The Anatomy of Inquiry (Routledge Revivals)

Philosophical Studies in the Theory of Science

Israel Scheffler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780415739610
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317810858
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

First published in 1963, this title considers the philosophical problems encountered when attempting to provide a clear and general explanation of scientific principles, and the basic confrontation between such principles and experience. Beginning with a detailed introduction that considers various approaches to the philosophy and theory of science, Israel Scheffler then divides his study into three key sections – Explanation, Significance and Confirmation – that explore how these complex issues involved have been dealt with in contemporary research. This title, by one of America's leading philosophers, will provide a valuable analysis of the theory and problems surrounding the Philosophy of Science.

Part I
Explanation

1. The Humean Background

'Explanation' is an ambiguous word. We often apply it to the clarification of terms or statements. Alternatively, we use it to refer to the provision of reasons in support of a judgment. In yet another way, we frequently attach it to the weaving together of a theoretical fabric within which credible generalizations may occupy determinate places. Our present concern is with still a different employment of the word, according to which it applies to the causal diagnosis of particular events, occurrences, or facts. To ask for an explanation why a given patient has contracted a disease is, normally, to ask neither for clarification of the term 'disease' nor for a fisting of the symptoms upon which the medical judgment of disease is based, nor yet for a theory of disease, but rather for an analysis of those antecedent factors in the situation responsible for the patient's falling ill.

Ever since Hume, such causal diagnosis has generally been taken to be a matter of connecting the event to be explained with other events by means of general principles gotten through experience, though not demonstrable on the basis of accumulated experiential knowledge. Hume denied necessary connections of matters of fact: between observed cases recorded in the evidence and predicted cases based on the evidence there is a fundamental logical gap unbridgeable by deductive inference. No event is thus explainable solely through specification of others from which it may be said necessarily to follow. For no event "necessarily follows" from any others. Rather, additional appeal must be made to principles which serve to connect events in general patterns, and which, though resting on past experience, far outstrip what can be demonstrated on the basis of such experience.¹

That some such principles are required in order for us to connect cause and effect was argued by Hume to follow from the fact that cause and effect are not, in themselves, logically connected, that it is, therefore, always consistent to suppose a given cause to occur without a particular event alleged to be its effect. Thus, in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, he says:

When I see, for instance, a Billiard-ball moving in a straight line towards another; even suppose motion in the second ball should by accident be suggested to me, as the result of their contact or impulse; may I not conceive, that a hundred different events might as well follow from that cause? May not both these balls remain at absolute rest? May not the first ball return in a straight line, or leap off from the second in any line or direction? All these suppositions are consistent and conceivable. Why then should we give the preference to one, which is no more consistent or conceivable than the rest? All our reasonings a priori will never be able to show us any foundation for this preference. In a word, then, every effect is distinct from its cause. It could not, therefore, be discovered in the cause, and the first invention or conception of it, a priori, must be entirely arbitrary. ... In vain, therefore, should we pretend to determine any single event, or infer any cause or effect, without the assistance of observation or experience.²

It is observation and experience that may reveal numerous instances without exception in the past, in which an event of a given kind is conjoined to an event of another kind. There is, to be sure, no way of demonstrating, on the basis of such instances, that events of these respective sorts will always be found to be conjoined. There is no guarantee that the course of nature is constant and uniform. Yet all our knowledge of matters of fact rests upon the principle of custom or habit by which such past conjunctions are generalized to future, unknown, and hypothetical cases.

Thus, Hume writes, "Having found, in many instances, that any two kinds of objects—flame and heat, snow and cold—have always been conjoined together; if flame or snow be presented anew to the senses, the mind is carried by custom to expect heat or cold, and to believe that such a quality does exist, and will discover itself upon a nearer approach."³ If we are to say, in the spirit of this passage, that we have accounted for this heat by showing it to have been caused by this flame, we can do no more than show that the heat has in fact now been conjoined to the flame, and affirm our habitual or customary belief that heat and flame are always conjoined, having frequently and without exception been conjoined in the past.

Now, it often happens that we speak of one event as the cause of another, even where constant conjunction in the past has in fact failed. If, for example, the heat referred to above is taken as the sensation of heat, flame often has occurred without such conjoined sensation, e.g., when a discarded match has burned itself out at a considerable distance from the nearest living being. Yet, I do not hesitate to attribute the sensation in my finger, when I burn myself on a match, to the flame as cause.

