaining the properties of bulk matter ever since computers became widely available. The capacity of computer simulations to do what formal mathematical deductions cannot do is evidence of the relevance of the geometrical structures of the material objects and the geometrical structure of space itself as ontological causes of these global regularities.

Fragility and other such dispositions are, therefore, supervenient properties only in the sense that they cannot be deduced mathematically from the basic laws of physics together with appropriate initial and boundary conditions. But they are not supervenient relative to our ontology, because when we recognize that the dispositions are constituted by bits of matter that coincide with space as a substance, we can see how the wholeness of space so constrains the motion and interaction of the material structures that they add up over time to global regularities of certain kinds.

The example of fragility is complicated by the fact that one of its ontological causes is derivative. Material structures are not basic ontological causes, but depend on the tendency of potential energy to become kinetic, and fragility is a disposition in which the very existence of the ontological cause is at stake. It involves, in other words, the generation and corruption of (derivative) substances in our ontology, and thus, is special in way that parallels the generation and corruption of primary substances in Aristotle’s ontology.

The complication about generation and corruption encountered in the case of fragility is, however, general, for it holds of chemical interactions generally. They are unlike the interactions in which molecules serve as catalysts (or enzymes), for in those cases, the molecules have geometrical structures that persist through the change, making them ontological causes. But in chemical interactions, molecules have geometrical structures that contain many different structural ontological causes, like fragile objects, because their global regularities also depend on how the free energy that drives the irreversible processes is supplied.

A typical chemical interaction involves an exchange of clusters of atoms between two original molecules that result in two new molecules. Their shapes determine how the original molecules fit together and, so, which parts of each molecule interact with which parts of the other, and the total force exerted at such moments determines whether or not the molecules will interact chemically and exchange subgroups of atoms, forming new kinds of molecules. The free energy comes from the potential energy of the forces that parts of molecules exert on one another, but it is structured by spatial relations among parts that are not changed.^xi The structural causes in these cases are the clusters of atoms (or smaller molecules) that do not change their geometrical structures during the interaction, since only unchanging geometrical structures of matter are ontological causes. Thus, molecules will contain different structural causes depending on which other kinds of molecules are combined with them. But that does not mean that chemical interactions are supervenient properties or otherwise ontologically irreducible, at least, not when we recognize that substantival space is an ontological cause.

Putnam’s Argument from Countervailing Conditions. Although Putnam does not say that they are supervenient, he also argues that dispositions are often irreducible. His reason is that they are tendencies that hold only “other things being equal.” Putnam (1987) illustrates the irreducibility of disposition by considering the solubility of a sugar cube in water.^xii

It might not dissolve when placed in water, he argues, because the water might already be saturated with sugar. Or because the water might freeze before the cube can dissolve. Finally, he appeals to Loschmidt’s reversibility paradox as a countervailing condition. The water might happen to be in a state that is the exact time-reversal of a state that occurs when a larger cube was dissolving, so that the motions and interactions in this special case make the cube un-dissolve out of the water and form a crystal.

It is materialist reduction that Putnam is talking about, for the irreducibility of these disposition comes from trying to deduce them from premises that are “formulas in the language of fundamental physics”^xiii which cannot take into account of all the various exceptional conditions that might prevent the expression of the disposition. On the deductive-nomological model of explanation, the only way to predict what will happen is to trace precisely the motion and interaction of all the objects in the region over a region of time and see where it leads, and Putnam denies that all the conditions that might be relevant to the exhibition of the disposition can be included in such a deductive argument.

The dissolving of the sugar cube in water is, according to the spatiomaterialist reduction, just a structured thermo­dynamic process. The free energy is the potential energy that comes from the forces that would form weak hydrogen bonds between the sugar and water molecules. The structural causes are the shapes of the water molecules, the shapes of the sugar molecules, and the material structure that results from packing sugar molecules together in the crystal.

In dissolving, weak bonds holding sugar molecules together in the crystal are replaced by weak bonds with water molecules as a result of their random motion and interaction with one another in the region. Opposite electric charges on opposite sides of the water molecules fit with similar charges on sugar molecules in such a way that the sugar molecules exchange their bonds with one another for stronger, less energy-rich bonds with water molecules, freeing kinetic energy in the process. Thus, when their random motion and interaction brings these molecules together, sugar molecules are released from their bonds in the crystal to form bonds with water, and a new kind of static order comes to exist. That is how matter, as energy, flows through geometrical structures from potential energy to evenly distributed heat in this case.

Putnam’s doubts about reducibility come from the impossibility of including countervailing conditions in the deduction. But if the disposition is recognized to be a global regularity, there can be no countervailing conditions that are not taken into account, because all the bits of matter in the region are involved in how their motion and interaction add up over time.

If what prevents the sugar cube from dissolving is that the water is already saturated with sugar molecules, it is simply the absence of the free energy in the region that the material structures use to do the work of freeing them from the crystal. The potential energy depends on certain spatial relations between the molecules exerting the forces, and since all the water molecules in the region are already bound to sugar molecules, the relevant spatial relations do not exist, and so there is no thermo­dynamic flow of matter from potential energy to evenly distributed heat to be structured. That condition is already taken into consideration, if it is explained ontologically as a global regularity by structural causes and the global aspect of space.

On the other hand, if what keeps the sugar cube from dissolving is a sudden freezing of the water, that is also something that is already taken into account by treating it as a global regularity. Global regularities are regularities about whole regions of space, and that means they must either be closed or else one must keep track of what is flowing in and what is flowing out of the region. Although a sudden freeze would certainly stop the irreversible special theory of relativity, there is no way it could happen unnoticed. Heat is a form of matter (that is, kinetic energy is explained ontologically as kinetic matter), and as a kind of substance, it cannot simply go out of existence. The tendency to randomness spreads heat throughout the region, and it can be removed from the region only if there is something colder in the region to which it can flow. That would be a thermo­dynamic flow of matter toward evenly distributed heat in the region that is clearly relevant in explaining the dissolving as a global regularity. Finally, nothing outside the region could make it freeze without violating the principle of local action. Thus, a sudden freezing is not an exception to an explanation of dissolving as a structural global regularity.

The final countervailing condition Putnam mentions is not explained by this reduction to spatiomaterialism, for it is just an illusion that comes from the attempt to carry out a materialist reduction of the tendency to randomness. Putnam is using Loschmidt’s paradox as a countervailing condition. But as we saw in the last chapter, when the tendency to randomness is explained geometrically, rather than mathematically, by statistics, there is no reason to believe the water and sugar molecules would ever be in a microstate that corresponds to one in which the sugar cube is dissolving except for all the molecules having exactly opposite momentums. Only the statistical definition of randomness requires us to believe that all possible microstates are equally probable.

None of the countervailing conditions to exhibiting solubility that Putnam mentions would be overlooked, therefore, by an explanation of this disposition as a global regularity, because when the global aspect of space is recognized as an ontological cause, the whole region where it occurs is causally relevant. Dispositions are not properties inherent in the nature of matter, but rather kinds of structural global regularities, which depend on structural causes, free energy supplied by a thermo­dynamic flow of matter toward evenly distributed heat, and a region of space where their geometrical structures coincide. What makes it seem that exceptional conditions preclude the ontological reduction of dispositions is the assumption that a reductive explanation must deduce a description of the regularity from “formulas in the language of fundamental physics,” as if the disposition had to follow from the basic laws of physics without taking account of how structural causes can channel the thermo­dynamic flow of forms of matter toward evenly distributed heat in the region. The role of space in imposing those regularities may make it hard to formulate these ontological explanations as deductions, but the reduction to the ontology of spatio-materialism leaves no room for surprises.

Finally, other apparently irreducible phenomena can be explained in similar ways.

Prigogine (1980), for example, points to the phenomenon of self-forming objects as irreducible.^xiv He recognizes that it does not occur when entropy is maximum, but depends on open systems, in which there is a flow of mass and energy (so-called “dissipative systems”). But far from being an anomaly, this kind of phenomenon is entailed in a spatiomaterial world like ours, because self-forming objects are just instances of the tendency of potential energy to become kinetic.^xv See the discussion of crystal formation and the conformation of protein molecules in Structural global regularities.

“Chaos” is likewise cited as evidence of emergent phenomena. These are situations in which structural global regularities suddenly appear from apparently chaotic, or random, dynamic processes, such as a turbulent flow suddenly becoming highly structured. What makes them seem inexplicable, however, is failing to take space into account in one way or another, either by not recognizing the structural causes at work in the region, by not taking the geometrical structure of the boundary conditions of the system into account, or by ignoring the structure of the space within those boundaries. When they are taken into account, it is not surprising that the quantitative aspects of the motion and interaction of bits of matter in the region would fit together geometrically with those spatial structures so that their motion and interaction add up over time to certain regular, repeated patterns.^xvi They are just structural global regularities. The anomalies all come from overlooking structural ontological causes and how they work together with the global aspect of space.

