The Metaphysics of the Physical World—Part II
Introduction
In today’s post, we explore in detail the tacit model of reality to which the influential philosopher and historian E.A. Burtt was referring1, when we quoted him last week as saying that we “have allowed the physicists to make a metaphysic out of method.”
This week we outline this tacit model of reality, drawn from the physicists’ stock-in-trade, and explore the temptation to confuse the comparatively barren “world according to physics” with the rich diversity of the real world out there. To the extent that we fall prey to that temptation, we are severely limiting our options for applying scientific understanding to the issues that most confound us in our daily lives.
As we are reminded here, “We live in a manifold world—rich, multifarious, diverse and everywhere idiosyncratic,” but the Official view of the world as being everywhere uniform leads us to “confine our scientific ambitions to placing individual instances under universal laws.”
This is, after all, the way in which we most often find people thinking in terms of applying scientific thinking to real-world problems. It too often leaves us with social sciences attempting to emulate the methods of physics and chemistry without ever attaining anywhere near their degree of predictive certainty.
Psychology can no longer claim to be a young science, and it has not got very far considering the lack of any universal psychological principles by which we can optimize our pursuits, if only we could manage to apply these principles perfectly, at the perfect time. We can optimize our lives only when we can get specific about what is going on in this instance, with this unique set of circumstances, and what it is we need to do to get the outcome we are after.
There is no set of universal laws of human nature, which if we learned them all and applied them skilfully would allow us to address a particular set of circumstances objectively and with scientific rigor. Here Psychology has proved to be of limited use in understanding people, despite all its efforts to understand People.
Indeed, the social sciences to date have only been able to provide what are at best useful frameworks elucidating certain dimensions of a situation—but that’s about it. Rarely have they been able to tell us what will work for us in this specific situation right now, the way that engineers can apply physics to know what to do with other kinds of real-world problems in specific, unique circumstances, say in building a particular bridge or reducing a prototype engine’s power consumption.
Gregory Bateson once remarked that he found it easier to argue constructively with dogmatic Roman Catholic theologians or doctrinaire Marxists, because they were at least aware that they were looking at things through a particular frame—whereas most other theorists remain blissfully unaware of the frame they are tacitly using. Most of us are unaware we are even looking at the world through a particular frame.
When we recognize that we are looking at things through a particular frame, we can recognize that it is likely reality won’t always match up all the way, and that when it doesn’t, this isn’t a flaw of reality. It means we need to reconsider some of our assumptions.
If we expect life to involve an infinite number of unique one-off situations, nothing is stopping us from learning to master these one-off sets of circumstances objectively. It is only the questionable picture of reality as strictly hierarchical and governed by universal laws after the manner of physics which is getting in our way.
Idiosyncratic situations needn’t pose an obstacle to understanding them and addressing them with scientific rigor, unless we attempt fruitlessly to try and apply universal solutions and concepts to situations that are unique. Here we begin to show how that can be done.
—Ellen and James
The Metaphysics of the Physical World—Part II
The World of Physics and the Entertainment World
Gilbert Ryle reminds us that when people speak of “the world of physics,” or when we refer to the marine biologist’s world or the world of bacteriology, it can all be as innocuous as speaking of the entertainment world or the poultry world—using “world” to mean, roughly, field, or province, or department of interest: e.g. all matters pertaining to poultry-keeping.2
But there is a built-in and beguiling ambiguity here. The poultry-keeper or the marine biologist is interested in things that, as it happens, can usually only be found, respectively, in farmyards or in oceans. Accordingly, perhaps, there is little temptation to confuse the poultry world or the marine biologist’s world with the world as a whole, and no temptation to imagine that the marine biologist, say, is giving us his (marine biological) version of what the world as a whole is like.
The physicist, however, by trade, deals in matters instances of which may be found throughout the universe. While crystals or colloids, gamma rays or pulsars, semiconductors or magnetic fields are not to be found everywhere, the totality of phenomena falling within the physicist’s department of interest are indeed scattered throughout the world.
Yet this fact alone, even taken together with earlier considerations in Part I, does not seem to be enough to account for the great pull of the temptation to regard the world of physics as being the world according to physics—even though we are not in the least tempted to think of the world of marine biology or the world of organic chemistry as being the world according to marine biology or organic chemistry.
