5662 lines
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5662 lines
451 KiB
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<title>The career of epistemological philosophy</title>
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<meta name="author" content="Amr Gharbeia">
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><b>T<img src="data:image/png;base64,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" name="TtsOtkCRS10_09" align="right" hspace="5" width="250" height="42" border="0">he
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career of epistemological philosophy.</b></font> Pre-Socratic
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philosophy was a radical random variation on the arguments of
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rational level culture, and it may also have been tried out in other
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civilizations. But only in Western civilization did it give rise to
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epistemological philosophy and put the linguistic structures
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generating social institutions on the philosophical level of
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neurological organization. </font></font></font>
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</p>
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif">A<img src="data:image/png;base64,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" name="TtsOtkCRS10_10" align="right" hspace="5" width="250" height="23" border="0">ncient
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and medieval epistemological philosophy. </font>Epistemological
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philosophy began when Plato discovered a convincing way of
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constructing an argument that would explain the validity of all first
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level arguments based on perception and desire. It was also an
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explanation of everything, but it was not based on a theory about
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change and diversity, that is, about efficient causes. Instead, it
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was a theory about the nature of reason based only reflective
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understanding, or the capacity of subjects to use rational
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imagination to explain rational causation. It did entail an
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explanation of the nature of the substances constituting the world,
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but that was an afterthought, for its approach to philosophy was
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epistemological. The theories about the nature of reason and the
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nature of consciousness that we have derived from our ontological
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foundation fit together as a way of understanding the basic structure
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of epistemological arguments. We need only consider what rational
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subjects had to work with, when they turned to reflective
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understanding for a theory about how we know about the world, because
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there are only certain ways that those elements can be used to
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explain the validity of the reasons used in the ordinary arguments of
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rational level culture. </font></font></font>
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</p>
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">What
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represents the current scene to the subject are the telesensory
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images that are currently being used (in conjunction with input from
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the current bodily condition) to construct a <i>local image</i>, and
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together with the representation of the body itself, that is the
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subject’s perception of the world. But the local image (and the
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body image to which it is related) generated from current sensory
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input are embedded within a faculty of rational imagination, and
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thus, rational subjects are able to see actual states against the
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background of what is possible by efficient causation by using covert
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behavior to call up all sort of images in relation to them. Consider
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the aspects of the world that are represented in rational
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imagination. </font></font></font>
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</p>
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><i>Spatial
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imagination </i>makes it possible to call up sequences of images
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representing the effects of the locomotion (or motion) in relation to
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other objects within the local scene and to call up sequences of
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<i>local images </i>(that have been recorded in memory as a map of
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one’s territory) representing locomotion beyond the local scene. Or
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spatial imagination can be used more generally to think about the
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effects locomotion and turning (or motion and change of direction)
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within the local scene, in relation to a purely imaginary local
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scene, or in the abstract (because the same behavioral schemata are
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used relative to different <i>local images</i>).</font></font></p>
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><i>Structural
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imagination </i>makes it possible to call up sequences of telesensory
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images, or <i>object images,</i> representing the effects of
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manipulating objects in the local scene, such as rotating and
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twisting them, and it too can be used abstractly to think about the
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geometrical structures of objects in space.</font></font></p>
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><i>Naturalistic
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imagination</i>, which comes with the ability to use natural
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sentences, makes it possible to call up sequences of images, or
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<i>naturalistic images, </i>representing the states of affairs that
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make natural sentences true, so that together with (particular and
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general) beliefs about regularities (which are either built into the
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structure of imagination or acquired from experience), rational
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imagination can represent their effects in the natural world.</font></font></p>
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><i>Rational
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imagination</i>, which comes with the ability to use psychological
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sentences, makes it possible to call up sequences of images as
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psychological predicates (or <i>psychological images</i>) and to
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predicate them of objects in space that are subjects, and this
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ability to think about psychological states is the ability to
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understand how they are causes or effects of other psychological
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states, including their role as reasons (or causes that are
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represented as causes as part of the process of causing beliefs or
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behavior). </font></font>
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</p>
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Perception
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and rational imagination both have an appearance to the subject.
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These images are certain configurations of neurons firing in various
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2-D arrays of neurons that are connected by projections between the
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thalamus and neocortex (or between regions of neocortex), and their
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firings are all synchronized by the thalamus insofar as they have to
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do with the same objects. That is, the brain processes the
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information contained as patterns of firing in 2-D arrays of neurons,
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and thus, what happens in the brain is a highly structured in both
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space and time. But what is more, the joint firings of those neurons
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is like a complex antenna that generates a steam of photons, and the
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intrinsic natures of the photons being given off by the active brain
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are phenomenal properties which make the rational subject conscious. </font></font></font>
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</p>
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Perception
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and rational imagination have different appearances, because the
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images they involve are caused in basically different ways.