Functions. The recognition of supervenient properties is the most common way of describing the failure of reductionism, ^xvii and functional properties are the example that has forced philosophers of science to recognize that some properties are supervenient. The main problem is that they may be realized by indefinitely many different and seemingly unconnected sets of physical traits, as illustrated by such artifacts as clocks. As we have noted, clocks may be realized by objects whose physical structures range from machines worn on the wrist to tree rings, sun dials, and the amount of radioactive decay. Artifact are a special case, which is one sense are not so problematic, because we know that they depend on the intentions of subjective beings. In another sense, they are more problematic, because it requires the reduction of intentions. However, functional properties also play an enormous role in biological, where they pose a similar problem. For example, hearts are mechanisms for circulating energy in multicellular organisms, but they cannot easily be picked out by their physical properties, because they vary from simple gastrovascular cavities to elaborate circulatory systems with arteries and veins involving one or more hearts of various kinds.

There is no general agreement about the significance of the existence of supervenient properties. At one extreme, they are considered a way of defending physicalism against the claims that there are processes that cannot be explained in terms of the laws of physics. At the other extreme, they have attracted other philosophers of science toward emergentism, is the sense of the belief that there are laws in less general branches of science that cannot be reduced to physics.

Though supervenience theorists generally deny that upper level laws mentioning supervenient properties are irreducible, supervenient properties do entail a kind of law that is not reducible.

Supervenience theorists insist that the causal connections in which supervenient properties may be involved can always be explained by the physical causes that are responsible for the regularity in that case, though, of course, those physical causes vary with the kind of physical properties that realized the supervenient property in that case. They are right to deny that there is any need irreducible causal laws (that is, laws that can be used to explain events by efficient causes). No one believe that clocks or hearts require anything but physical laws for their operation.

Even so, however, the reduction of the less general regularity to the laws of physics is not complete, because the physical explanation of what happens in each instance of a supervenient property does not explain the indefinitely large variety of different sets of physical traits that may realize the super­venient property. In other words, the grouping of those cases in such a way that they all have the same supervenient property is itself a regularity that has not been explained. If supervenient properties are anything more than purely subjective projections onto the world, then the fact that such physically diverse objects can be grouped together in describing upper level regularities is something that needs to be explained in the end. That regularity may not be a law of nature in the sense of a law of nature that supports an efficient cause explanation (according to the deductive-nomological model). But it does imply the existence of an order of some kind about the world, and that order cannot be reduced to the laws of physics and conditions described in physical terms.

In the case of functional properties, furthermore, the prime example of supervenient properties, there is even more reason to suspect that there are irreducible laws of nature, because functional properties are typically used to give functional explanations. It is not just that certain organs in multicellular bodies are all have the function of circulating energy to all parts of the body, but that the existence of such organs seems to be explained by that function. But if functions are causes that can explain the traits that have them, it involves causal connections like those in efficient causes. The function is a different event or condition from the trait it would explain, just as the efficient cause is different from its effect.

It is certainly not like the connection between an ontological cause and its effect. The function is not constituted by the trait described physically. If it were, there would be nothing supervenient about the functional property. Instead, traits are said to “realize” the function, because there are many different ways that functional properties can be realized. But that makes it even more mysterious how the function can be said to explain the trait, since the same function can be served by physically different traits.

Furthermore, since a functional explanation explains the trait by the function, it would not help to discover that the trait constitutes (or realizes) the function, because the function must be prior to the trait to “cause” it. And that would require explaining where the function comes from or how it could make material objects have the physical properties that would constitute them.

The prior issue is, therefore, whether functional explanations in biology are valid and, if so, how. Though most philosophers are inclined to believe that they are valid in some sense, there has been no generally accepted defense of their validity. The received view is that they are really just disguised historical explanations of a contingent process of selection, which do not justify prediction of the traits that will evolve.^xviii But if evolution is a global regularity in a world of matter and space in time, there is a sense in which they are valid explanations.

There is, of course, no question of functional explanations being valid, if that means that the function is a substance that acts on matter to give it the trait, that is, to give it the physical properties that enable it to serve the function. That is the kind of causal connection entailed by Aristotelian teleology, or what is called “final causation.” Aristotle believed that having an essential form would make natural change take place in the particular substance for the sake of an end, final cause, or telos, which is said to be good for substances of its natural kind. Naturalists have long since recognized that there are no essential forms in the natural world that work in the way Aristotle supposed. That is entailed by materialism about the natural world, which has prevailed since the beginning of modern science, and essential forms acting as final causes are not among the substances assumed by spatiomaterialism.

The validity of functional explanations. The validity of functional explanations in biology is, however, entailed by ontological philosophy, and the way in which their validity is explained, confirms their validity in a far stronger sense than is currently recognized. Functions do cause the traits that serve them, and if evolution is due to reproductive causation, functions explain why organisms have the traits they do in a way that makes it possible, in principle, to predict that the traits will evolve.

That is not to say that every physical property of the traits is predictable. The traits usually involve some physical properties that could be otherwise. But enough of the physical properties of the traits are determined by their functions that they can be recognized by their physical properties in the organisms.

Evolution is due to reproductive causation. That is, evolution is a global regularity that is explained ontologically as the kind of change that is constituted by reproductive cycles and the wholeness of space. The reproductive cycles are material structures of a certain kind using the available free energy to go through cycles in which they both reproduce and do non-reproductive work that controls conditions that affect their reproduction. The regularity about change in the region over time includes , as we have seen, both a gradual change during each stage in the direction of maximum holistic power for organisms of their kind (or their natural perfection) and a series of evolutionary stages in the direction of the natural perfection of life itself.

Since reproducing organisms impose natural selection on themselves (by the scarcity caused by generations of reproduction in space), what is regular about change in the region over time is that every possible increase in the power of the reproducing organisms is necessarily made actual as it becomes possible. Each random variation of their structures that is acquired because it controls some condition affecting its reproduction is a trait. Its function is to control the relevant condition. And since the conditions that it is possible for random variations on evolving organisms to control are “in the cards,” so to speak, they can, in principle, be used to predict the traits that will evolve.

Likewise, for the revolutionary episodes. The higher levels of part-whole complexity in the structures of the reproducing organisms that can be tried out at each stage of evolution depend on the natures of the reproducing organisms that already exist, because they must originate as a radical random variations on existing structures. And whether they can control some relevant condition that was previously out of reach depends on the nature of the region where conditions affect their reproduction. That is also “in the cards,” so to speak, and since both the possibility and the functionality can be known, the stages of evolution are, in principle, predicable. Thus, once again, even higher levels of structure in reproducing organisms can be explained by the function that it is possible for such structures to serve.

Actual predictions of the new traits that occur in gradual evolution by their possible functions would require the capacity to imagine every possible random variation and to see what condition those secondary effects would control, and that is usually not possible. Thus, it is only after the change has occurred that we are usually in a position to see which possible function was responsible for the trait's evolution. But in the case of revolutionary evolution, it is easier to see the possible functions of new kinds of primary structures, and that is the kind of functional explanation that was used to trace the course of evolution in the previous section.

This ontological explanation of evolution as a global regularity entails, in other words, a necessity about the kind of change that takes place over time in the region of space. It is a kind of regularity that makes prediction possible, in principle.

This is formally similar to the explanation of dispositions and ordinary causal connections between events described in the last chapter, for those regularities were also global regularities explained by matter and space as ontological causes. In dispositions, the event ordinarily called the “cause” is typically the way free energy is supplied, and the irreversible change that takes place is the effect.

In this case, however, reproductive causation necessarily makes every possible increase in the power of primary structures actual, and given the meaning that "function" has ontologically, that means that it necessarily makes every functional trait that is possible actual. Possible functions are, therefore, the cause of the evolution of certain kinds of secondary effects in much the same sense that compressing and releasing an elastic object causes it to spring back or putting a sugar cube in water causes it to dissolve. The evolutionary changes that make it possible for the random variations on reproducing organisms being tried out to be functional in a new way are what causes that trait to evolve.

Though functional explanation are valid, the functions are not essential forms with causal powers, as Aristotle assumed. In Aristotelian teleology, functions are assumed as a basic principle (if not substance) of the ontology, and thus, their causal powers are not explained, but merely assumed. But in evolution by reproductive causation, the ontological causes are the kinds of space and matter that exist in a world like ours, for they are the ultimate ontological causes of reproductive global regularities.

The ontological reducibility of functional properties. The predictability of traits by their functions should remove any doubts about the reducibility of functions or functional properties to the ontology of naturalism. Doubts about their reducibility come from the understanding that contemporary Darwinists have of the causes of evolutionary change. They are, as pointed out in the explanation of reproductive global regularities, accidentalists. They think of natural selection as being imposed on living organisms from outside by unpredictable changes in their environment, and they worry about the availability of random variations to meet the new conditions in the best possible way. For them, in Kauffman's (1993) words, evolution merely "cobbles together jury-rigged contraptions.”