Materialism and the Official View
There is a very great temptation, from which few of us are ever wholly immune these days, to look out upon the world—“‘Well all that’ accompanied by a sweeping gesture”3—and imagine it all to be simply composed of matter, arranged according to the schoolchild’s well-known kneebone-connected-to-the-thighbone hierarchy of wheels within wheels: atoms making up molecules making up everything else.
The temptation is to imagine, in all that we see, little forces at work, and littler forces within the little forces, by which all things live, and are moved, and have their being. We imagine a surrogate world constructed according to this simplistic wheels-within-wheels model and confuse it with the real world out there. The temptation is very great, so great that it has come to represent the Official view of nature.
According to the Official view, which has held sway for over three-and-a-half centuries, the universe comprises a vast, hugely complex and richly interconnected causal system of events, governed by a relatively small number of universal causal laws, some yet to be discovered.
This Official universe is hierarchically arrayed in a sequence of interlocking stratified layers (or nested shells), with the phenomena of subatomic physics at the lowest level (or at the core), and with layers of ‘higher-level’ phenomena successively arrayed upwards from this base (or outwards from this core).
What’s more, the story goes, the laws, known and unknown, governing the behaviour of the various classes of interacting elements together determine the course of everything that transpires in the universe. On the Official view, if there is any room for slippage between these universal laws and individual goings-on, it can only be the result of a kind of leakage—some residual indeterminism in the universe due either to quantum uncertainty or to the predictive difficulties of non-linear equations.
The Official view forms a cluster of temptations to which we are prone to succumb, a habit of mind into which we tend to fall, a mood which overtakes us.
But when we take this cluster of temptations which we are calling the Official View of nature—this funny way we are all inclined from time to time to picture the physical world—and we try and put it into a set of philosophical propositions, we end up with a loose body of doctrines more-or-less as follows:
1. All that exists in the world are the entities recognized by physics. The world as a whole together with all that takes place within it is entirely constituted by the fundamental constituents of matter in aggregations of varying complexity, their behaviour, interconnections and physical interactions, and nothing else.4 Physics thus gives a complete inventory of the world in ever increasing detail and refinement.
2. The universe is a unitary, hierarchically structured holistic system of interacting, homogeneous classes of physical entities composed entirely of matter, that is, composed of subatomic particles making up atoms, which compose molecules, which are constructed e.g. into organelles, and thence into cells, organs, organ systems, organisms, ecosystems, and so on in hierarchical fashion.
3. Man, like all other animals, is equally a physical mechanism within this complexly, mutually interacting hierarchy, in common with the rest of nature. Every human being is a product of the interaction between his or her physical constitution (heredity) and the contingent interactions into which it has entered (environment), and nothing more.
Now this loose cluster of views which we are in the course of adumbrating is typically known in academic philosophy as “materialism,” but at this point the materialists divide into two camps, the reductive or eliminative materialists (who embrace what we shall call “strong” materialism) and the ontological materialists or emergent evolutionists (who embrace what we shall call “weak” materialism). So our list continues:
4. According to strong materialism, all properties are (basically) physical properties, the subject-matter of physics; whilst according to weak materialism some properties of things in the biological realm cannot be put into the language of physics—matter acquires novel physical properties at higher levels of complexity.
5. All explanations of events can be given, in principle, in terms of laws and antecedent conditions, though many of these laws remain as yet undiscovered.
(5a) According to strong materialism, we will eventually be able to derive all of these laws as consequences of the fundamental laws of physics: Biology is thus applied physics, and psychology is applied biology.
(5b) According to weak materialism, there may be fundamental laws to be discovered at all levels of the hierarchy; laws governing more complex aggregations of matter—e.g. organisms, societies—may not be able to be accounted for in terms of the consequences of the laws of physics alone, but may require the addition of equally fundamental principles, laws or regularities which govern more complex aggregations.
Needless to say, there is not time in this short article to attempt a critique of this widely held set of doctrines and the venerable philosophical tradition behind them and derived from them, no time to show why Schopenhauer justly thought it a philosophy well suited for barbers’ and apothecaries’ apprentices.
But what we do need to do for our purposes here is to notice what it is that materialism is about, what materialism is a philosophy of, and hence what the Official view’s cash value turns out to be.