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Perceptual images come from sensory input (and involve projections
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from the sensory organs through the thalamus to the neocortex),
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whereas images of rational imagination come from covert behavior
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operating on memory (and involve only regions of neocortex beyond
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those registering sensory input). This makes these two kinds of
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images appear quite different from the point of view of the subject
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reflecting on them. But in both cases, objects seem to be present to
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the subject, in one case, as objects of perception, and in the other
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case, as objects of reflection. </font></font>
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</p>
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><img src="data:image/png;base64,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" name="HistPhiloOP" align="bottom" width="400" height="250" border="0"></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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). </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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 <i>local image</i>,
|
||
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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Objects
|
||
of reflection, such as the <i>object images </i>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 <i>object images </i>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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">However,
|
||
since objects of reflection are appearances quite on a par with
|
||
objects of perception, it is <i>possible </i>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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><img src="data:image/png;base64,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" name="HistPhilAncient" align="bottom" width="400" height="250" border="0"></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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).</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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?</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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
|
||
<i>The Republic</i> 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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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 <i>Timaeus</i>, 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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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). </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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 <i>Metaphysics</i>
|
||
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.) </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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.) </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><i>Medieval
|
||
epistemological philosophy. </i>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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif">M<img src="data:image/png;base64,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" name="TtsOtkCRS10_11" align="right" hspace="5" width="250" height="24" border="0">odern
|
||
epistemological philosophy.</font> 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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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). </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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 <i>naïve
|
||
realism</i>, 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 “<i>critical realism</i>,” 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.”</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><img src="data:image/png;base64,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" name="HistPhiloMod" align="bottom" width="400" height="250" border="0"></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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 <i>local image </i>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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0; page-break-before: always">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif">C<img src="data:image/png;base64,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" name="TtsOtkCRS10_12" align="right" hspace="5" width="250" height="23" border="0">ontemporary
|
||
epistemological philosophy. </font>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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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 <font face="Arial, sans-serif">Relations</font>), 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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><img src="data:image/png;base64,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" name="HistPhiloCont" align="bottom" width="400" height="250" border="0"></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><i>Logical
|
||
positivism.</i> 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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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 <i>derive </i>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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><i>Ordinary
|
||
language philosophy.</i> 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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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, <i>The Idea of a Social
|
||
Science.</i> </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><i>Skepticism
|
||
about metaphysical realism.</i> 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 <i>nature </i>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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Their way
|
||
of analyzing language also gave analytic philosophers reason to doubt
|
||
that natural science, even if it was right about the <i>existence </i>of
|
||
theoretical entities, is correct about their real <i>nature</i>. 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 <i>existence</i>, but also the real <i>nature </i>of what
|
||
exists in the world. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Putnam
|
||
suggests the universality of this kind of argument by appealing to
|
||
the Lowenheim-Skolem theory. It holds, as we have seen (in
|
||
<font face="Arial, sans-serif">Relations</font>), 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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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.)</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.” </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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 <i>causal
|
||
relation</i>, but a <i>geometrical isomorphism </i>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.) </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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 <i>over time </i>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.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">We have
|
||
already seen (n <font face="Arial, sans-serif">Relations</font>) 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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><i>Naturalized
|
||
epistemology.</i> 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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0; page-break-before: always">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><b>T<img src="data:image/png;base64,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" name="TtsOtkCRS10_13" align="right" hspace="5" width="250" height="40" border="0">he
|
||
evolution of ontological philosophy.</b></font> 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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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 <i>makes </i>reason whole.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Or to put
|
||
it negatively, naturalists do not believe that ontology can <i>explain
|
||
</i>the validity of the arguments of natural science, because
|
||
ontology depends on those very arguments for its beliefs about which
|
||
substances exist. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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). </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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 <font face="Arial, sans-serif">Spatiomaterialism</font>)
|
||
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 <i>explain </i>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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Indeed, it
|
||
is hard to see how spacetime would be used as an ontological cause to
|
||
<i>explain </i>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! </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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 <i>ought </i>to
|
||
do. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0; page-break-before: always">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><b>E<img src="data:image/png;base64,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" name="OdkC27" align="right" width="100" height="39" border="0">pistemological
|
||
philosophy of causation.</b></font> 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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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). </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">The
|
||
difference between natural and social science arises, as we have seen
|
||
(in <font face="Verdana, sans-serif">Stage 9</font>), 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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><b>E<img src="data:image/png;base64,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" name="OdkC28" align="right" width="72" height="32" border="0">fficient
|
||
causation.</b></font> Efficient-cause explanations show that the
|
||
events and conditions identified as causes produce the events and
|
||
conditions identified as their consequences. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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). </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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 <font face="Verdana, sans-serif">Method</font>,
|
||
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.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><b>B<img src="data:image/png;base64,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" name="OdkC29" align="right" width="45" height="30" border="0">asic
|
||
laws.</b></font> 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). </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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
|
||
<i>how </i>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.<sup><a class="sdendnoteanc" name="sdendnote1anc" href="#sdendnote1sym"><sup>i</sup></a></sup>
|
||
</font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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