This view of evolution is another example of the effect of overlooking the wholeness of space as a cause of regularities about change over time, for instead of seeing evolution as the way that reproductive cycles add up in space over time, it sees evolution as driven by an externally imposed natural selection. Thus, it seems to contemporary Darwinists that different traits might have served the same functions. Since that means that there is no necessary connection between functions and the traits that serve them, functions are said to be "super­venient properties" relative to the physical nature of the traits that have them.

But if there is a necessary connection between the functions and the traits that serve them, as implied by their status as consequences of spatiomaterialism, then functional properties are, in principle, reducible to the ontology of naturalism. This is to reduce functional properties to our ontology in much the same way that we reduced dispositional properties, except that the relevant global regularity depends on reproductive causation, rather than structural causation.

It is the progressiveness of evolutionary change that entails the validity of functional explanations and the ontological reducibility of functional properties. From the beginning, I have described evolutionary change as change in the direction of natural perfection, and I have distinguished various kinds of natural perfection: the natural perfection of the organisms at each stage, the natural perfection of their combination in the ecology, and the natural perfection of life in the series of stages of evolution. Even evolutionary change itself has a kind of natural perfection about it because of the way that what happens at each moment contributes to the progress.

The direction of evolutionary change was called “natural perfection,” because it always involves a maximum holistic power and that is the kind of part-whole relation that is optimal in a spatiomaterial world. It is “natural” perfection, because it is the kind of perfection that is appropriate in a natural world.

Though it depends on the thermodynamic flow of matter from forms of free energy to energy bound as evenly distributed heat, nothing can structure thermo­dynamic order except material structures, and reproductive causation is making the most of structural causation by shaping reproducing organisms to be as powerful as possible in using the available free energy to control conditions in the world. To be sure, until the evolution of reason, organisms acquire only those powers that control conditions that affect their own reproduction. But that is simply what is required for structural causes that are maximally powerful to exist in a world of matter and space in time. No structural causes, regardless how powerful, would last very long, if they did not use their power to ensure their own existence. Organisms do that in a way that makes them as powerful as possible, and rational beings do that because it is good.

The natural perfection produced by reproductive causation made it possible to explain goodness as contributing to natural perfection. Each part of such optimal part-whole relations makes a necessary contribution to its maximum holistic power, and thus, each is good in the sense of contributing to the natural perfection of the whole of which it is part. And as we have seen, this explanation is a definition of “good” that vindicates all our deepest and firmly held convictions about what is good and bad (and about what is right and wrong).

By this definition, goodness and perfection are related to one another as the property of the part is to the property of the whole in the products of reproductive causation. When the whole is perfect, all the parts are as good as they can be, and when all the parts are as good as they can be, the whole is perfect.

Moreover, it follow that the function that each non-reproductive structural effect has is good for the organism of which it is part, that each kind of organism is good for the ecology of which it is part, and that each level of organization in the structures of organisms that comes to exist with new stages of evolution are good for what exists in the whole region in which evolutionary change is happening. Ultimately, therefore, there is one whole on the planet (or planetary system) to whose perfection all the good parts make a necessary contribution.

To be functional is, therefore, to be good. Since their functions explain the traits that evolve, what explains the traits that organisms have is their goodness. The goodness of the random variations is what explains why they are naturally selected. Likewise, since what explain each new stage of evolution is the functionality of its higher level of part-whole complexity, what explains each new stage of evolution is its goodness. The goodness of the higher level of organization is what explains why it is naturally selected. This connection to the nature of goodness is another way of saying that evolution is progressive.

Rational causation. The remaining problems about the nature of causation arise in the branches of science known as psychology and social science.

Psychology has to do with the explanation of individual behavior, and that is problematic mainly because we know too much. As rational beings, we have a special way of seeing into the minds of other rational beings (and subjective animals generally). We ordinarily explain individual behavior by the reasons that the individual has for it, that is, the beliefs, intentions, desires and the like that are responsible for it, or subjectivistic understanding, as we have been calling it. There are two problems,

One problem in this field is that rational explanations do not seem to be the kind of explanation that a branch of natural science ought to be seeking.

But another problem is that, even if they are, they do not seem to be reducible to the kinds of explanation given in physics.

The social science have to do with the explanation of social phenomena, or what has been explained here as the behavior of spiritual animals. We know that human societies are different from other groups of animals, because our capacity for subjectivistic understanding gives us an “inside view,” so to speak, of the phenomena. However, that view is not based on perception and, thus, is not from the vantage of natural science. Thus, there is a problem about the nature of the object that is being studied by the social sciences.

The problem about reductionism in this case is just opposite to the other cases considered here. Though there have been social scientists, like Comte and Durkheim, who thought that societies are not reducible to the individuals, that view is not common these days. Contemporary naturalists tend to assume that social phenomena must somehow be explained in terms of the individuals who make up human societies, because they do not see how there could be any relevant causes that arise from the nature of society as a whole.

The main philosophical problems about the nature of causation in social science has to do, therefore, with showing how social phenomena can be explained as a result of the nature of the individuals, the regularities in their behavior, and the situations in which they act. The project of explaining social phenomena in that way is called “methodological individualism,” and its most popular current form is sociobiology, which bypasses individual psychology and tries to explain social behavior by genes that have evolved in individuals.

The ontological explanation of the nature of change provides, however, a solution in all of these cases. Though the laws of nature (or regularities) discovered in psychology and social science may not be reducible to the laws of physics, they are reducible to the ontological causes recognized by spatiomaterialism in a world like ours. Once again, the reason is the failure to recognize that the global regularities are caused ontologically by the wholeness of space and other substances contained by it, both basic and derivative, like material structures and reproductive cycles. Indeed, all the basic phenomena investigated by both psychology and social science have already been explained in tracing the course of evolution by reproductive causation. What follows here is just a reminder of their relevance.

Psychology. In the first instance, psychology is based on our ordinary way of understanding human beings. That is to explain individual behavior and beliefs by the reason which are responsible for it, or what I have been calling “rational explanation.” For decades now, it has been is called “folk psychology” in epistemological philosophy of science, because it is generally assumed that such explanations depend on learning the relevant “laws of nature” as a normal part of the process of growing up in human society. But it has been explained here as subjectivistic understanding.

Subjectivistic understanding is part of the cognitive capacity I have been calling “reason,” for it is the use of rational imagination to think about the causes of beliefs and behavior in subjective animals like us. Reason has been explained here as a capacity that derives from the use of psychological sentences, for that is what enables the subject to represent and, thus, reflect on the psychological states that are involved causally in the process by which their animal behavior guidance system. That is the basis of the subject’s capacity to use the theoretical and practical reasoning that takes place in his own brain to simulate the reasoning going on in the brains of others, and thus, it is what enables the subject to see into the minds of other subjects.

Naturalistic understanding is another part of the capacity of reason. It is the use of rational imagination to think about the causes and effects of states of objects in space, or the kind of imagination that first evolved in primitive spiritual animals, which had only the use of natural sentences (with a subject-predicate grammar). The use of natural sentences gives the subject the concept of a state of affairs (or event) in nature, and since reason uses a faculty of imagination that is built on the spatio-temporal imagination of mammals and the structuro-temporal imagination of primates, it involves the ability to understand efficient causes and their effects (both those that depend on these basic aspects of the spatial structure of the world and those that are learned from experience of other regularities in the natural world).

Hermeneutics. By “hermeneutics,” I mean the belief that the best that science can do in the way of explaining individual beliefs and behavior is to give rational explanations.

This view is now most commonly defended in the philosophy of social science. There seems to be no hope explaining social phenomena unless the beliefs and behavior of individual can be explained. Even the gathering of statistics about individuals, as in economics and sociology, depends on being able to start with the ordinary explanations of their beliefs and behavior. Thus, those who are eager to have the social sciences recognized as a form of genuine knowledge about the world seem forced to accept a hermeneutical understanding of individual behavior.

Hermeneutics is also the foundation of most social psychology and clinical psychology for the same reason. But in psychology, there are attempts to give a deeper explanation of individual behavior, which would make it clear that psychology is a branch of natural science and, thus, no less entitled to claim that its conclusions are science. They will be considered next.

The main problem with simply accepting rational explanations as scientific explanations is that the empirical method does not lead to general agreement about what is true, at least not in a way that is comparable to using the empirical method with efficient-cause explanations.

This problem with the empirical method was discussed when the empirical method was introduced (in Method). The empirical method is the attempt to discover what is true by inferring to the best explanation of what is observable in the natural world, and as we noted, it is a method that can, in principle, be used in conjunction with various kinds of explanation: efficient-cause explanations, rational-cause explanations and ontological-cause explanations. The way that it leads to agreement in the case of efficient-cause explanations has made natural science a spectacular success in the attempt to discover the true. Its use in conjunction with ontological-cause explanations is the foundation of ontological philosophy, where it may also lead to general agreement, this time about the basic substance constituting the natural world. But in the case of rational-cause explanations, it fails to lead to agreement about what is true. Different rational subjects trying to explain the same behavior (or the same beliefs) of some individual often wind up with different conclusions, and no matter how much they consider one another’s rational explanations, there does not seem to be any way for them to reach agreement.