To cut to the chase, as they say in Hollywood, in either its strong (reductionist) version or in its weaker (emergentist) version, the materialist contention about the physical nature of the world is, and logically can only be, a contention about the kinds of explanation that are necessary and sufficient to account objectively for goings on in the world.
No one in their right mind, not even philosophers, can seriously deny, in any meaningful way, that people and trees, books and symphonies, laws and parliaments exist. When “strong” materialists venture to say that all that “really” exists are the entities recognized by physics, they can only plausibly be construed as saying that everything that ever takes place can in principle be accounted for without residue by explanations which do not need to mention people or symphonies or parliaments, and which employ only the laws and fundamental entities of physics: a thesis about explanation which, I have come to be convinced, can readily be demonstrated to be false.
As for the weak materialists—the emergentists—they agree that everything is made of matter okay, but admit it might matter to our explanatory accounts that some aggregations happen to be, say, people rather than trees, and that we may still need to refer to some aggregations under such headings. In the face of the latter admission, however, their agreement that everything is made of matter now ceases to do any work and can be shown to be incoherent, whilst at the same time they relinquish any basis for restricting permissible explanations to any a priori set.
Materialism sounds at first like a very exciting, substantive thesis—a much grander thesis than, but of the same form as, “these flowers are all really made of silk,” or "this intricate model of St. Paul’s Cathedral is made only of sugar and colouring,” or “this entire model community is constructed entirely of ordinary Lego.” But the exciting-sounding materialist contention has only a very thin core of substance to it, and that thin core of contention is either ultimately vacuous or fairly obviously false.
Although, again, we haven’t the space to argue the case here, our view is that either form of materialism—strong or weak—depending on how you interpret it, is either false or meaningless: as a theory about what there is in the world it can be shown to be meaningless; as a theory of explanation it can be shown to be false. Likewise, the Official view of nature as a fundamentally uniform, unitary, richly interconnected web of causal relationships I hold to be a primitive myth which, after 300 years or more, has now outlived its usefulness.
Three Fatal Temptations
“I can resist everything but temptation” quipped Oscar Wilde. The Official view of nature as a complex, unitary whole, uniform in its laws and properties, hierarchical, and composed entirely of lifeless matter in various arrangements, where the properties of anything are a function of the properties of its constituents and their interactions with one another and with the environment, is a view which tempts all of us from time to time, whether or not we are professional philosophers or scientists.
It is a temptation whose ultimate sources are many, but here we shall confine ourselves to mentioning but three of those sources, each a temptation in its own right.
The first source is a tendency, a human frailty, which, nearly two-and-a-half millennia after Aristotle’s critique, we still have not been able to overcome, at least not all of the time. And that is the temptation to regard the “stuff” something is made of as being more real, and of more consequence, than the form of that stuff, the clay as more real and consequential than its shape, the marble as more real and fundamental and consequential than Michelangelo’s design and shaping of it into David.
The second source of the Official temptations is the tendency, the temptation, to accord greater explanatory importance to neat universal truths than to idiosyncratic accounts, to give precedence to sweeping principles over detailed local narratives—preferring explanations which, with satisfying economy, apply to more than a single instance.
In William James’s language,5 this second source is a sort of aesthetic preference for “thin” explanations over “thick” explanations. It is a preference for the descriptively rather high-level and intellectually highbrow over the comparatively low-level and seemingly lowbrow.
The third and most important temptation behind the Official view, the last we shall mention here, is the temptation to think that all explanations are—or for purposes of greater rationality, ought to be—of the same form.6 But in fact there are as many different and incomparable and equally objectively ‘necessary’ forms of explanation as there are varieties of puzzlement, and we curious human folk are wont to be curious about the most extraordinary range of matters, seeking answers to the most diverse kinds of questions. An explanation has not been given until the particular questioner’s puzzlement has been addressed to that questioner’s satisfaction.
A Manifold World: The New Epistemology, Officialdom and the Future of Science
So far we have tried, in this two-part article, to loose the hold over our thinking (if only a little) of a number of unnecessary and philosophically naive temptations which have hamstrung the rigorous empirical investigation of nature by artificially restricting the scope and the terms of natural science.