|
||
(<font face="Verdana, sans-serif">Local regularities)</font>. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><b>I<img src="data:image/png;base64,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" name="OdkC30" align="right" width="67" height="30" border="0">rreducible
|
||
regularities.</b></font> 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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.” </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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 <i>ontologically </i>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.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif">Self-organizing
|
||
systems.</font> 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.<sup><a class="sdendnoteanc" name="sdendnote2anc" href="#sdendnote2sym"><sup>ii</sup></a></sup></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif">Stratification
|
||
of nature.</font> 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.<sup><a class="sdendnoteanc" name="sdendnote3anc" href="#sdendnote3sym"><sup>iii</sup></a></sup>
|
||
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 <i>sui generis</i> 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.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif">Emergent
|
||
evolutionism.</font> The defense of emergentism has a long history.<sup><a class="sdendnoteanc" name="sdendnote4anc" href="#sdendnote4sym"><sup>iv</sup></a></sup>
|
||
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
|
||
<i>order </i>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.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="2" style="font-size: 10pt"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif">Chaos
|
||
theory.</font> 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.<sup><a class="sdendnoteanc" name="sdendnote5anc" href="#sdendnote5sym"><sup>v</sup></a></sup>
|
||
But instead of defending emergentism explicitly, they are content to
|
||
present these phenomena in the vein of a mystery yet to be solved.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0; page-break-before: always">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><font color="#993366"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><b>S<img src="data:image/png;base64,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" name="OdkC31" align="right" width="62" height="34" border="0">econd
|
||
law of thermodynamics.</b></font></font> 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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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 <i>a</i>symmetrical 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-<i>a</i>symmetrical law can be
|
||
derived from time-symmetrical laws. This is sometimes called the
|
||
puzzle about the “arrow of time.”<sup><a class="sdendnoteanc" name="sdendnote6anc" href="#sdendnote6sym"><sup>vi</sup></a></sup>
|
||
It is, as we shall see, the source of Loschmidt’s paradox.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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 <i>statistical
|
||
equilibrium </i>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 <i>six
|
||
dimensional phase space </i>to represent the state of <i>each
|
||
</i>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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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 <i>in three
|
||
dimensional space</i> 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
|
||
<i>statistical</i>, whereas the definition of randomness we have been
|
||
using is <i>geometrical</i>. 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 <i>count </i>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 <i>define
|
||
</i>non-randomness, but also to <i>explain </i>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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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 <i>only
|
||
</i>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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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 <i>implies </i>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.<sup><a class="sdendnoteanc" name="sdendnote7anc" href="#sdendnote7sym"><sup>vii</sup></a></sup>
|
||
</font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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 <i>ever
|
||
actually occur </i>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.<sup><a class="sdendnoteanc" name="sdendnote8anc" href="#sdendnote8sym"><sup>viii</sup></a></sup></font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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 <i>see</i> 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 <i>geometrical structure </i>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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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 <i>see</i>
|
||
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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><font color="#993366"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><b>M<img src="data:image/png;base64,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" name="OdkC32" align="right" width="64" height="34" border="0">echanical
|
||
principles.</b></font></font><font color="#993366"> </font>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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><b>Putnam’s
|
||
Board-and-Peg Argument.</b> 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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000">“<font face="Times New Roman, serif"><span lang="en-US">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.”</span></font><sup><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><span lang="en-US"><a class="sdendnoteanc" name="sdendnote9anc" href="#sdendnote9sym"><sup>ix</sup></a></span></font></sup></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.”<sup><a class="sdendnoteanc" name="sdendnote10anc" href="#sdendnote10sym"><sup>x</sup></a></sup>
|
||
That role of special interests is what leads him to argue that
|
||
“structural features” are a “higher level” that is
|
||
“autonomous” from physics.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Let
|
||
me emphasize, however, that space is an ontological cause of this
|
||
simple global regularity in two ways. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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 <i>concrete </i>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.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><b>The
|
||
Supervenience of Dispositional Properties. </b>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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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 <i>supervene </i>on physical traits.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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 <i>in this case </i>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.”</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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 <i>type </i>of disposition, that
|
||
is, which includes all and only fragile objects, making fragility a
|
||
supervenient property. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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 <i>see </i>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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">It
|
||
is not necessary to construct deductions using mathematical formulas,
|
||
because the cause that explains the <i>kind </i>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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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 <i>generation </i>and <i>corruption </i>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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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.<sup><a class="sdendnoteanc" name="sdendnote11anc" href="#sdendnote11sym"><sup>xi</sup></a></sup>
|
||
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 <i>unchanging </i>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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><b>Putnam’s
|
||
Argument from Countervailing Conditions.</b> 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.<sup><a class="sdendnoteanc" name="sdendnote12anc" href="#sdendnote12sym"><sup>xii</sup></a></sup>
|
||
</font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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”<sup><a class="sdendnoteanc" name="sdendnote13anc" href="#sdendnote13sym"><sup>xiii</sup></a></sup>
|
||
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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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 <i>global </i>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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Finally,
|
||
other apparently irreducible phenomena can be explained in similar
|
||
ways. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Prigogine
|
||
(1980), for example, points to the phenomenon of self-forming objects
|
||
as irreducible.<sup><a class="sdendnoteanc" name="sdendnote14anc" href="#sdendnote14sym"><sup>xiv</sup></a></sup>
|
||
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.<sup><a class="sdendnoteanc" name="sdendnote15anc" href="#sdendnote15sym"><sup>xv</sup></a></sup>
|
||
See the discussion of crystal formation and the conformation of
|
||
protein molecules in <font face="Verdana, sans-serif">Structural
|
||
global regularities.</font></font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000">“<font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="2" style="font-size: 10pt"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.</font><sup><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><a class="sdendnoteanc" name="sdendnote16anc" href="#sdendnote16sym"><sup>xvi</sup></a></font></sup><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">
|
||
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. </font></font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0; page-break-before: always">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><font color="#993366"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><b>F<img src="data:image/png;base64,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" name="OdkC33" align="right" width="55" height="34" border="0">unctions.</b></font></font>
|
||
The recognition of supervenient properties is the most common way of
|
||
describing the failure of reductionism,<sup> <a class="sdendnoteanc" name="sdendnote17anc" href="#sdendnote17sym"><sup>xvii</sup></a></sup>
|
||
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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Though
|
||
supervenience theorists generally deny that upper level <i>laws
|
||
</i>mentioning supervenient properties are irreducible, supervenient
|
||
properties do entail a kind of law that is not reducible. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.<sup><a class="sdendnoteanc" name="sdendnote18anc" href="#sdendnote18sym"><sup>xviii</sup></a></sup>
|
||
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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif">The
|
||
validity of functional explanations.</font> 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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.