The problem about reaching agreement on rational-cause explanations is sometimes called the hermeneutical circle, because the attempt to resolve disputes about what an individual intends or believes in a particular case depends inferring to the best rational cause explanation. Since one standard of the best explanation is explaining the widest range of phenomena, the widest range in this case is the range of the individual’s behavior. But for other instances of the individual’s behavior to be relevant in judging which explanation is best, they must also be explained rationally, and thus, the same problem arises about explaining them. The rational explanation of one instance of behavior depends on the rational explanation of the other, and that instance on yet another, so that in the end, all the behavior has to be interpreted. The rational explanation of the part thus depends on the rational explanation of the whole, and as it happens, even when all relevant behavior is included, there are still differences among the subjective scientists.

The reason for these disputes can be explained, as we did earlier, by the nature of rational explanation. It comes down to disagreements among the subjective scientists themselves in basic their beliefs about the world, especially their most basic and general beliefs, such as moral and religious beliefs. An inference to the best rational explanation is an inference to the fewest and simplest psychological states that will explain the widest range of behavior, but it depends on a judgment about which alternative explanation is the most coherent, that is, rational selection. And since rational explanation involves using one’s own process of practical and theoretical reasoning to simulate the reasoning of others, the judgment about which alternative set of psychological states is simplest and fewest depends on using one’s own desires and beliefs (including beliefs about what is good) as the background in which they are compared. Since that background varies from one subjective scientist to the next, subjective scientists tend to disagree about which is the best rational explanation.

Inferences to the best efficient-cause explanations are not subject to this kind of dispute, because naturalistic understanding involves only beliefs about the natural world which are ultimately based on perception. No judgments about what is good and bad, or what is meaningful, or how one feels is relevant in natural science. But they are the stuff of the subjective sciences.

Insofar as such disagreements about the best rational-cause explanation are not resolvable, it is apparent that the conclusions of subjective science are not objective. The ontological explanation of the nature of reason shows that there is a good deal of validity in rational explanations, because the animal behavior guidance systems of rational subjects do work in basically the same way. Thus, to some extent, they can be used to discover the true, though the range in which they are trustworthy may be limited to more immediate intentions is rather well defined social situations. However, rational explanations will lead to much greater agreement about the reasons behind individual behavior when ontological philosophy evolves in philosophical spiritual animals, because there will be a great deal more agreement about background beliefs and values.

However, a genuine science of individual needs more than rational explanation, because psychology must be integrated as a branch of natural science. Thus, naturalists are on the right track in attempting to reduce rational cause explanations to the kind that is used in natural science.

Naturalism. There have been various attempts to reduce rational-cause explanations to efficient-cause explanations, and as a way of showing the relevance of the ontological explanation of the nature of change to issues about causation, let me mention the main varieties here.

Behaviorism. The original attempt to turn psychology into science is behaviorism, that is, the attempt to discover a law of nature describing the regularities about individual behavior so that it would be possible, in principle, to explain particular actions by efficient causes. These first attempts tried to reduce behavior to what is now called “respondent conditioning,” exemplified by Pavlov’s dog, in which behavior that is already triggered by some stimulus is conditioned so that it comes to be triggered by another stimulus. It was followed by the theory of operant conditioning, developed mainly by B. F. Skinner. Operant conditioning is based on the law of effect. When kinds of behavior that are generated spontaneously or randomly are reinforced, they are more likely to generated again, especially under similar stimulus conditions.

Functionalism. Behaviorism has been replaced in psychology by cognitive psychology. It departs from its predecessor by recognizing that behavior is mediated by internal states, and thus, it takes the project of psychology to be to discover the internal states that are responsible. But cognitive psychology does not attempt to discover the physical properties of internal states. Instead, it attempt to discover them in terms of their causal connections to input states and output states of the organism. That leads to what is called “functionalism.”

Neurophysiology. The other thriving trend in psychology is the attempt to reduce rational explanations to neurophysiology, that is, to the states of the brain. (Though brain states may still be defined functionally, the functions are physiological functions, and thus, involve descriptions that are more closely tied to physics.)

The significance of ontological philosophy for each of these projects is implicit in what has been said in tracing the course of evolution as a global regularity caused by reproductive cycles and the wholeness of space.

Neurophysiology. The problems of neurophysiology have been addressed by this ontological explanation of the course of evolution by tracing the stages of animal evolution from somatosensory through manipulative animals to rational subjects (stages 4-9). The nervous system was explained as an animal behavior guidance system, but the biggest departure from received neurophysiology comes from the recognition of levels of neurological organization and what each contributes to the animal system of representation. That functional explanation shows how structures in the nervous system serve as a faculty of imagination, that is, a mechanism in which covert behavior calls up sequences of images from memory in the sensory input system to represent the effects of motion on the relations of objects in space, of manipulation on the geometrical structures of objects in space, the causal relations among states of objects in space, and the causal relations among psychological states.

This is a different kind of neurophysiological explanation of behavior than is expected by the current defenders of neurophysiology, such as Paul and Patricia Churchland, for they are eliminative materialists, who expect rational explanations (or “folk psychology,” as they call it) to be replaced by neurophysiology. By contrast, this explanation of how the brain works explains the validity of rational explanation by showing not only how they are valid explanations, but also by explaining how it is possible for rational subject to give such explanations of beliefs and behavior.

As a functional explanation of those structures in the brain, however, it leaves a great deal yet to be explained. Indeed, all the detailed mechanisms that are required to serve these functions remain to be explained. But those nervous mechanisms are quickly yielding to the astonishing progress of empirical neurophysiology. Since they are coming at it from opposite directions, what ontological philosophy implies and what empirical neurophysiology is disclosing should converge on a single, complete explanation of how the brain works before long.

Behaviorism. What made it possible to explain the stages of neurological organization by reproductive causation was the recognition that the faculty of imagination does not require the mechanism of embryological development (that is, the multicellular biological behavior guidance system) to provide the detailed structure of the brain. It needs to provide only the basic systems of the faculty of imagination, because its structure makes possible a contained form of reproductive causation in which the behavioral schemata behind covert behavior can evolved by reinforcement selection. That is, given that there are random variations on behavioral schemata, the learning of new ways of behaving and thinking can be explained by a memory circuit that strengthens the synapses of neurons involved in generating behavior of that kind when they are successful by genetically determined criteria (such as success in getting around in space or success in social relations mediated by linguistic behavior). Thus, the brain has a built-in structure that internalizes structures of the world, from the spatial structure of the natural world to language and the capacity for reflection.

This is an explanation of the validity of operant conditioning, at least, in mammals and beyond. The law of effect is true, on this functional explanation of the faculty of imagination, because the regularity it describes is the evolution of behavioral schemata by reinforcement selection within the mammalian brain. (The memory circuit works in a similar, but far more limited way in non-mammalian vertebrates, and thus, the learning in pigeons was limited enough to stand out in the kinds of experiments that Skinner conducted.)

But this neurophysiological explanation of operant conditioning reveals that it is not as open ended and unstructured as Skinner believed, because it is the evolution of behavior schemata that operate as various faculties of imagination (spatio-temporal, structuro-temporal, naturalistic and subjectivist imagination). That is, behind the overt operant behavior, including verbal behavior) is a covert operant that calls up sequences of images of a certain kind, and thus, from the point of view of the subject, the behavior is generated in world from an understanding of the world that sees the actual against the background of the possible.

Functionalism. The neurophysiological structures in the nervous system have been explained by the functions of various systems at a series of level of neurological organization. That is a functional explanation in the strong sense that is entailed by reproductive causation and the recognition that evolution is progressive, increasingly sophisticated ways of serving as an animal system of representation are what causes each higher level of neurological organization. And these functional explanations of the levels of neurological organization include functional explanations of various nervous structures in the brain, such as the behavior generator, the local image, the object image, and the like.

These functionally described states are not quite what cognitive psychology is looking for. In the first place, they are tied certain neurophysiological structures in the brain, and thus, internal states are no explained exclusively in terms of their causal connections to (sensory) input and (behavioral) output. Secondly, the functions that are ascribed to internal states are not merely that of representing aspects of the world, but as representing objects, representing them as being located in space, as having geometrical structures, as being efficient causes, and even as having reasons. And the functions of such states depend on them being parts of a faculty of imagination.

This departure from received functionalism in psychology solves the problems that have been encountered, and by considering them more closely, those who are interested can see how.

Intentionality. The philosophical problems about the nature of mind arise from certain aspects that seem to be incapable of explanation by the basic laws of physics. One of those problems is consciousness, or the subjective aspect of experience, such as the phenomena appearance of the natural world in perception. The foundations for the ontological explanation of consciousness were discovered in Properties, and the way in which it explains the unity of mind, or the fact that many qualia appear to the subject at the same time, was explained as part of the discussion of the mammalian brain (Stage 6). The other main problem, which will be discussed here, has to do with intentionality. ^xix

The problem about intentionality is how there can be psychological states that are about the world. We know there are psychological states about the world, because they are what we use to give rational explanations of behavior (and beliefs) of rational subjects (and other subjective animals). Though the mind obviously depends in some way on the nature of the brain, it does not seem that that the aboutness of psychological states can be explained by the basic laws of physics. Functionalists believe, however, that they can be explained as functional states. No one denies that it is plausible to suppose that the intentionality of psychological states involves a system of representation built into the brain. But how can states of the brain be representations? How can they be about the world?

