The Anatomy of Knowledge

Papers Presented to the Study Group on Foundations of Cultural Unity, Bowdoin College, 1965 and 1966

Marjorie Grene

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138903654
• eBook ISBN: 9781317440376
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Originally published in 1969. Since the seventeenth century the kind of knowledge afforded by mathematical physics has come more and more to furnish mankind with an ideal for all knowledge. The ideal also carries with it a new conception of the nature of things: all things whatsoever are held to be intelligible ultimately in terms of the laws of inanimate nature. This reductionist formula can be overcome only by the fundamental rethinking of our philosophical premises. To contribute towards thsi rethinking was the aim of the Study Group at whose meetings this collection originated. The essayists come from a wide range of disciplines but all want to address the conflict in our culture.

The first part consists of discussions of various fundamental problems in the sciences. There are essays on the inter-relation of physics and psychology, on the possible reduction of biology to physics and chemistry, on new approaches to experimental psychology, against the possibility of giving a purely 'factual' account of social and political life, and for a fundamental reform of our concept of responsibility. The second section of the book suggests lines of philosophical inquiry which might help to resolve the epistemological and ethical problems arising at the foundations of physics, biology, psychology and the social sciences.

PART I

FOUNDATIONS PROBLEMS IN THE SCIENCES

1

EPISTEMOLOGY OF QUANTUM MECHANICS

ITS APPRAISAL AND DEMANDS

Eugene P. Wigner

I believe that in a conference such as ours every participant should contribute some of his specialized knowledge which has a bearing on the main subject of the conference. However, he also should give his thoughts on the main subject even if this is outside his specialized competence, and he should do this freely, not restricting himself to the areas of impact of his speciality. This may give a dilettantish taste to some of his remarks, and I wish to apologize in advance for my own. The specialty which I wish to contribute lies in the area of the epistemology suggested by our present picture of the conceptual limitations of physical theory. However, I would like to come to this subject, and its place in our subject of inquiry, from a more general discussion of cultural unity and the role of science in general therein.

THE EXPANDED ROLE AND GOAL OF SCIENCE

Forty years is not a very short period in human affairs, and it is likely that some aspect of man’s world has undergone important changes in almost any period of forty years. Our attention is, naturally, focused on those aspects of our world which are changing, and I believe that the changes in the role and also in the goals of science are as characteristic of our times as any.

Forty years ago most people knew about science only as something esoteric. When I was a child there was only one scientist in the circle of acquaintances of my family, and he was considered to be somewhat queer. Today in the U.S. one person in thirty works directly or indirectly either on improving our understanding of nature or to make better use of the understanding which we possess. Forty years ago, the demands of science on our economy were negligible—the most spectacular ones being for astronomical equipment. Today the U.S. spends $20 billion a year on research and development. This is 3

per cent of the gross national product.

Forty years ago few people paid much attention to what scientists thought or said; today their voice carries great weight in national as well as international affairs—often uncomfortably great weight. The attention, also, which the world pays to scientific discoveries or observations has grown to an almost disagreeable extent, and a significant scientific error could—in fact, occasionally does—cause embarrassment to its country of origin.

Hand in hand with this expanding role of science went an expansion of its goals. Forty years ago science was happy to provide increased insights into very limited areas—the motion of celestial bodies being a prime example. Today science seems to strive for an encompassing view of the whole universe in all of its manifestations, both in the large and in the small.

As I hope to explain on some other occasion, the expanded role and the expansion of the goals of science hold great promises for the future of man but also bring a new and more subtle type of danger thereto.¹ The promise is, of course, that men, instead of fighting with each other for power and influence, will fight together for an increase in our knowledge and understanding. If there is to be a cultural unity among men, science will have to provide most of the pillars thereto.

THE PRESENT SCHISM IN SCIENCE

What is the most important gap in present science? Evidently, the separation of the physical sciences from the sciences of the mind. There is virtually nothing in common between a physicist and a psychologist—except perhaps that the physicist has furnished some tools for the study of the more superficial aspects of psychology, and the psychologist has warned the physicist to be alert lest his hidden desires influence his thinking and findings.