We need not be tempted to confuse the richly diverse, real world out there with a thin, surrogate world constructed from the meagre materials of the concepts of physics, concepts devised to answer a very specific set of highly interesting and important questions—albeit questions about a tiny handful of abstracted aspects of the natural world.
We need not be tempted either, to project onto the world itself the characteristics of the narrow but fertile methodology of the physicists, and fancy that science has somehow shown nature to be uniform, mechanistic, deterministic or mathematical. Nor need we be tempted to view the physicist as a kind of scientific generalist simply because his particular chosen specialism leads him to be interested in certain aspects of things which, chiefly on account of their high degree of abstraction, one can find exemplified just about everywhere.
And so we need not fall into the temptation to reduce all explanations to a single form, let alone to a single sort of content, nor confine our scientific ambitions to placing individual instances under universal laws. And above all we need not be blinded by the mythical Official view of nature, picturing it as a great hierarchical system of complexly interacting classes of entities—the vision with which man first embarked on the great scientific adventure more than three centuries ago.
Physics, or any science restricting itself to the concepts reducible to those of physics, only accounts for, or only ever will be able to account for, a minute fraction of the known phenomena of the physical world; the stars are many and large, but, in relative terms, the phenomena they exhibit are few. There are a much smaller number of distinct phenomena, by many orders to magnitude—a far less rich variety of natural phenomena—to be found in Betelgeuse than in Berlin, Boston or Billericay.
And so it is here that we come at last to the new epistemology, and its place in the sun, and my reason for choosing to grasp this particular nettle here and take up two issues of Change to clear the air on the much-misunderstood topic of the relationship between physics and the world. To the extent that we can shrug off the temptations and limitations of the Official view of nature, the new epistemology has a chance to survive into the 22nd century.
What is more, I believe that, by grasping this nettle, those who came to embrace the new epistemology of form and pattern, flux and constraint, still have the potential for revolutionizing the study of nature—the potential Gregory Bateson recognized some six decades ago when he called it “the biggest bite out of the fruit of the tree of knowledge that mankind has taken for over 2000 years.”7
In accounting for goings-on in the world, what the new epistemology brings to the scientific party is far more than an ability rigorously to compass directiveness in nature—purpose and design. This is itself no mean achievement, and no less than revolutionary, but more revolutionary still is the new epistemology’s characteristically negative mode of explanation.
On the new epistemology, explanation, in its pure form, eschews talk of events and their causes in favour of states-of-affairs and the constraints that leave them as the only states-of-affairs not currently precluded. As I have shown elsewhere and will be saying more about in future issues of Change in due course, this opens up to rigorous empirical investigation and scientific explanation the limitless field of the individual, autonomous, and idiosyncratic.
Regularities are ubiquitous within the narrow stable of Official-view science but are comparatively rare in the real world. From the perspective of the new epistemology, however, the rich diversity of phenomena, everywhere apparent, can be seen to be real and of fundamental explanatory importance. The idiosyncratic details of unique and unrepeatable events can, within a new kind of epistemological framework, be put to work in a rigorous ‘negative’ form of scientific explanation.
“Science,” Oakeshott concluded,8 “is not . . . an attempt to discover and generalize the ‘material’ world, or the ‘physical’ world, it is an attempt to discover a stable and communicable world of experience devoid of caprice or superstition.” It is my conviction that the real world in which we live is not, and not even a little bit like, the barren world of physics.
We live in a manifold world—rich, multifarious, diverse and everywhere idiosyncratic. And this manifold world requires manifold forms of explanation. The new scientific epistemology may, if we dare, provide an unprecedentedly powerful range of objective ways to study our world scientifically and with imaginative rigour. Just how it may rise to that challenge must wait for another occasion.
© Copyright 1995, 2023 Dr James Wilk
The moral right of the author has been asserted
in his landmark 1924 The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science
Dilemmas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954, p. 73
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, Part III, remark 316
Cf. D. M. Armstrong, "The Causal Theory of Mind" (1976), p. 29, in The Nature of Mind and Other Essays; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981
in A Pluralistic Universe (1909)
On this point, see J. C. B. Gosling, “Preferred Explanations,” Chapter XVII of his Plato, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973, pp. 271-90
Gregory Bateson, “From Versailles to Cybernetics,” in his Steps to an Ecology of Mind, London: Paladin Books, 1972
Michael Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933