Intentionality cannot be explained as something we read into the phenomena, as if it were just a useful way of describing or summing up what happens in nature.^xx That would be to deny the reality of the phenomenon, at least as part of the natural world. And it is hard to see how even that is possible without contradicting oneself, because no one who holds that we are reading things into nature (or describing them in certain ways) can deny there are intentional states in the world. Those very interpretations are about objects in the natural world. The only way to avoid self-contradiction, therefore, is to hold that one’s own mental states are not part of the natural world, and that is, ontologically speaking, a form of mind-body dualism. It implies that there are two basically different kinds of substances in the world: natural entities without real intentional states, and beings like us, who must have them, since we do refer to other objects and ascribe intentional states to them. This is a disastrous kind of dualism, for there is no way to explain how substances whose natures differ as mind and body are related to one another as a single world. And even if there were, it would be to give up naturalism and, thus, ontological philosophy.^xxi

Though it is generally agreed among naturalists that intentionality is to be explained functionally, there is little agreement about what such a functional explanation would involve. There are two main schools of thought about the nature of "functionalist theories" of psychological states, and both would explain intentionality in terms of representations in the brain. One theory holds that the most science can do is give functional descriptions of the brain. The other holds that natural science can give functional explanations of the brain, although it is based on an analysis of functional explanations (the etiological theory) that precludes their reduction to the ontology of naturalism. A brief account of these theories will provide a sense of the obstacles that intentionality poses for a naturalistic metaphysics.

Intentional states as functional states. The still dominant view of psychological states is called "functionalism,” a philosophy of psychology inspired by the analogy between minds and computers a quarter century ago.^xxii The idea is that psychological states can be understood as internal states in a complex system whose kinds can be distinguished in terms of the causal roles those states play in mediating between input and output, much as internal states of computers explain its output in response to certain kinds of input because of how internal states are related by the program. Thus, the goal of psychology is supposed to be giving a functional description of the mind/brain, much as one would a computer, that is, by describing a system of interconnected internal states that tells how all possible inputs would affect output. Two points about functionalism of this kind should be noticed,

First, it denies the possibility of reducing functional systems to the kinds of physical processes that realize them. According to the deductive-nomological model of explanation, the reduction of one theory to another depends on establishing a necessary connection between the terms used by one theory and the terms used by the other, and functionalists deny that there is any such type-type identity between functional states and their physical realizations in the brain.^xxiii That is, the functional properties of a system are thought to "supervene" on its physical properties. One of the deepest convictions functionalists have is that, just as physically different kind of computers can perform the same computations, so physically different kinds of brains or brain states can realize the same psychological states. Functionalists are quick to point out that they are not denying materialism (or physicalism). They need not believe in the existence of anything but entities of the kind mentioned by the basic laws of physics. They admit that functionally defined states are identical to the physically defined states that realize them in each specific case. The agree that if a physical system of some kind realizes a functional system, then another physical system of the same (relevant) kind must also realize it. But they believe that there is only a token-token identity between functional and physical properties. They deny there is any necessary connections between the types of these tokens, because they believe that indefinitely many different kinds of physical systems can realize a functional system.

Second, the very form of functionalist psychology precludes any explanation of intentional states in terms of representations of the world. Psychological states are ordinarily classified not only by the propositional attitudes involved (that is, depending on whether they function as beliefs, desires, intentions or the like), but also according to content (or what they are about, beliefs about water, say, being different from beliefs about alcohol). Though the former kinds are plausibly explained by their casual role in mediating between input and output, the latter cannot be, for any correspondence to objects/states in the world would lie outside the functional system. The only way of distinguishing psychological states according to their content within the functional system is by differences in the representations themselves, that is, by the so-called formal aspects of the states (which are analogous to syntax, as opposed to semantics, in linguistic analysis). They have, in the jargon of this field, "narrow content,” but not "wide content.” They cannot have a content that depends on a relationship to objects/states in the rest of the world, because the only relationship of the system's internal states to the rest of the world is by way of its input and output, and functional theories abstract from how input and output connect to the rest of the world. Thus, since functionalist theory cannot connect the mind with real objects/states in the world, it cannot explain the intentionality of psychological states — that is, explain how and why they are about the world. It cannot, for example, say which beliefs are true. It cannot even explain what makes true beliefs true.

The leading proponent of functionalism, Jerry Fodor, argues that these two points are connected. He argues that psychology cannot explain psychological states by how physical states correspond to objects/states in the rest of the world, because functionally described states supervene on physically described states and the physical states on which they supervene are in the brain. This doctrine he calls "individualism.”^xxiv

Fodor does not, of course, deny that the internal states of functional systems do sometimes refer to objects/states in the world. But he proposes to account for the "wide-content" of our ordinary psychological explanations by supplementing his functionalist theory of mind with a "causal theory of reference.” The referents would be picked out as certain more or less remote causes of input to the functional system that are regularly related to the internal states. That is supposed to account for the intentionality of psychological states, but even Fodor recognizes that such a causal theory of reference has trouble accounting for some kinds of references.^xxv And there are more basic philosophical objections to such a theory, which Fodor does not acknowledge.^xxvi However, neither class of problems is relevant here.

For our purposes, the problem is that, if the intentional content of psychological states can be explained only by tacking a causal theory of reference onto a functionalist theory, then far from explaining intentional states in terms of the ontology of naturalism, functionalist psychology actually makes intentionality more puzzling. Even if all the references we take psychological states to be making did turn out to have causal relations to the world, it would show, at most, that there is an objective regularity about our ascriptions of references to psychological states. But it would not explain why psychological states are about the world. need to tack a causal theory of reference onto a functionalist theory of mind would still suggest that the intentionality of psychological states is something accidental.

What Fodor’s functionalism is leaving out can be seen with the help of our ontological explanation of the function of the animal behavior guidance system. Because animals acquire their free energy by ingesting other objects in space, they need, in addition to their biological behavior guidance system, a system to guide behavior that acts on other objects in space. Thus, animal behavior is different from biological behavior, because it must direct behavior at other objects in space, rather than just at the world as a whole (or merely oriented in a gravitational or electromagnetic field). Thus, what makes animal behavior guidance systems more powerful is the evolution of a subsystem, the animal system of representation, which uses an interaction between sensory input and behavioral output to represent the objects toward which its behavior is directed.

Behavior is generated by the structure of the organism as an irreversible structural global regularity, but as animal behavior, it can make events occur regularly in its territory that are otherwise quite improbable only by acting other objects in the region. That is, what coincides with the geometrical structures of region’s thermo­dynamics flow of matter toward evenly distributed heat to do work is not an unchanging material structure, like a region-wide machine, but rather animal behavior, that is, behavior in which, typically, the animal moves around in the region and acts on other objects (as in chasing prey and ingesting them). But that requires animal behavior to be guided in relation to objects in space, and thus, a system evolves in the animal behavior guidance system to represent the object, or what we have called the animal system of representation. The animal stages of evolution are all increases in animal power that comes from the animal system of representation representing the nature of the world in which its behavior must act more completely.

The animal system of representation evolves first in telesensory animals. (The somatosensory animal has only an implicit representation of the object, because it uses the location of the sensory input in the body to locate the object for purposes of directing behavior at it, for example, as the hydra’s tentacles sting prey that touch it and contract to draw the prey into its gastrovascular cavity.) Embryological development constructs a nervous system in telesensory animals that uses the regular changes in sensory input as a function of behavioral output to represent the object in such a way that it can guide locomotion in relation to the object. The function of this brain structure depends on how the animal interact with other objects in space, and that is the basis of the relationship of representation between the states of the animal system of representation and the objects in space.

Functionalism abstracts from this functional explanation. To insist that such internal states be defined strictly in terms of the internal causal relations by which they mediate between sensory input and behavioral output is to cut off from consideration all the structural effects outside the body that are involved in doing the non-reproductive work of controlling relevant conditions. The culprit here is the computer analogy, and there are two ways in which it cuts psychological states off from any deeper explanation.

First, on the computer model, the only context that is relevant in a functional system is the input to the system and its output, and thus, functionalism abstracts from the part of the structural effects outside the organism. That cuts the animal behavior guidance system off from any coincidence with the thermo­dynamic flow outside the organism, including any relevant conditions the behavior it is generating might be controlling.^xxvii

Second, on the computer model, the internal states of a functional system are defined only in terms of the causal relations among them that are responsible for mediating between input and output, and thus, functionalism also abstracts from the structural global regularities that occur within the animal behavior guidance system. When functionalists abstract from the "physical realization" of the functional system, they are abstracting from the material structures that channel the flow of free energy in the animal behavior guidance system.