Such an attribution is accommodated within the Humean tradition by treating it as an indication of some causal factor singled out from the total cause—which is in fact what is conjoined to the effect in question. In the present example, the total cause may be presumed to include not merely the flame, but the proximity of a sentient organism, the lack of insulating barriers, and still other conditions, if the principle connecting it to the effect in question is to hold true of our past experience. The total cause may in some instances be unknown, or the additional conditions may be understood in context, or they may be relatively constant in duration by comparison with the factor singled out, or they may, finally, be less subject to our control. In any event, there is nothing more involved in causal explanation than the connecting of circumstances through principles of conjunction resting upon past experience.

The variability of ordinary causal attribution is elaborated in J. S. Mill's A System of Logic. "It is seldom, if ever," writes Mill,

between, a consequent and a single antecedent that this invariable sequence subsists. It is usually between a consequent and the sum of several antecedents, the concurrence of all of them being requisite to produce, that is, to be certain of being followed by, the consequent. In such cases it is very common to single out one only of the antecedents under the denomination of Cause, calling the others merely Conditions. Thus, if a person eats of a particular dish, and dies in consequence, that is, would not have died if he had not eaten of it, people would be apt to say that eating of that dish was the cause of his death. There needs not, however, be any invariable connection between eating of the dish and death; but there certainly is, among the circumstances which took place, some combination or other on which death is invariably consequent: as, for instance, the act of eating of the dish, combined with a particular bodily constitution, a particular state of present health, and perhaps even a certain state of the atmosphere; the whole of which circumstances perhaps constituted in this particular case the conditions of the phenomenon, or, in other words, the set of antecedents which determined it, and but for which it would not have happened ... If we do not, when aiming at accuracy, enumerate all the conditions, it is only because some of them will in most cases be understood without being expressed, or because for the purpose in view they may without detriment be overlooked. . . . Nothing can better show the absence of any scientific ground for the distinction between the cause of a phenomenon and its conditions, than the capricious manner in which we select from among the conditions that which we choose to denominate the cause. However numerous the conditions may be, there is hardly any of them which may not, according to the purpose of our immediate discourse, obtain that nominal pre-eminence. . . . The cause, then, philosophically speaking, is the sum total of the conditions positive and negative taken together; the whole of the contingencies of every description, which being realised, the consequent invariably follows.⁴

The view of the passage just quoted has been reinforced and generalized by later writers. Thus, it has been widely remarked that the notion of cause tends to disappear in advanced theoretical science in favor of the notion of functional association.⁵ The relative constancy of the former notion in everyday situations and in applied science has, further, been taken to underscore its close connection with practical issues of control and ascription of responsibility, in context.⁶ Thus, given a set of conditions which, in Mill's sense, constitutes "the cause, philosophically speaking," of some effect, we may single out for causal status just that condition presumed subject to human control and thus capable of providing a basis for determining legal or moral responsibility.

In other cases discussed by recent writers, selection of some condition for causal status may hinge on the relative temporal constancy of other conditions belonging to "the cause, philosophically speaking," and in still other cases, the latter conditions are excluded by some pragmatic criterion: e.g., they are too well understood to mention, or they are as yet unknown. Causal status may, in an extreme case, be assigned to some particular event or object felt to be contributory, though we feel ignorant of any general condition it exemplifies which, properly speaking, itself belongs to the total cause.

It has further been remarked that control has two faces: we are sometimes interested in producing an effect, at other times concerned to prevent one from occurring. In the former case, we naturally attend, with Mill, to those contingencies "which being realised, the consequent invariably follows." In the latter case, we may attribute causal status rather to those contingencies which, being unrealized, the consequent invariably fails to follow. Thus, imagine a substance which invariably produces cancer when injected; the discovery of this substance does not constitute finding the cause of cancer, for our concern is to prevent this disease, and 'finding the cause of cancer' is accordingly interpreted, commonly, as 'find...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION: Philosophy and the Theory of Science
• PART I: Explanation
• PART II: Significance
• PART III: Confirmation
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX