The Metaphysics of the Physical World—Part I
Introduction
How can we create a social science that is really a science?
The social sciences have been grappling with their status as science for as long as sciences of the mind and of people have existed. Sociology, psychology, and anthropology are understood to be softer than the hard sciences like physics, chemistry, and biology.
Psychology, the study of the mind, is often at odds with psychiatry, the study of where the mental meets the physical, which is one of the easier medical specialties compared with the understanding and healing of our purely physical containers. Neuroscience, as the study of what is immaterial by way of the material, is sought after by research psychologists as a way to pin down their soft, ethereal findings to something real.
And cognitive psychology, even when not connected with neuroscience, bases its fundamental understanding of the mental world on the metaphors of the physical sciences, using the language of the physical world as a conceptual wrapping by which to objectively capture the ethereal and mysterious forces that make up most of what we call living — our conversations, choices, thoughts, opinions, memories, preferences, feelings, habits.
This equation of the physical with the real is deeper than a fad of popular science: it has to do with our understanding of, our definition of, what reality is, or more specifically, what reality deserves to be.
Why do we tend to think that the device we are reading something on is realer than the communication going on when we read, or that the physical words on the page are realer than the tone of the passage?
If the physical really is more real than the mental, then it seems that the social sciences will always be at a disadvantage when it comes to true, scientific statements.
But is it possible that the struggle of the social sciences to find their place as equally rigorous as the physical sciences comes down not to its inability to copy physics enough, but because to rigorously study the mental world is fundamentally different than to rigorously study the physical world?
What would make that so? How would we find out?
—Ellen
The Metaphysics of the Physical World—Part I
The researches of many commentators have already thrown much darkness on this subject, and it is probable that, if they continue, we shall soon know nothing at all about it.
—Mark Twain
Where I seem to differ from some of my friends is in attaching little importance to physical size. I don’t feel in the least humble before the vastness of the heavens. The stars may be large, but they cannot think or love; and these are qualities which impress me far more than size does. I take no credit for weighing nearly seventeen stone.
My picture of the world is drawn in perspective, and not like a model to scale. The foreground is occupied by human beings and the stars are all as small as threepenny bits.
—F. P. Ramsey, Foundations of Mathematics, p. 291
It’s going to be a blow on behalf of the ordinary universe, which I think on the whole likely to be the right one.
—William Golding
The World and the World of Physics
When philosophers, as well as moonlighting scientists in philosophical mood, refer to “the world,” and then proceed to say whatever it is they have to say about the nature of the world, they mean not the planet Earth, but the sum total of all phenomena and objects known or unknown, throughout space and time. “The world” refers then to everything to be found within the unitary, vast and unbounded three-plus-one-dimensional continuum in which all events occur and everything is located.
Sometimes this totality is conceived of as constituting one vast, singular, harmonious system of things—a cosmos, a notion implicit in the modern scientific conception of the world for more than 300 years. But as Toulmin pointed out long ago, we must not make the mistake of thinking that the world is a place like any other place, only a good deal bigger.
When cosmologists purport to tell us what the world is like as a place, whether they are professional cosmologists schooled in philosophical method or just off-duty astrophysicists, they are seeking to comment not just on this or that aspect of the world but aim to say something—neither trivial nor banal—about everything.
But quite commonly, philosophers and scientists, now with a let’s-get-down-to-business air of significantly greater specificity, can be found referring quite purposefully to “the physical world.” Here we are entitled to wonder, “Well, as opposed to what?” The qualifying epithet suggests a distinction between this and some other world, as when we speak of "physical anthropology" to indicate that our remarks may not necessarily apply to cultural anthropology. By saying “the physical world" we imply that much about the world will not be covered in our remarks.
Sir Arthur Eddington, in The Nature of the Physical World,1 acknowledges that the physical world cannot possibly embrace everything, for the physical world, he says, is restricted merely to a complex of metrical symbols dealing with particular measurable quantities, obtained and manipulated according to some specific well-worn procedures, rules and conventions, within a certain established tradition that has developed a particular coherent scheme for relating these quantities in order to answer a fairly small set of quite specific questions.