This abstraction is necessary, functionalists would insist, because there are different kinds of structural causes that could generate the same kind of structured thermodynamic order. That may be true of computers, but it is not true of biological mechanisms, because in products of reproductive causation, there is a necessary connection between functions and traits. The kind of structural effects that serve any function are determined by that function, because they are the most powerful way of controlling that relevant condition that is possible for organisms of their kind when they evolved. That necessary connection makes a type-type reduction to naturalist ontology possible.

Both kinds of abstraction are appropriate for computers, because their input and output is strictly linguistic (or digital), and many different machines can be built that manipulate the syntax of linguistic or mathematical representations. But animal behavior guidance systems are structural causes that have evolved by reproductive causation to guide behavior in a world of objects in space, not just syntax manipulators designed by human ingenuity to work in a linguistic environment. Given our definition of "functions,” therefore, neither kind of abstraction — neither from the objects in space outside the brain nor from the physical nature of the brain itself — is appropriate.

Functional explanations of intentional states. This brings us to the other received theory of the intentional content of psychological states, the one that would explain representations by their function, rather than just describe them by their causal roles as internal states in a functionalist system.

Ruth Millikan (1989, p 282) rightly challenges Fodor's assumption that the status of an inner state "as a representation is determined by the functional organization of the part of the system that uses it,” pointing out that there is no such a thing "as behaving as a representation without behaving like a representation of anything in particular.” The relationship to objects/states in the world is essential, she insists, to any explanation of intentional states in terms of representations. She is also correct to insist that such a system can be explained functionally, and not merely described functionally. But her theory fails to reduce psychological states to naturalist ontology, because she accepts a theory of functional explanations, the "etiological theory,” that takes accidentalism for granted. And as a result, she overlooks an essential ingredient in any adequate explanation of the nature of psychological states.

Let us call Millikan's kind of explanation the "teleological theory" of representations. It holds that what makes an inner state a representation is that its function is to represent.^xxviii According to the etiological analysis, representations are states of an organism that correspond to certain objects/states of the world and that were selected to be parts of the organism because they correspond to those objects/states in the world. That makes the correspondence part of the explanation of the intentional state something more than what happens to be true of it or what we read into it, because the state's correspondence to the world is responsible for the organism having been able to do something that was (and perhaps still is) required for its success in reproduction.

There are, for example, bacteria that use tiny magnets (magnetosomes) to guide their locomotion. What they represent is not, however, the direction of magnetic north, which causes their orientation, but rather the direction of oxygen-free water, because magnetosomes were selected for their correspondence to oxygen-poor water. That correspondence causes their reproductive success by enabling them to avoid the toxic, oxygen-rich water near the surface, and thus, the magnetosomes have the function of representing oxygen free water.^xxix

The teleological theory of psychological states is closer than Fodor's functionalism to the explanation entailed by this ontological explanation of the course of evolution, because instead of tacking a causal theory of reference onto a functional system, it gives a functional explanation of the correspondence between inner representations and objects/states in the world. But the teleological theory of representations nevertheless agrees, in effect, with the other abstraction involved in functionalism, for it still assumes that there is no necessary connection between intentional states and the physical states that realize them. The accidentalist assumptions of the contemporary Darwinist explanation of about the course of evolution lead to the etiological analysis of functional explanations, and since that precludes explaining course of evolution by the functions that are possible, it does not seem possible to explaining psychological states ontologically. Both assumptions of accidentalism are relevant.

First, though inner states of an animal may have the function of representing something, what they represent is contingent. Since natural selection is imposed by changes in the environment, what inner states correspond to depends on environmental changes or conditions that could be different. There may be a historical explanation of the natural selection of intentional states, but since what is represented is contingent, no ontological reduction of psychological states is possible.

Furthermore, even if the selection pressure responsible for psychological states were given and the nature of the correspondence were determined, psychological states would still not be reducible to the ontology of naturalism, because the etiological theory has nothing to say about the mechanisms that would serve that function. The kinds of inner states and how they are made to have the required correspondence would depend on which random variations happened to be available at the time the selection pressure was imposed. Thus, the teleological theory of representations does not offer an account of intentionality that reduces psychological states to the ontology of naturalism.

The examples used to illustrate states with representational functions, such as the magnetosomes in bacteria mentioned above, seem to confirm accidentalism. Though they might guide some bacteria to oxygen free water, they might guide other animals in seasonal migrations. But such examples are misleading, because they implicitly assume that the representational functions of inner states are tied directly to the control of rather specific conditions. And this may be true in somatosensory animals and simpler animals, since they do not have animal systems of representation. And since the accidentalists assumptions of contemporary Darwinism keep teleological theorists from trying to trace the course of evolution, they do not notice that the evolution of greater power in higher animals comes from serving a more universal function in behavior guidance, namely, the representation of objects for the purpose of adapting behavior to the spatial aspects of the world. That is, they overlook the inevitability of the evolution of the animal system of representation in multicellular animals. ^xxx

The animal system of representation has a necessary neurological structure in telesensory animals because of how behavioral output must be combined with sensory input to locate objects in space for purposes of guiding behavior. There are, of course, different ways of serving this function, as we have seen, with the greatest differences arising from the fundamental difference between proterostome and deuterostome embryological development. But the inevitability of the neurological structure of the system for representing the objects of animal behavior at later stages of evolution, because they use higher levels of neurological organization to represent additional aspects of the spatial structure of the world. Spatio-temporal and structuro-temporal imagination give the animal subject internal states that correspond to the world in a way that does not depend on the selection pressure that happen to have been imposed on the animal. It evolves because evolution is progressive. In order for animal to have more power to control relevant conditions, their behavior guidance systems must have animal systems of representation that represent objects as being located in space and as having geometrical structures.

These forms of imagination in animals are the foundation, as we have seen, for the evolution of naturalistic and subjectivistic imagination in primates with the use of language. But those forms of imagination are also inevitable, and they involve a correspondence between brain states and the states in the world, including other subjects, that is also necessary.

This solves a problem that functionalist explanations encounter when they try to explain correspondence with nothing but causal connections between input and output within the organism. The correspondence is not just a constant conjunction between telesensory input and the object in space that is involved in reference, as Fodor seems to mean by calling it a casual connection, but an isomorphism between geometrical structures in the brain and the geometrical structures of the locations of objects in the space around the telesensory animal.

Social science. The social sciences present yet another problem about the nature of the causal connections involved in scientific explanations. By “social sciences,” I mean the various branches of science that attempt to understand human society, from anthropology and sociology, which both claim to be the most basic social science, to economics, political science and even history, though the latter has reservations about calling itself a science at all. The main issue about the nature of causation in these fields has to do with whether explanations of social phenomena are reducible to explanations of the individuals involved in social phenomena. It is basically a dispute between individualism and holism, and what is at issue is the essential nature of the object being studied by these sciences. Whereas holism is the belief that a human society as a whole is something more than the sum of its parts, individualism is the belief that it is just all the individuals that make up society.

Individualism. The roots of individualism go back to Thomas Hobbes and Adam Smith. Max Weber stands out as a defender of individualism among advocates of hermeneutical (or interpretive) social science. But in the contemporary era, its main defenders have been F. A. von Hayek and Karl Popper.^xxxi These philosophers call themselves "methodological" individualists, because they think of individualism as principle about how to practice social science. But it presupposes an ontological position, because a science that follows that methodological principle could not be expected to discover the truth, unless the society were nothing but the behavior and interaction of all its members in the natural world.

Methodological individualist hold that all social phenomena can be explained, in principle, as either the intended or unintended consequences of the (mostly) rationally explicable behavior of the individuals involved in the situations they face. Methodological individualism does not have to take a stand on whether or not such rational explanations can be reduced to explanations in natural science. Its main point is that what makes social phenomena seem to be something more than what the individuals do is that the consequences of all their actions as they add up in space over time are largely unintended.

More recently, a form of individualism has been defended by sociobiologists, at least, implicitly. They attempt to give an evolutionary explanation of the social nature of human beings. Darwin was the first naturalist to defend an evolutionary explanation of human beings was (in his Descent of Man). But he was not an individualist, because he recognized the role of group level selection in human evolution, as well as individual level natural selection. The most recent attempts to establish a science of human society as a branch of evolutionary biology are due to Edward O. Wilson (1975, Ch. 27; 1978; and, with Charles J. Lumsden, 1983). They are individualists, because their project is to explain social phenomena by natural selection working on the individual level.

Holism. Contemporary defenders of holism about society believe that there are irreducible laws about social phenomena. Prominent epistemological philosophers of social science, such as Bhaskar (1979) and Manicas (1987), believe that casual processes throughout nature are stratified. They hold that there are irreducible laws not only at the social level, but also at other levels of organization, such as psychology, physiology, biology, and chemistry. They believe that theories in social science must mention unobservable theoretical entities, such as social structure, and as scientific realists, they believe that those entities exist in some way that is not reducible to the individuals and their behavior.