|
||
</font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif">The
|
||
ontological reducibility of functional properties.</font> 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.” </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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).</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">By this
|
||
definition, <i>goodness </i>and <i>perfection </i>are related to one
|
||
another as the property of the <i>part</i> is to the property of the
|
||
<i>whole </i>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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Moreover,
|
||
it follow that the function that each non-reproductive structural
|
||
effect has is good <i>for the organism </i>of which it is part, that
|
||
each kind of organism is good <i>for the ecology </i>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
|
||
<i>for what exists in the whole region </i>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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0; page-break-before: always">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><font color="#993366"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><b>R<img src="data:image/png;base64,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" name="OdkC34" align="right" width="73" height="32" border="0">ational
|
||
causation.</b></font></font> The remaining problems about the nature
|
||
of causation arise in the branches of science known as psychology and
|
||
social science. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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,</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">But another
|
||
problem is that, even if they are, they do not seem to be reducible
|
||
to the kinds of explanation given in physics. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><font color="#993366"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><b>P<img src="data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAEsAAAAeCAMAAABT0xOcAAAAYFBMVEX////w8Png4PPQ0O3jx5vAwOiwsOKgoNyQkNaAgNBwcMpgYMRQUL5AQLhVSzowMLI5MicgIKwQEKYAAJkAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABl64e+AAABEElEQVR4nO2SYY+DMAiGa7FFbDmvsP//W486F1Pn3HIx++SbWKDiQ6G6/kP93kw/hymud+epd3qSLtbF+gZLmPlFSmiilN6y2NMAsp/SRETvWVZ9IBUMKJrtiJxVcwi2uhzQMgqGtLAW1wyxSoWTbFg4ahyVJ2NYZ9mMSKosjWY8SzWVtbieFS0CVoZNj2g9YszFIl+KV4350aMBarH6rO4Ed3JCxdSwwM5TR4udNTjiMNrR+JC1RKrd1D3NyzTNU1Px3gZAOG/cWWI79cvVlU7mZCVPeyyCEOoYcbBFEAI9WJoBUBo3+Vjfa3HSsDby5eXNrzLCPKiE7T/RKsUPUIoAw1x4OmL9TxfrYu2xTtMfmsmIdWhX0wcAAAAASUVORK5CYII=" name="OdkC35" align="right" width="75" height="30" border="0">sychology.</b></font></font>
|
||
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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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). </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif">H<img src="data:image/png;base64,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" name="OdkC36" align="right" width="73" height="20" border="0">ermeneutics.
|
||
</font>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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">This
|
||
problem with the empirical method was discussed when the empirical
|
||
method was introduced (in <font face="Verdana, sans-serif">Method</font>).
|
||
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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif">N<img src="data:image/png;base64,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" name="OdkC37" align="right" width="73" height="20" border="0">aturalism.</font>
|
||
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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><b>Behaviorism.</b>
|
||
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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><b>Functionalism.</b>
|
||
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.”</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><b>Neurophysiology.
|
||
</b>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.) </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><b>Neurophysiology.</b>
|
||
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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><b>Behaviorism.</b>
|
||
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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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.) </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><b>Functionalism.
|
||
</b>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 <i>behavior generator</i>, the <i>local image</i>, the
|
||
<i>object image</i>, and the like. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif">Intentionality.
|
||
</font>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.<sup>
|
||
<a class="sdendnoteanc" name="sdendnote19anc" href="#sdendnote19sym"><sup>xix</sup></a></sup></font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">The
|
||
problem about <i>intentionality</i> is how there can be psychological
|
||
states that are <i>about</i> 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 <i>aboutness</i> 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?</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Intentionality
|
||
cannot be explained as something we <i>read into</i> the phenomena,
|
||
as if it were just a useful way of describing or summing up what
|
||
happens in nature.<sup><a class="sdendnoteanc" name="sdendnote20anc" href="#sdendnote20sym"><sup>xx</sup></a></sup>
|
||
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 <i>about </i>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.<sup><a class="sdendnoteanc" name="sdendnote21anc" href="#sdendnote21sym"><sup>xxi</sup></a></sup></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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 <i>descriptions</i> of the brain.
|
||
The other holds that natural science can give functional <i>explanations
|
||
</i>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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><b>Intentional
|
||
states as functional states. </b>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.<sup><a class="sdendnoteanc" name="sdendnote22anc" href="#sdendnote22sym"><sup>xxii</sup></a></sup>
|
||
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, </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.<sup><a class="sdendnoteanc" name="sdendnote23anc" href="#sdendnote23sym"><sup>xxiii</sup></a></sup>
|
||
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 <i>are </i>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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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 <i>about water</i>,
|
||
say, being different from beliefs <i>about alcohol</i>). 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 <i>how </i>and <i>why </i>they
|
||
are <i>about </i>the world. It cannot, for example, say which beliefs
|
||
are true. It cannot even explain what makes true beliefs true.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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 <i>in </i>the brain. This
|
||
doctrine he calls "individualism.”<sup><a class="sdendnoteanc" name="sdendnote24anc" href="#sdendnote24sym"><sup>xxiv</sup></a></sup>
|
||
</font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.<sup><a class="sdendnoteanc" name="sdendnote25anc" href="#sdendnote25sym"><sup>xxv</sup></a></sup>
|
||
And there are more basic philosophical objections to such a theory,
|
||
which Fodor does not acknowledge.<sup><a class="sdendnoteanc" name="sdendnote26anc" href="#sdendnote26sym"><sup>xxvi</sup></a></sup>
|
||