Yet psychological schools have maintained that they wish to explain, eventually, all ‘processes of the mind’ by known laws of physics and chemistry and, as I’ll enlarge upon later, physicists came to conclude that, in ultimate analysis, the laws of physics give only probability connections between the outcomes of subsequent observations or content of consciousness. Hence, there is a striving, on the part of both the psychological and the physical sciences, to consider the reality of the subject of the other one the more basic. Perhaps I should interject here that it is my belief that the endeavor to understand the functioning of the mind in terms of the laws of physics is doomed to have no more than temporary and very partial success, whereas the direction into which modern physical theories point appears to me to be more fertile. Fundamentally, however, I believe that physics and chemistry, the disciplines of inanimate matter, will prove a limiting case of something more general, and that the fault of our ancestors in having thought of body and mind as separate was not of having thought of both of them but of having thought of them as separate. They form a unit, and both of them will be understood better if they are considered jointly.

This is, of course, only an opinion and a belief which may not be fully appropriate to our subject. What I feel sure of, however, is that there is a vast area of interesting knowledge here, waiting for a great mind to start its uncovering. To have such a large area may be very important if science is to become a unifying force for men, diverting them from their preoccupation with power.

TWO TYPES OF SCIENCE

The hope that man can fill the gap between the physical sciences and those of the mind is inspiring. It can be put into proper perspective, however, only if we also discuss what ‘filling the gap’ means, i.e. what it is that science accomplishes when it pervades a subject. Before that, a distinction between two kinds of science should be drawn which is surely neither new nor precise but which is nevertheless useful. Some of our sciences, among which physics is foremost, are concerned solely with regularities. The typical statement it makes is something as follows: If two macroscopic bodies are far from each other and all other bodies, the component of their separation in any fixed direction is a linear function of time. This is, evidently, a rule of very great generality (even though it is a special case of even more general ‘laws’). It is, however, a highly conditional statement and leaves unanswered many questions, such as the character of the bodies which are widely separated, whether there are such bodies and how many such bodies exist. There are other sciences which are concerned with just these questions, not with regularities. Geography, astronomy, botanics, zoology, and at present also psychology are such sciences. They are descriptive rather than searching for regularities, even though, as they develop, they may discover regularities—as did astronomy. However, these regularities then seem to become parts of another discipline.

LIMITATIONS OF THE TWO TYPES

Several years ago I discussed the limits of the sciences concerned with regularities. My conclusion was that the limits are given by the finite capacity of the human mind for assimilating knowledge, by its finite interest for increasingly subtle and sophisticated theories. Some of these limitations can be overcome by co-operative science, and there is a great deal of temptation to discuss that. The limitations of the descriptive sciences have evidently the same source. Even if we could catalogue the exact locations of all houses and trees all over the earth, we would have little interest in such a catalogue. It surely would be interesting to know how the plants look on another planet on which the conditions, such as temperature, gravitational acceleration, etc., are different from ours; it would be even more interesting to know how they look on a planet which is very similar to ours. But, unless comparisons of plants on different planets suggest new regularities, interest in such comparisons would soon be exhausted. It seems to me, therefore, that if the sciences are to provide the pivot for cultural unity, we must rely in the long run principally on the sciences which discover regularities, or, as is said commonly, provide explanations.

Even the regularity-seeking sciences may become stale one day; even they may cease one day to fire man’s imagination. The ideals of Arthur’s Round Table did. Man may then turn to other ideals. However, the fascination of the regularity-seeking sciences should suffice to give man a taste of cultural unity; it should start him on that path.

WHAT DO THE REGULARITY-SEEKING SCIENCES FURNISH?

It is often said that physics explains the behavior of inanimate objects. This sounds somewhat like an advertisement; no ultimate explanation can be given for anything on rational grounds. As I have said elsewhere, what we call scientific explanation of a phenomenon is an exploration of the circumstances, properties, and conditions thereof, its co-ordination into a larger group of similar phenomena, and, above all, the ensuing discovery of a more encompassing point of view. Or, as David Bohm said a short time ago, ‘Science may be regarded as a means of establishing new kinds of contacts with the world, in new domains, on new levels….’² One of the greatest accomplishments of physics in this regard is also one of its oldest accomplishments: the recognition that the motion of an object thrown into the air, the motion of the moon around the earth, and the motion of the planets around the sun follow the same regularities. The paths are all ellipses, obeying Kepler’s laws. The more encompassing point of view was provided in this case by the gravitational law of Newton, which permitted the co-ordination not only of the three phenomena enumerated but also of several other less striking phenomena.

The regularity-seeking sciences have another function: the discovery and creation of new phenomena. The phenomenon of electric induction is a case in point. Its co-ordination with magnetic phenomena, with the forces exerted by currents, was possible under the point of view of the Faraday-Maxwell electrodynamics.