The roots of social holism can be traced to theorists about human society in the 19^th Century. Among those classical defenders of holism, there is a difference between those who took a basically hermeneutical or interpretative approach to explaining individual behavior and those who were naturalists about the explanation of individual behavior (or psychology).

The interpretationalists are represented by Herder and Hegel. Herder used the notion of Das Volk as a way of pointing to the cultural aspect of spiritual animals, but he thought of culture as expressing the nature of society as an irreducible spiritual entity. Thinking of himself as the founder of history, Herder saw human history as the story of the transit though the natural world of a kind of spiritual being whose nature could be understood only from the inside (that is, through its culture). For Hegel, Das Volk became Die Volksgeist, and ultimately the state, as part of his idealist metaphysics. Hegel saw evolution and history as a dialectical progress of the Idea in which it becomes aware of itself in the natural world, and objective spirit was a later moment in that process.

The naturalists who defended holism in the 19^th Century accepted the empirical method of science as the only valid way of acquiring knowledge about the world, and thus, they understood holism in terms of the social aspect of spiritual animals, rather than the cultural aspect. They rejected individualism in favor of believing in the existence of irreducible laws and/or entities on the social level. August Comte, for example, thought of science as seeking to discover basic laws of nature on each of several levels of phenomena, including physiological explanations of individuals and laws of social development. Though each branch of science went through a predicable series of stages before it discovered the basic laws (religious, metaphysical and positivist stages), the laws of higher level strata of nature could not be explained in terms of the laws of lower level strata. Emile Durkheim also thought of himself as a naturalist, but his theories turned on the recognition of a conscience collective, which seems to his detractors, at least, as belief in a group mind, though it was probably only a way of talking about the effect of the society, by way of its culture, on the members.

The ontological critique of epistemological philosophy of social science will show that individualism and holism are both true and both false. Both are true, because social phenomena are the result of organisms evolving at both the individual and social levels of biological organization at once. And both are false, because each takes the truth of what it is defending to deny the truth of what the other side is defending. Because neither side in this dispute understands the basic nature of the object investigated by the social sciences, each is describing only an aspect of this phenomenon and trying to parlay it into an explanation of the basic nature of society.

The nature of social phenomena has been explained by tracing the course of evolution by reproductive causation from primates (manipulative animals, at stage 7) through primitive and rational spiritual animals (stages 8 and 9) to philosophical spiritual animals (at stage 10, including the individualism-holism dispute). Since evolution is explained as a global regularity, everything that evolves is reduced ontologically to space and matter in a world like ours, including spiritual animals. But that does not make the levels of biological organization any less real. We have seen how levels of part-whole complexity are responsible for stages of evolution. But the three stages at which spiritual animals evolve are unique, because on them, reproductive causation is a work on two levels of biological organization at once. There are, in other words, organisms on both the individual and the social levels of biological organization imposing natural selection on themselves by their own reproduction in space. Thus, at the same time that spiritual animals are changing gradually in the direction of natural perfection for organisms subject to the condition of being made up of language-using multicellular animals as parts, the individuals are changing in the direction of natural perfection for multicellular animals subject to the condition of being parts of spiritual animals.

Since this ontological theory about the essential nature of the object of the social sciences has already been explained, I will invoke it here it to sketch the ontological critique of individualism and holism in social science.

Ontological critique of methodological individualism. What is true about methodological individualism is that the behavior of the members of spiritual animals can be explained rationally in the situations that they face. There are no effects or influences of the spiritual animal on its members that are not mediated by the rationally explicable behavior and interaction of the individuals. That means that there are no group minds nor irreducible spiritual substances that act on rational subjects by means that they cannot observe and explain. But that does not mean that social holism if false, because by means of such transparent processes, the society as a whole has decisive effects on the individuals.

The rational nature of the individuals. The most basic effect of the social level on the individuals is one that lies mainly in the past, namely, the evolution of the spiritual animals of which they are parts. It is the evolution of spiritual animals by group level natural selection through warfare that has made the individuals rational, for that is what explains the evolution of psychological sentences, which enables them to reflect on their psychological states as reasons (that is, as causes of their beliefs and behavior that are represented as such causes as an essential part of the mechanism by which they cause beliefs and behavior).

Methodological individualism takes the rationality of the individuals for granted and tries to explain the society, including their economic cooperation in civil society as well as government, as the result of rational individuals acting in their individual self interest. At one extreme, methodological individualists such as Hobbes explain society itself as a contract among rational subjects. At the other extreme, they admit that the historical origin of economic and political institutions is basically the accumulation of the unintended consequences of the rationally explicable behavior of many individuals over many generations, and so they recommend a conservative attitude about tampering with what has come to exist. But in either case, the basic premise of their explanation — that individuals are rational subjects — is simply taken for granted, and that is to ignore the most basic effect of the social level organism on the individuals, namely, the evolution of spiritual animals at the social level of biological organization by imposing natural selection on themselves through warfare.

Thus, methodological individualism fails to recognize the basic way in which holism is true: Society is not a construct of reason, but rather, reason is an effect of the evolution of spiritual animals. Reason does make it possible for individuals to act together in pursuit of common goals. But the individuals have such a power only because they already pursued common goals before reason evolved, that is, at the primitive stage, when they had only the use of natural sentences and social level behavior depended on a leader to assign tasks to individuals. Furthermore, contracts are just one way in which rational beings are able to act jointly in pursuit of common goals. Institutions themselves are ways of generating social level behavior for the control of relevant conditions on the social level that usually do not depend on contract.

Sociobiology defends a more radical kind of individualism, because it does not recognize much of a role, if any, for reason in guiding behavior. Instead, it proposes to explain individual behavior by the evolution of genes in individuals that disposes them to pursue certain goals, including to learn certain rules (or “epigenetic rules,” as Wilson calls them).

Their best example of such genes are attitudes toward incest, such as the way in which children raised together tend not to find one another sexually attractive at puberty. But sociobiologists suggest that there are similar genes for warfare, religion, male domination of women, as well as the disposition to learn certain skills and rules. And the cooperation among individuals is explained as a result of the evolution of altruistic genes as a result of what they call “kin selection.” Wilson (1975, pp. 563-564), for example, insists that ethics “reduces” to inherited emotions, and he betrays little doubt about his denail of a universal moral standard.

Though sociobiology is on the right track in looking for an evolutionary explanation of human society, their project is crippled by the accidentalism of contemporary Darwinism and its failure to recognize that levels of part-whole complexity in evolving organisms cause stages of evolution. The basic defects are its inability to explain why the evolution of language is inevitable and its failure to recognize the role of reason comes to play in guiding their behavior. Thus, sociobiology is rightly dismissed as “reductionism” in the pejorative sense, of debunking belief in the phenomena to be explained by arguing that what seems to be irreducible is not real in the first place.

The inadequacy of sociobiology’s way of explaining evolution can been seen in its attempt to reduce cultural evolution to biological evolution. Sociobiologists take human culture to be continuous with primate culture, and they explain both the diversity of cultures and why culture can change so much more quickly than biological evolution by the increased reliance on rule-governed behavior. That change is supposed to have given humans more power to change their environment than other animals. But Wilson (1975, p. 574) explains the rapidity of the “social evolution” that has given humans this power by postulating a “motor” that responds “more to internal reorganization” in society and “less on direct responses to features in the surrounding environment.” When challenged to explain what he means, he and Lumsden (1983) offered their theory of “gene-culture co-evolution,” in which culture is not only shaped by genes, but the culture that develops from those “epigenetic rules” also imposes a natural selection on genes. The rapid change is apparently supposed to come from a positive feedback between genes and culture. But if that is all there is to it, there is nothing to guide the co-evolution in one direction rather than another. Hence, it would be surprising if it made humans more powerful. The theory of gene-culture co-evolution is the accidentalist theory of evolution taken to the extreme, for the direction of evolutionary change, having been freed even of having to track changes in an external environment, can take off in any direction. It apparently just happened to take off in the direction of technological control.

The rationality of the individuals is an effect of the social level on the parts in the long past, however, and so we can set aside those earlier stages in human evolution and assume, as methodological individualists do, that the individual are rational. But even when we start with individuals as rational subjects, there are other ways in which the spiritual animal affects its members that also go unrecognized by methodological individualism.

Cultural evolution. One way in which the social level organism affects the individuals as rational subjects is by way of cultural evolution. The individual internalizes the culture of his spiritual animal as a normal part of his development after birth, including not only the language and the capacity to generate arguments (that is, the evolution of behavioral schemata in rational imagination), but also the arguments and conclusions that have accumulated as the culture (that is, all the belief based on the mammalian map of its territory as a way of representing the whole world, including rational subjects who have bodies). That indebtedness to earlier generations is recognized, of course, by methodological individualists, but what they do not see so clearly is that the exchange of arguments, including the education of new members into the culture, is a form of evolution by reproductive causation that has been contained within the spiritual animal for many generations.