However, neither class of problems is relevant here. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">For
|
||
our purposes, the problem is that, if the intentional content of
|
||
psychological states can be explained only by <i>tacking </i>a causal
|
||
theory of reference <i>onto </i>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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.<sup><a class="sdendnoteanc" name="sdendnote27anc" href="#sdendnote27sym"><sup>xxvii</sup></a></sup>
|
||
</font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><b>Functional
|
||
explanations of intentional states.</b> This brings us to the other
|
||
received theory of the intentional content of psychological states,
|
||
the one that would <i>explain </i>representations by their function,
|
||
rather than just describe them by their causal roles as internal
|
||
states in a functionalist system. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Ruth
|
||
Millikan (1989, p 282) rightly challenges Fodor's assumption that the
|
||
status of an inner state "<i>as</i> 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 <i>explained </i>functionally,
|
||
and not merely <i>described </i>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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.<sup><a class="sdendnoteanc" name="sdendnote28anc" href="#sdendnote28sym"><sup>xxviii</sup></a></sup>
|
||
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 <i>because they
|
||
correspond </i>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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.<sup><a class="sdendnoteanc" name="sdendnote29anc" href="#sdendnote29sym"><sup>xxix</sup></a></sup></font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.<sup> <a class="sdendnoteanc" name="sdendnote30anc" href="#sdendnote30sym"><sup>xxx</sup></a></sup>
|
||
</font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0; page-break-before: always">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><font color="#993366"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><b>S<img src="data:image/png;base64,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" name="OdkC38" align="right" width="75" height="30" border="0">ocial
|
||
science. </b></font></font>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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><b>Individualism.</b>
|
||
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.<sup><a class="sdendnoteanc" name="sdendnote31anc" href="#sdendnote31sym"><sup>xxxi</sup></a></sup>
|
||
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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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 <i>Descent of Man</i>). 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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><b>Holism.</b>
|
||
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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">The roots
|
||
of social holism can be traced to theorists about human society in
|
||
the 19<sup>th</sup> 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).</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">The
|
||
interpretationalists are represented by Herder and Hegel. Herder used
|
||
the notion of <i>Das Volk</i> 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, <i>Das Volk </i>became <i>Die
|
||
Volksgeist</i>, 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.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">The
|
||
naturalists who defended holism in the 19<sup>th</sup> 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
|
||
<i>conscience collective,</i> 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.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif">O<img src="data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAEgAAAAUBAMAAADcj2b4AAAAMFBMVEX////w8PnQ0O3AwOiwsOKgoNyQkNaAgNBwcMpgYMRQUL5AQLgwMLIgIKwQEKYAAJnhdqIwAAAA9UlEQVR4nGNgIAbw/ycIPgxSRbvfg1h/5t8Dkf//f4NK5f9BVhR8H8T6Xb8XSP78//8zVMr+J7Ki7f9Tje4/Nqqf8+3/jW//JxkCzZg/2fi//bf/wZrfii2c7kMU2f6qz/5dX/19ffbnf/af/9v/rv+/Zb/959/5/z6/z/pVD1EEFAWi6r/++p9/14MVFRUDFf0Pivn8v/o3QpEfUNF/j/7Pf/LBivS/gxT93wxXFHwfKLqpGKho4v3P/80S/5ck15slgaxzj4Ar2v3+/L/7f/fdvwcMgD//f9/5/+fc/d9335//8//2/T//7/27P1jjjghFxAAA6lc2vHz33zwAAAAASUVORK5CYII=" name="OdkC39" align="right" width="72" height="20" border="0">ntological
|
||
critique of methodological individualism.</font> 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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><b>The
|
||
rational nature of the individuals.</b> 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). </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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). </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><b>Cultural
|
||
evolution.</b> 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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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). </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><b>The
|
||
invisible hand. </b>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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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 </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. .</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><b>The
|
||
work of the invisible hand. </b>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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif">O<img src="data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAACoAAAAUBAMAAAAJnbK1AAAAMFBMVEX////w8PnQ0O3AwOiwsOKgoNyQkNaAgNBwcMpgYMRQUL5AQLgwMLIgIKwQEKYAAJnhdqIwAAAAgElEQVR4nGNgwAr4/2OCDzQU/QOEQHDy/3lk0c9ACATb/89HFz1sBhTN/22s/zUo3Rgs+tHY+L/d9/Xb/9t/fv/+03+9b/thau1/1wNFfyv3A5nfEaI/5wNF///zRhGdUvweKPo13Q4uCnLZ3/3/3wJdthvIPP/3PS3DAZsoVgAAzVJMKhL8cO0AAAAASUVORK5CYII=" name="OdkC40" align="right" hspace="5" width="42" height="20" border="0">ntological
|
||
critique of social holism.</font> The truth of social holism is aso,
|
||
therefore, not quite what social holists have imagined. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">The
|
||
evolution of spiritual animals that makes individuals rational is by
|
||
natural selection, or reproductive causation on the social level of
|
||
biological organization.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">The
|
||
evolution of culture is by the rational selection of arguments, or a
|
||
form of reproductive causation contained within spiritual animals.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">The
|
||
evolution of processes of production is by capitalist selection, or a
|
||
form of reproductive causation contained within spiritual animals. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">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. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Ontological
|
||
philosophy must, however, deny traditional forms of social holism
|
||
that postulate entities that are not constituted by space and matter.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Thus,
|
||
ontological philosophy must deny the existence of Hegel’s <i>Geist</i>
|
||
and Herder’s <i>Das Volk,</i> 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. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">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.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Finally,
|
||
the social holism of Durkheim must also be rejected, because there is
|
||
no irreducible tendency of the <i>conscience collective </i>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.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<br><br>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<div id="sdendnote1">