These examples are brought forward to indicate what ‘filling the gap’ between the physical sciences and the sciences of the mind should mean. We have at present, of course, a rather sophisticated and well-developed regularity-seeking science of inanimate objects. We also have the beginnings of a similar science of the mind. Surely, the concept of the subconscious has permitted us to see many phenomena from a common point of view and the theory of the subconscious has been much enriched by phenomena discovered more recently. Dr. Polanyi has alluded to these. However, the link between the two, the phenomena of the mind and of physic phenomena, is missing now, just as the link between gravitation and mechanics on the one hand and electromagnetism on the other was missing for a long time. The creation of the missing link is a sufficiently challenging task to form a pivot for the cultural unity which we dream about.

Before turning to the subject about which I am believed to know something, the epistemology of modern physics, I would like to make one more general remark supporting a point made by Dr. Polanyi.³ It has little to do with cultural unity but much with the epistemology which I want to discuss.

SCIENCE IS AN EXTENSION OF PRIMITIVE KNOWLEDGE; IT IS IMPOSSIBLE WITHOUT THE LATTER

In order to appreciate this point we only have to imagine a mind which knows all that we know of physics but knows nothing else. Such a mind is like that of a person who floats in dark empty space and is not subject to any outside influence. Such a mind will have no use for its abstract knowledge of physics because there will be no sensory data to be correlated, no events to be understood. In fact, the laws of physics will be meaningless for him, because these give correlations between sensory data and he receives no sensory data that he can interpret.

This is very abstract discussion, but it does show that science cannot be a replacement for our common ability to accept sensory data, an ability mostly born with us but also partly learned during our babyhood. Rather, science gives us only a different view of these sensory data; it creates pictures from which they can be correlated in novel fashions. The primitive sensory data are the material with which science deals, which it orders and illuminates. Science does not furnish data, neither does it offer a substitute for the data; it is only interested in them.

One could object that our knowledge of nature permits us to use substitutes for sensory data, to photograph the stars rather than to look at them. This, however, is only appearance. Even if we photograph the stars, we must eventually ‘take in’ by our senses what the photograph shows. Furthermore, without our senses we could not handle a photographic camera. Clearly, all knowledge comes to us ultimately through our senses; science only correlates this knowledge.

I make these remarks for two reasons—neither of which is directly related to ‘cultural unity.’ First, because I believe that they are a paraphrase of Dr. Polanyi’s insistence on the significance of tacit knowledge; in fact, they perhaps are somewhat more. They are an insistence that something even more primitive than tacit knowledge is the subject of science, the material it deals with, without which it would be empty and meaningless.

The second reason for my remark is that the same conclusion at which we have arrived here abstractly will be forced on us later when we consider the epistemology of modern physics. This is not surprising; in fact, obstacles which can be understood abstractly only with foresight and imagination become obvious if one tries to travel down the road on which they stand.

THE TREND IN PHYSICS IN OUR CENTURY; THE CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK OF QUANTUM THEORY

Physics in our century has been under the spell of two conceptual innovations and an experimental discovery. The two conceptual innovations are relativity and quantum theories; the experimental discovery is the realization that the structure of matter is atomic, that it can be explored with tools developed for this purpose; pictures of its constitution, enlarged to macroscopic scale, can be obtained rather directly.

Let us first look at an element that is common to relativity theory, as it was originated by Einstein, and to quantum theory as it developed, often against the better wishes of its disciples. The common element—an element which is very important from the epistemological point of view—is the rejection of certain concepts which have no primitive observational basis. These concepts are very different from the two theories, and I prefer to discuss quantum theory principally because its rejection of concepts not based on direct apperception is much more radical. Let me therefore describe present quantum theory’s critique of the earlier, very natural, concepts.

The quantities which characterize the state of a system of point particles were considered, in analogy to macroscopic objects, the positions and velocities of these particles. An analysis of the experimental processes available for determining atomic structures—the processes which were mentioned before as constituting the most important experimental discovery of our century—shows, however, that there is little reason to believe that these can be determined accurately on the atomic scale. Hence, quantum theory wishes to adopt an attitude which is free of preconceptions. It considers the observations themselves.

An observation implies the interaction of some ‘measuring apparatus’ with the ‘object’ on which the observation is to be undertaken. One can think of such an interaction as a collision between the apparatus and the object. Just as in the case of a collision, there is practically no interaction before or after the process; before and after the observation, apparatus and object are isolated from each other. The duration of the interaction is finite; it i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Study Group on Foundations of Cultural Unity
• Introduction: Hobbes and the Modern Mind
• PART I FOUNDATIONS PROBLEMS IN THE SCIENCES
• PART II PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES
• EPILOGUE
• Index