Individualists tend to assume that contributions to culture come from individual geniuses who bestow their insights on the rest of us. But that is merely to focus on the random variations rather than the natural selection. The random variations that can be tried out depend on the point that has been reached in the gradual evolutionary change toward natural perfection at any stage, for it is just a recombination of already evolved structures, and thus, it is inevitable in a large enough population, if it is possible at all. But it becomes part of the culture only because others judge that accepting such arguments gives them a more coherent world view, often including a more coherent set of general intentions (or values). That is, the culture evolves by the rational selection of arguments by the individual rational subjects in the spiritual animal, and that is a social level process.

Cultural evolution is an effect of the social level on the individual, because it is a change that depends on the spiritual animal also having a social aspect. The social aspect is a structure of the spiritual animal as a whole, the aspect that has to do with how the members are related and interact as objects in space. At a minimum, they are in continual linguistic interaction, and in rational spiritual animals, that means that arguments are evolving by rational selection. But the culture is also an aspect of the spiritual animal. Though culture is potentially complete in each individual brain (when it has mastery of all the arguments that have accumulated), the culture is a structure of the spiritual animal as a whole, because it also exists in the brains of all the other members and it is exchanged by linguistic interactions.

The social whole has, therefore, an effect on the part, because the continual linguistic interaction among members of a rational spiritual animal is a contained form of reproductive causation in which culture evolves in the direction of discovering the true, the good and the beautiful. But methodological individualists have no need to deny this kind of holism, because it does not compromise the autonomy of the individual. Cultural evolution does not require anything to be true of the social whole that cannot be explained individualistically except the basic fact that the rational individuals are in continual linguistic interaction as parts of a spiritual animal (and we have seen how that is explained by reproductive causation).

The invisible hand. Methodological individualists point to the market as their prime example of how the rationally explicable behavior of many individuals in the situations they face has consequences that none of them may intend. But even this phenomenon depends on a kind of holism that they do not recognize.

Adam Smith is an individualist hero because he showed how the tendency to “truck and barter” leads to a division of labor which makes the production of goods more efficient. Though each individual is pursuing his own self interest, the result of their market interactions is an economic system from which they all benefit. That is the prime example of the “invisible hand” at work

What methodological individualism overlooks, however, is how the market system is a form of class structure, that is, a later stage in the evolution of the social aspect of spiritual animals. As we have seen, there is an inevitable series of stages of social evolution, from nomadic bands through agricultural villages to civilized societies, which are based on a class structure, such as feudalism or slavery. Agriculture introduces the institution of the private ownership of land and other property. Class structure evolves because random variations in the institution of property that give one group of members power over another make it possible to coordinate the behavior of many more members, and since the increased population gives civilized societies an advantage in war, they tend to be naturally selected. It is possible for capitalism to evolve from feudalism in philosophical spiritual animal, because as we has seen, they have a culture that expects rules of morality and justice to be justified on basic principle that recognize the rational autonomy of individuals and they can have a natural science that can develop techniques for controlling what happens by using mathematics to see beneath the observable surface of physical processes.

Capitalism involves, as we have seen, a class relation. There is a basic difference between the role of the capitalist and the worker in the process of production. The worker sells his labor power on the market for a wage, while the capitalist buys labor power and other capital goods to produce commodities for sale on the market and takes the profit. To be sure, it is a class relation that is quite different from feudalism, because the social roles are not necessarily inherited. Besides mobility between the classes, it is possible for the capitalist class relation to evolve into a more abstract form, in which everyone, or nearly everyone, plays both roles, as capitalist and worker. But the class structure is still essential, because it is the mechanism that puts some members in a position of power over other members so that the behavior of many individual can be coordinated to carry out the productive activity of the spiritual animal. .

Methodological individualism does not recognize class structure as a basic trait of spiritual animals. They see only the individuals, each owning different kinds of property, exchanging them on the market. But that is just how the institution of property is used to sustain the class relation in a capitalist society. There must be some members, at least, with sufficient money to start up processes of production, and there must be other members who are willing to sell their labor power for a wage. Historically, these roles come from individual owning different quantities of property, and that is sufficient to serve the function of a class structure.

The work of the invisible hand. A consequence of failing to recognize that the invisible hand of the market is actually a form of the class relation by which large civilized societies are possible is that methodological individualists also fail to recognize its long term effect. Adam Smith argued that market exchanges make production more efficient by leading to a division of labor. But the more important effect of the market in the long run is the way in which capitalism is a contained form of evolution by reproductive causation.

We have seen how the competition among capitalists for a profit involves capitalist selection. What evolves are the processes of production. They reproduce in time as capitalists reinvest in them for another period, and they reproduce in space as well when capitalists invest in new processes of production. But there is a limit on the processes of production that can go through such reproductive cycles, because the commodities must be sold on a finite market, and those producers that offer better commodities at lower prices are the ones who succeed in selling their commodities and, thus, make a profit. It is not just chance which processes of production continue to go through reproductive cycles, because capitalists prefer to make a profit, and they will invest only in production processes that do. Thus, the efficient production of commodities is the non-reproductive work, and since reproduction is by investment in production processes, there is gradual evolution by capitalist selection. There is change gradually in the direction of natural perfection for production processes of their kind, that is, in which commodities are produced as efficiently as possible -- or as Marxians would say, with the least labor time.

As in biological evolution, however, there is also a change at the ecological level. As reproducing organisms (production processes) are changing in the direction of increasing power to control all the conditions that affect their reproduction, the organisms in the region of space tend to diversity to tap all the sources of free energy (to supply all the commodities that people will buy at the price that they must charge to make an average profit). Thus, although production processes start out simple, uniform and not very efficient, they gradually become more complex, more diverse and more efficient. The increase in diversity means that technology, made possible by natural science, is continually being used not only to make the same products more efficiently, but also to produce new and better commodities.

Capitalist evolution is an form of reproductive causation that is contained within spiritual animals, and thus, it is a social level process, or an effect of the spiritual animal as a whole on its members. This is the longest range unintended consequence of the “invisible hand,” but methodological individualism tends to overlook it, because they think of the efficiency as an equilibrium toward which the market economy tends. But far from being an equilibrium, it is an evolutionary process, with the same creative powers of biological evolution.

Methodological individualism is basically correct in its insistence that nothing happens in social processes except the rationally guided behavior and interaction of the members. But its failure to recognize how reproductive causation has shaped individuals to have capacities that work together as a whole means that it overlooks ways in which such individually explicable behavior has added up, and continues to add up, in space over time to social level regularities that affect the individuals.

Ontological critique of social holism. The truth of social holism is aso, therefore, not quite what social holists have imagined.

Contemporary social holists, like Manicas and Bhaskar, who believe that there are irreducible social laws are correct in denying that social laws can be reduced to the basic laws of physics. But that irreducibility comes from not taking into account global regularities, namely, the reproductive global regularities. Reproductive causation is the source of all the ways in which ontological philosophy disagrees with methodological individualism.

The evolution of spiritual animals that makes individuals rational is by natural selection, or reproductive causation on the social level of biological organization.

The evolution of culture is by the rational selection of arguments, or a form of reproductive causation contained within spiritual animals.

The evolution of social structure, including capitalist class structure, is by natural selection of spiritual animals, or reproductive causation on the social level of biological organization.

The evolution of processes of production is by capitalist selection, or a form of reproductive causation contained within spiritual animals.

These are regularities on the social level which social science is trying to explain, and though they are not reducible to the laws of physics, they are ontologically reducible. There is no reason to believe that social laws will refer to unobservable theoretical entities that cannot be explained as being constituted by space and matter as substances enduring though time.

Ontological philosophy must, however, deny traditional forms of social holism that postulate entities that are not constituted by space and matter.

Thus, ontological philosophy must deny the existence of Hegel’s Geist and Herder’s Das Volk, if holists insist that spiritual animals be explained as by the kinds of entities whose existence is affirmed by epistemological philosophy. But the more interesting aspect of this critique is that what Hegel and Herder were referring to is spiritual animals. They portrayed spiritual animals as idealist entities, because they recognized that they have a cultural aspect. But ontological philosophy offers a more complete explanation of what they were referring to by explaining the nature of spiritual animals as a product of evolution by reproductive causation, that is, in which spiritual animals have both a social and a cultural aspect.

Ontological philosophy must deny the positivism that made Comte so confident that laws describing the behavior of societies would be irreducible. There is a deeper explanation, and it is an explanation of the metaphysical kind that Comte dismisses as the “metaphysical stage” preceding positivism in the evolution of science. It is the ontological explanation of evolution on the foundation of spatiomaterialism.

Finally, the social holism of Durkheim must also be rejected, because there is no irreducible tendency of the conscience collective to generate institutions that increase social solidarity. The social solidarity comes from the basic nature of the spiritual animal and, thus, stems from its evolution. And the functionality of the institutions of society is also explained by their capacity to sustain populations that make them better able to win at war, though it is as often mediated by the recognition of that advantage as it is by actual natural selection by warfare. There is no direct, irreducible connection between something contributing to social solidarity and what individuals are constraned to do.