Leaving to one side Eddington’s notorious two tables, he is otherwise generally clear enough about using “the physical world” synonymously with a term he also uses frequently, “the world of physics”—the subject-matter of physics as physics happens to treat it, that is, what physicists have to say about the matters with which they concern themselves professionally, e.g. such highly abstract quantities as mass, energy, distance, and so on, and such phenomena as gravitation or light refraction.
Our knowledge of the physical world, for Eddington, is knowledge of the response of various metrical indicators to the presence of this or that body, and the subject-matter of physics is a schedule of pointer readings obtained by measuring certain physical variables with certain instruments under certain conditions, readings of quantities which vary with one another in initially perplexing ways.2
But whether or not we take Eddington’s line on physics, it seems unplausible that when philosophers and scientists purport to tell us about the nature of the physical world, they mean to comment merely on a schedule of pointer readings or to confine their remarks to the professional concerns of physicists. They would seem to be trying to say something about the principles governing the world of natural events at large—the public, objective, external world accessible to corroboration by sensory experience.
Now this objective world has its physical or material aspects, to be sure, but to what extent are we justified in regarding this as the whole story? It is my contention that the natural world is no less fundamentally mental or historical or biological than it is physical, and that, if I am right, this has considerable consequences for our scientific understanding of nature in general.
Metaphysics and Method
“We have allowed the physicists to make a metaphysic out of a method,” said Professor E. A. Burtt,3 and Eddington, I think, would have concurred. Physicists find the nature of the world to be, in its most general terms, just what you would expect them to find it to be, given their methods of inference. It is no wonder, Eddington remarks, that physicists have come to describe the world as “consisting of entities rigorously bound to one another by mathematical equations forming a deterministic scheme.”4
For, in physics, “mathematics is the model of exact inference” and physicists endeavour to ensure that all of their inferences conform to this model. Where the physicist cannot complete the mathematical chain he is forced to admit that knowledge of the kind he makes his stock-in-trade is not yet to be had. When it comes to reckoning the nature of the physical world, physics, Eddington argues convincingly, gets out what it puts in. The mathematical determinism of the universe, to the extent that it appears in the physicists’ account of the world, along with the apparently mechanistic nature of things as the physicist finds them, is no more than a perfectly predictable and unavoidable reflection of the physicists’ modus operandi.
When I speak to Mr X over the telephone, Eddington remarks, the voice that comes across to me is not the whole of what is at the other end of the wire—there is much more to Mr X. And physics, like the telephone, “can transmit just what it is constructed to transmit and no more.”5 Or again, we are reminded of the quip about the scientist who first cuts cheese into perfect cubes and studies them, and later submits an article to Nature on the Euclidean architecture of cheese.
But as Eddington goes on to point out, what no one could have predicted is the great fertility of these narrow methods of investigation—how very many phenomena in nature could be helpfully illuminated in this strict mathematical way.
Of course we must be very careful here to note that physicists, or indeed the various scientific enterprises taken as a whole, have done nothing to demonstrate the supposed uniformity of nature. The often alleged uniformity of nature is neither established by observation nor is it a hypothesis to be tested, as Oakeshott points out, but is “secured to nature by definition.”6
The uniformity of nature is an artifact of our methods of investigation. Only those aspects of phenomena which were the same from observation to observation could be accommodated by the methods of this particular scientific engagement. Any explanations which applied only to a particular observation and not to a whole class of observations needed to be ignored as useless to science as traditionally conceived.
Imagine that an ingenious young fisherman has invented a Universal Fishing Net and an associated method of fishing which is excellent for catching all kinds of fish (provided only, of course, that they are larger than the holes in the net). Sixty years later, after a lifetime’s experience with his net and method, having caught millions of fish of every conceivable variety, in waters all around the world, he is asked what he has learned. He replies: “Strange as it may seem, there is not a fish in the sea smaller than my thumb.”
Accounting for the World in the Terms of Physics
How is it, then, that physics seems to have something to say about everything in nature, about everything that exists?
For one thing, every line of business has its occupational hazards and produces its occupational deformities. Philosophically naive physicists, when they stray into cosmological waters, tend to be dazzled by the methodologically-demanded generality of their findings and by the ubiquity of their specialist subject-matter. After all, matter and energy do pop up all over the place! And they tend to mistake these for the utterly spurious ‘comprehensiveness’ of their theories.