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="sdendnote" style="margin-bottom: 0.25cm"><font color="#000000"><a class="sdendnotesym" name="sdendnote1sym" href="#sdendnote1anc">i</a>
|
||
Among other places, Hume uses the billiard ball example in Section
|
||
IV, Part I of <i>An Enquiy Concerning Human Understanding</i>. </font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div id="sdendnote2">
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="sdendnote" style="margin-bottom: 0.25cm"><font color="#000000"><a class="sdendnotesym" name="sdendnote2sym" href="#sdendnote2anc">ii</a>
|
||
Although the notion of self-organizing systems comes from
|
||
thermodynamics, it has uses in biology, as is clear in Kauffman
|
||
(1993). </font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div id="sdendnote3">
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="sdendnote" style="margin-bottom: 0.25cm"><font color="#000000"><a class="sdendnotesym" name="sdendnote3sym" href="#sdendnote3anc">iii</a><sup>
|
||
</sup>See for example, Manicas (1987).</font></p>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div id="sdendnote4">
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="sdendnote" style="margin-bottom: 0.25cm"><font color="#000000"><a class="sdendnotesym" name="sdendnote4sym" href="#sdendnote4anc">iv</a><sup>
|
||
</sup>Mandelbaum (1971, pp. 20-28 and p. 291) discusses various
|
||
forms of monistic holism or emergentism, including Engels. Engels
|
||
denied the adequacy of reductionistic materialism in all branches of
|
||
natural science, not just history, claiming that the basic laws of
|
||
nature were not those of physics, but rather dialectical laws, in
|
||
which essentially novel phenomena arise from the "contradictions"
|
||
in established processes.</font></p>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div id="sdendnote5">
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="sdendnote" style="margin-bottom: 0.25cm"><font color="#000000"><a class="sdendnotesym" name="sdendnote5sym" href="#sdendnote5anc">v</a>
|
||
For a popular exposition, see James Gleick, 1987.</font></p>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div id="sdendnote6">
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="sdendnote" style="margin-bottom: 0.25cm"><a class="sdendnotesym" name="sdendnote6sym" href="#sdendnote6anc">vi</a>
|
||
L. Sklar (1992) reviews these issues and gives references to the
|
||
literature in Chapter 3, “The Introduction of Probability into
|
||
Physics”. He puts the problem of reducing them to the basic laws
|
||
of physics as being unable to show that the probabilistic
|
||
assumptions of statistical mechanics are “nonautonomous” (p.
|
||
121). See also Sklar (1993)).
|
||
</p>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div id="sdendnote7">
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="sdendnote" style="margin-bottom: 0.25cm"><a class="sdendnotesym" name="sdendnote7sym" href="#sdendnote7anc">vii</a>
|
||
Loschmidt’s paradox does not mean that Boltzmann’s statistical
|
||
explanation of this tendency is falsified by observation, for it can
|
||
be held that the reason we never observe random systems
|
||
spontaneously becoming nonrandom is that the random microstates that
|
||
lead to nonrandom states are statistically so overwhelmingly
|
||
improbable that they virtually never occur in nature. And the reason
|
||
why we <i>do </i>observe many cases of nonrandom states becoming
|
||
random can be explained by the existence of other kinds of processes
|
||
in nature that impose nonrandom initial states on closed systems.
|
||
This bias in our sample of systems makes what is just an atemporal
|
||
statistical fact about such systems appear to be a tendency to
|
||
become more random over time.</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="sdendnote">This may save the appearances, but
|
||
it does not salvage Boltzmann’s definition of randomness as an
|
||
explanation of the <i>tendency </i>to randomness. To be sure, there
|
||
are sources of usable, or “free”, energy in nature that can
|
||
impose nonrandom initial states on closed systems, and a more
|
||
general version of the second law of thermo­dynamics would have
|
||
to cover the systems of which they are parts. These sources of free
|
||
energy include not only other systems with nonrandom distributions
|
||
of elasticly interacting objects, but also systems in which the
|
||
objects have potential energy because of forces they exert on one
|
||
another. But their existence does not explain the tendency to
|
||
randomness as a change with a direction in time. It only explains
|
||
why there are so many examples of that tendency in our surroundings.
|
||
There is still no reason to believe that systems that start off in a
|
||
nonrandom state will become random, except that most such systems
|
||
examined must be in a random state, if all possible microstates are
|
||
equally probable. At best, the existence of natural processes that
|
||
impose nonrandom initial states on closed systems will so bias our
|
||
sample that it will <i>appear </i>that change has a direction in
|
||
time. But that is no part of the statistical explanation of the
|
||
tendency to randomness, for if its statistics did take into account
|
||
the existence of such natural processes, it could not assume that
|
||
all possible microstates are equally probable.
|
||
</p>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div id="sdendnote8">
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="sdendnote" style="margin-bottom: 0.25cm"><a class="sdendnotesym" name="sdendnote8sym" href="#sdendnote8anc">viii</a>
|
||
Attempts to show the equiprobability of all possible microstates
|
||
introduce another kind of phase space to represent the microstates
|
||
of the gas. The position and momentum of each molecule in a box can
|
||
be represented by six numbers, three each for its position and
|
||
momentum, and since the state of the whole box can be represented by
|
||
six numbers for each molecule, it is possible to think of the
|
||
microstate of the box as the location of a single point in a “space”
|
||
whose number of dimensions is six times the number of molecules.
|
||
This is misleadingly similar to the real, three dimensional space
|
||
from which it abstracts, for changes in the state of the box, which
|
||
actually depend on the molecules all moving and interacting in real
|
||
space according to the laws of physics, are represented as the
|
||
“motion” of this “phase point” in a “phase space” with
|
||
an enormous number of dimensions (the limits of the phase space
|
||
being determined by the total energy of the gas and the size of its
|
||
container). Although it can be shown that the phase point will <i>not
|
||
</i>move around to every point, it can be shown that it will
|
||
eventually spend the same amount of time in every small region of
|
||
this phase space. This theorem (the ergodic theorem) is used to
|
||
justify the assumption that all the points in phase space are
|
||
equally probable. But as long as it shows only that the phase point
|
||
will visit every <i>region </i>of phase space equally often, and not
|
||
every <i>point</i>, there is no good reason to believe that the
|
||
kinds of random microstates that would lead to non-random states
|
||
will ever occur, because there is no reason to believe that minor
|
||
differences in micro states will not add up to big differences, such
|
||
as not being non-random on the macro level. The importance of such
|
||
small differences is an example of the “butterfly effect” to
|
||
which chaos theorists have recently been drawing attention. See J.
|
||
Gleick, <i>Chaos: The Making of a New Science</i> (New York: Penguin
|
||
Books, 1987).</p>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div id="sdendnote9">
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="sdendnote" style="margin-bottom: 0.25cm"><a class="sdendnotesym" name="sdendnote9sym" href="#sdendnote9anc">ix</a>
|
||
“Philosophy and Our Mental Life”, Putnam (1975, pp. 295-6).
|
||
Putnam (1978, pp. 42-3) calls it the “Laplacean super-mind’s
|
||
deduction”.</p>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div id="sdendnote10">
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="sdendnote" style="margin-bottom: 0.25cm"><a class="sdendnotesym" name="sdendnote10sym" href="#sdendnote10anc">x</a>
|
||
For Putnam (1975, pp. 296-7), structural features are singled out
|
||
because of our interests, because of what is salient from our
|
||
special point of view, or because of the “pur­poses for which
|
||
we use the notion of explanation”, rather than because of the role
|
||
of material structures in constituting global regularities about
|
||
change over time.</p>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div id="sdendnote11">
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="sdendnote" style="margin-bottom: 0.25cm"><a class="sdendnotesym" name="sdendnote11sym" href="#sdendnote11anc">xi</a>
|
||
For many chemical interactions, the molecules must collide with
|
||
enough energy to distort one another’s geometrical structures so
|
||
that their parts are in a position to exert the forces that result
|
||
in exchanging parts of themselves with one another, and thus, the
|
||
likelihood of such reac­tions depends on the mean kinetic energy
|
||
of their random motion and interaction, or tempera­ture.
|
||
Although combustion does not start spontaneously, once it does
|
||
start, it can be self-sustaining. Once some molecules interact
|
||
energeti­cally enough to form the stronger, lower-energy bonds,
|
||
they release enough energy to put other molecules in a position to
|
||
do the same.</p>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div id="sdendnote12">
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="sdendnote" style="margin-bottom: 0.25cm"><a class="sdendnotesym" name="sdendnote12sym" href="#sdendnote12anc">xii</a>
|
||
Putnam also uses this argument elsewhere, for example, in Putnam
|
||
(1992, p. 62).</p>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div id="sdendnote13">
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="sdendnote" style="margin-bottom: 0.25cm"><a class="sdendnotesym" name="sdendnote13sym" href="#sdendnote13anc">xiii</a>
|
||
Putnam, 1987, p. 11.</p>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div id="sdendnote14">
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="sdendnote" style="margin-bottom: 0.25cm"><a class="sdendnotesym" name="sdendnote14sym" href="#sdendnote14anc">xiv</a>
|
||
See also Kauffman (1993, 1995).</p>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div id="sdendnote15">
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="sdendnote" style="margin-bottom: 0.25cm"><a class="sdendnotesym" name="sdendnote15sym" href="#sdendnote15anc">xv</a>
|
||
The more elaborate examples in which one kind of chemical reaction
|
||
is followed by another in cycles can also be explained as global
|
||
regularities, for they are simply cases in which the free energy of
|
||
the thermo<font color="#000000">­dynamic processes </font>to be
|
||
structured is supplied by the forces exerted by the molecules in the
|
||
region on one another and the chemical interactions are changing the
|
||
kinds of molecules that are present in the region.</p>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div id="sdendnote16">
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="sdendnote" style="margin-bottom: 0.25cm"><a class="sdendnotesym" name="sdendnote16sym" href="#sdendnote16anc">xvi</a>
|
||
See Gleick (1987).</p>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div id="sdendnote17">
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="sdendnote" style="margin-bottom: 0.25cm"><a class="sdendnotesym" name="sdendnote17sym" href="#sdendnote17anc">xvii</a>
|
||
John Post (1987) re-defines "physicalism" as a kind of
|
||
materialist ontology that rejects reductionism in favor of what are,
|
||
in effect, supervenient properties, and he goes so far as to take
|
||
that anti-reductionism as the main reason for accepting it.</p>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div id="sdendnote18">
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="sdendnote" style="margin-bottom: 0.25cm"><a class="sdendnotesym" name="sdendnote18sym" href="#sdendnote18anc">xviii</a>A
|
||
good statement of the etiological theory is given by Larry Wright
|
||
(1973, 1976), but see also Michael Ruse (1973). For a criticism of
|
||
the etiological theory and a defense of what they call the
|
||
"propensity theory", see Bigelow and Pargetter (1987).
|
||
Karen Neander (1991) defends the etiological theory against their
|
||
criticisms, but in a way that is not very convincing, at least, not
|
||
to me.
|
||
</p>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div id="sdendnote19">
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="sdendnote" style="margin-bottom: 0.25cm"><a class="sdendnotesym" name="sdendnote19sym" href="#sdendnote19anc">xix</a>
|
||
Franz Brentano originally proposed intentionality as the distinctive
|
||
mark of the mental. He focused on what he called "intentional
|
||
inexistence", by which he meant that a mental state could be
|
||
about something even if that something did not really exist. That
|
||
rules out explaining the content of a mental state as an actual
|
||
relationship to what it is about, but the content can be explained
|
||
by a theory that holds that particular representations are part of a
|
||
system. (Brentano did <i>not </i>require that <i>all </i>psychological
|
||
states are about things that do not exist). If there is a systematic
|
||
or normal relationship between representations of all types and
|
||
kinds of objects/states in the world, then tokens of those types can
|
||
stand for objects or states that do not exist.
|
||
</p>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div id="sdendnote20">
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="sdendnote" style="margin-bottom: 0.25cm"><a class="sdendnotesym" name="sdendnote20sym" href="#sdendnote20anc">xx</a>
|
||
This is the position long defended by D. C. Dennett (1971, reprinted
|
||
in 1978). Not only does he take psychological states to be something
|
||
that we ascribe to objects from the "intentional stance",
|
||
but he also takes functions to be something we ascribe from the
|
||
"design stance" and mechanisms to be something that we
|
||
ascribe from the "physical stance". Dennett can be happy
|
||
with such a position, because he is still basically an
|
||
subjectivistic epistemologist, who is content to explain nature in
|
||
terms of our ways of knowing about it, rather than ontologically.
|
||
</p>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div id="sdendnote21">
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="sdendnote" style="margin-bottom: 0.25cm"><a class="sdendnotesym" name="sdendnote21sym" href="#sdendnote21anc">xxi</a>
|
||
It does not help to say that there are no intentional psychological
|
||
states, only words and sentences that refer to the natural world,
|
||
because the same problem then arises about language. See the
|
||
discussion of the problems of cotemporary analytic philosophy in
|
||
Stage 10 on philosophical spiritual animals.
|
||
</p>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div id="sdendnote22">
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="sdendnote" style="margin-bottom: 0.25cm"><a class="sdendnotesym" name="sdendnote22sym" href="#sdendnote22anc">xxii</a>
|
||
See Putnam's (1975) 1960's papers on psychology and Fodor (1975).</p>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div id="sdendnote23">
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="sdendnote" style="margin-bottom: 0.25cm"><a class="sdendnotesym" name="sdendnote23sym" href="#sdendnote23anc">xxiii</a>
|
||
Fodor (1975) was among the first to distinguish token-token
|
||
reductions from type-type reductions.
|
||
</p>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div id="sdendnote24">
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="sdendnote" style="margin-bottom: 0.25cm"><a class="sdendnotesym" name="sdendnote24sym" href="#sdendnote24anc">xxiv</a>
|
||
See "Individualism and Supervenience" in Fodor (1988) and
|
||
Fodor (1991).
|
||
</p>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div id="sdendnote25">
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="sdendnote" style="margin-bottom: 0.25cm"><a class="sdendnotesym" name="sdendnote25sym" href="#sdendnote25anc">xxv</a>
|
||
Such a causal theory of reference is defended in Fodor 1988, Chapter
|
||
4.</p>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div id="sdendnote26">
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="sdendnote" style="margin-bottom: 0.25cm"><a class="sdendnotesym" name="sdendnote26sym" href="#sdendnote26anc">xxvi</a>
|
||
For example, Putnam points out in "Why There Isn't a Ready-Made
|
||
World" (1983, pp. 205-228) and (1981) that the kind of causal
|
||
relation Fodor uses to explain references to objects/states cannot
|
||
be explained by internal realism in terms of materialism. See the
|
||
discussion of contemporary analytic philosophy in Stage 10.
|
||
</p>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div id="sdendnote27">
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="sdendnote" style="margin-bottom: 0.25cm"><a class="sdendnotesym" name="sdendnote27sym" href="#sdendnote27anc">xxvii</a>
|
||
Fodor dismisses the possibility "that brain states should be
|
||
relationally individuated" as "plain silly."</p>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div id="sdendnote28">
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="sdendnote" style="margin-bottom: 0.25cm"><a class="sdendnotesym" name="sdendnote28sym" href="#sdendnote28anc">xxviii</a>
|
||
Millikan (1989, p. 283) holds that what is required to "fly a
|
||
naturalist theory of content" is an "appeal to teleology"
|
||
in which "what makes a thing into an inner representation is,
|
||
near enough, that its function is to represent". Millikan uses
|
||
an etiological analysis of functional explanations, and I have
|
||
simplified her analysis somewhat, because we are interested only in
|
||
representations that were naturally selected in the course of
|
||
evolution. We will take up language in the next part. Van Gulick
|
||
(1980) is an earlier attempt to formulate a teleological theory of
|
||
representation.</p>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div id="sdendnote29">
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="sdendnote" style="margin-bottom: 0.25cm"><a class="sdendnotesym" name="sdendnote29sym" href="#sdendnote29anc">xxix</a>
|
||
Millikan (1989, pp. 290-91) uses this example from Dretske (1990) to
|
||
illustrate her theory.</p>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div id="sdendnote30">
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="sdendnote" style="margin-bottom: 0.25cm"><a class="sdendnotesym" name="sdendnote30sym" href="#sdendnote30anc">xxx</a>
|
||
In arguing against the causal theory of reference, Matthen (1988)
|
||
uses, in effect, the input function of a behavior guidance system to
|
||
illustrate functional explanations of the correspondence to external
|
||
conditions, but he focuses on representations of color rather than
|
||
the representations of objects in space on which such perception
|
||
depends.</p>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div id="sdendnote31">
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="sdendnote" style="margin-bottom: 0.25cm"><a class="sdendnotesym" name="sdendnote31sym" href="#sdendnote31anc">xxxi</a>
|
||
Methodological individualism was originally defended by Karl Popper
|
||
(1950, 1957), F. A. Hayek (1952), and J. W. N. Watkins (1952, 1955,
|
||
1958 and 1959). It has been criticized by Maurice Mandelbaum (1959),
|
||
and more recently by David-Hillel Ruben (1985) and Margaret Gilbert
|
||
(1989).
|
||
</p>
|
||
</div>
|
||
</body>
|
||
</html> |