One leading contemporary astrophysicist, though known more for his personal courage than for his personal modesty, described “our goal,” ‘as physicists’, as “nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in.” It is clear from the context of his statement that he is not just using “the universe” as another name for ‘outer space’—plainly, in his befuddlement, be stakes his claim to the lot.
When I was an undergraduate, I was sitting in a Left Bank café when the half-cut French student at the next table announced to me that he was getting drunk to celebrate the passing of his law exams. When I congratulated him, he asked if I too was a student and inquired, purposefully, what my subject was. I replied that I was reading philosophy and neurophysiology. “Ha!” he exclaimed, with visible satisfaction, “nothing so important as I! For my subject is the Law,” he beamed, pausing for intensity and for breath, “and by comparison your work is of no account.”
When I merely shrugged at my beer, he urged, “Go on, ask me what I mean by that!” Again I obliged him. “You see,” he explained pompously, but in all boozy seriousness, “whether you are studying philosophy or physiology or physics or I don’t care what, you are still subject to the same Law. Everyone in this café, everyone in the world comes under the Law. No one can say that the Law does not apply to them. No one. Not even the Pope. And so, as for me,” he lowered his voice for dramatic emphasis and hunched towards me with a half-deranged gleam in his eye, “The whole world now is mine!”
There is no problem here on weekdays when the physicist is in the laboratory or the lecture theatre—the trouble only starts on Sundays when the physicist is in the pulpit or on the OpEd page. What makes physics as a branch of knowledge possible at all is the rigorously circumscribed nature of its methods. But there are methods other than these for acquiring knowledge of the world, methods equally rigorous and fertile.
Gilbert Ryle, in his Tarner lectures,7 employs the analogy of a scientifically minded college auditor, who saw his accounts as being the only objective description of college life. An undergraduate, permitted to view the accounts, is disturbed to learn from the auditor that “these accounts tell the objective truth about the entire life of the whole college; the stories that you tell about it to your brothers and sisters are only picturesque travesties of the audited facts. They are only dreams. Here are the realities.”
But, the undergraduate protests, might these accounts not just deal with certain aspects of the life of the college? Like the chimney sweep and the meter-reader from the electricity board, might the auditor not just see his own little corner of college life and, like them, offer only a petty fragment of the whole story?
“No,” the auditor insists, “here are the payments to the chimney-sweep at so much per chimney swept, and here are the payments to the Electricity Board at so much a unit. Everybody’s part in the college life, including my own, is down here in figures. There is nothing departmental in the college accounts. Everything is covered. What is more, the whole system of accountancy is uniform for all colleges and is, at least in general pattern, uniform for all businesses, government departments and town councils. No speculations or hypotheses are admitted; our results are lifted above the horizons of prejudice by the sublime Principle of Double Entry.”
And not just five or six sides but all sides of college life are covered. But whilst the auditor’s figures scrupulously cover and account for, say, every book in the library, they do not describe any of the books in the reviewer’s sense of “describe.” For the auditor the book is merely the price indicated on its jacket and no more. But what would we think of the auditor who left “his ledgers to edify us with the moral he pretends to draw from his accounts, namely that books are nothing but entries in columns of pounds, shillings and pence?”8
Or to change the metaphor altogether: “The universe is put into equations,” wrote Maeterlinck, “as the history of France was put into madrigals.”
© Copyright 1995, 2023 Dr James Wilk
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Next week, this article continues in Part II: We’ll discuss the way in which claims about what it is that the world is ultimately made of are epistemological claims about the sufficiency of certain forms of explanation, and we will see how the new epistemology greatly extends the reach of science while reducing its metaphysical pretensions.
A. S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928
ibid., Ch. XII
Cited by Susan Stebbing (p. 64) in her book critiquing Eddington’s philosophical views, Philosophy and the Physicists; London: Methuen & Co, 1937
op. cit., p. 271
op. cit., p. 270
Experience and Its Modes, Cambridge University Press, 1933, p. 191
Dilemmas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954, pp. 75-79
ibid., p. 77