Beyond Matter

Why Science Needs Metaphysics

Roger Trigg

• Publisher: Templeton Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781599475127, 9781599474953
• eBook ISBN: 9781599474960
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Metaphysics

Does science have all the answers? Can it even deal with abstract reasoning beyond the world we experience? How can we ensure that the physical world is sufficiently ordered to be intelligible to humans? How can mathematics, a product of human minds, unlock the secrets of the physical universe? Should all such questions be considered inadmissible if science cannot settle them?

Metaphysics has traditionally been understood as reasoning beyond the reach of science, sometimes even claiming realities beyond its grasp. Because of this, metaphysics is often contemptuously dismissed by scientists and philosophers who wish to remain within the bounds of what can be scientifically proven. Yet scientists at the frontiers of physics unwittingly engage in metaphysics, as they are now happy to contemplate whole universes that are, in principle, beyond human reach.

Roger Trigg challenges those who deny that science needs philosophical assumptions. Trigg claims that the foundations of science themselves have to lie beyond science. It takes reasoning apart from experience to discover what is not yet known and this metaphysical reasoning to imagine realities beyond what can be accessed.

"In Beyond Matter, Roger Trigg advances a powerful, persuasive, fair-minded argument that the sciences require a philosophical, metaphysical foundation. This is a brilliant book for newcomers to the philosophy of science and experts alike." —Charles Taliaferro, professor of philosophy, St. Olaf College

CHAPTER 1

Is Science the Sole Authority?

METAPHYSICS AND SQUIRRELS

IS “SCIENCE” MASTER in its own house, or does it depend on rational assumptions that it cannot itself prove? Perhaps it makes implicit presuppositions about the character of the world it studies, making such study possible. Many would vehemently deny that science needs anything that it cannot provide from its own resources. In other words, it needs no metaphysical framework in order to operate. It needs no philosophical foundation for its practices.

The very word “metaphysics” has raised many hackles over the last century. For some, it is a surrogate for theology—or at least needless obfuscation. In origin, the word referred to the subject of Aristotle’s great work, as a name given to the book following his Physics, which dealt with the things of nature. In Greek, the word “meta” also carries with it the flavor of not just what lies after but of what lies beyond. Certainly at the beginning of Metaphysics, Aristotle relates the idea of wisdom to dealing with “the first principles and causes of things,”¹ and later connects this to the knowledge of those things that are universal, “which are the hardest for humans to know since they are furthest from the senses.”² For him, such metaphysics was “first philosophy,” while the empirical discipline we now call science was “second philosophy.”³ He did not see the sharp distinction between empirical work and philosophical understanding that the English language divides by talking of “science” in the one case but not in the other. For Aristotle, they were all forms of knowledge (episteme—the root of epistemology). Languages such as German even now do not make any radical distinctions between them. Philosophy is as much a form of Wissenschaft (science/knowledge) as physics. Much to the surprise of English philosophers, translating “international philosophy congresses” back to English becomes “scientific congresses.”

“Science” is itself a word derived from the Latin word for “knowledge.” It has become restricted to the empirical sciences, with the eighteenth-century notion of “natural philosophy” dismissed totally. That may be more than a quirk of language. It betrays an implicit suggestion that all human knowledge ultimately derives from our senses and suggests anything very far from such empirical investigation should be ignored, as it is not derived through human experience by observation and experiment.

American philosopher W.V. Quine, a giant of mid-twentieth-century thinking about science, denied the idea of “first philosophy.” One of his influences was the philosophical tradition of American pragmatism. William James, for example, expressed pragmatists’ impatience for excessively abstract thought, which they considered unrelated to the real world. James was one of the foremost proponents of pragmatism at the beginning of the twentieth century. Pragmatism exemplifies the attitude of those—and they are many—who, whether practicing scientists or not, rely on the fact that “science works.” It has provided us with what was once unimaginable technology. While its products are not always benign, there is no doubt that modern science has given us the comfortable life that many enjoy. It has even taken men to the moon. Why do we need to worry about “first principles”? Is it not enough to see that, through the advance of science in theory and practice, we can control and predict the behavior of the physical world in ever more effective ways?

This attitude, with its “down-to-earth” and “no-nonsense” approach, has found abstractions irrelevant to the messy business of manipulating the physical world around us. James gave a celebrated illustration in defense of his view that “there can be no difference anywhere that doesn’t make a difference some-where—no difference in abstract truth that doesn’t express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact.”⁴ To use a favorite phrase of his, what is the “cash-value”⁵ of any statement? The illustration he gave came from a camping expedition when he found his companions arguing about what James took to be a metaphysical issue. His companions had seen a squirrel, and one of them had tried to follow it as it went, as squirrels will, around a tree trunk, keeping the trunk between the person and it. The squirrel went around the trunk, and so did the observer in pursuit, but he was not able to catch up with the squirrel. James put the issue this way:⁶ “The resultant metaphysical problem now is this: Does the man go round the squirrel or not?” The conclusion he drew was that it all depends on what “going round” means in practical terms. The dispute was in effect an idle one about the meaning of words, with the same practical consequences. There was no practical difference to be made whatever the conclusion. James insists that in the case of serious disputes “we ought to be able to show some practical difference.”⁷

As James himself points out, such pragmatism represents a familiar attitude in philosophy, what he terms the “empiricist attitude.”⁸ The use of words has always to be constrained by what is within reach of our human experience, and differences in claims to truth have to make a difference in our experience and life. If everything remains the same—whatever we claim in metaphysics—that will demonstrate that our language is failing to get a grip on anything that matters. It is like a wheel turning that fails to turn anything else. The suggestion is that such idle talk is typical of metaphysics and illustrates the way it fails to get a proper grip on reality.

THE VIENNA CIRCLE

Quine was fond in this context of referring to another image that came from Otto Neurath, a prominent member of the so-called “Vienna Circle,” the group of philosophers that met in Vienna between the wars, which Quine attended at one time. Quine explained the image this way in his seminal book Word and Object: “Neurath has likened science to a boat, which if we are to rebuild it, we must rebuild plank by plank, while staying afloat in it.”⁹ Whether it is in fact possible to rebuild a boat completely at sea may be disputed by boat builders, but the image is a powerful one. The idea is that one can change everything without any need to stand outside the boat. Science as an enterprise does not have to have any external philosophical or “metaphysical” base on which to rest. It can provide all the resources for development itself. We can remove one plank while standing on another, and in the same way, we can change one part of science and let it progress while still depending on another part.

The Vienna Circle had an immense influence, not least because its members were dispersed by the Second World War. In the English-speaking world, its “logical positivism” was popularized by A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic. An Oxford philosopher, he taught what was known as “verificationism,” the idea that not only the truth, but even the meaning of any statement that claimed non-logical truth, depended on our ability to verify it. The point was that such verification could only take place through human experience, as systematized by the methods of science in observation and experiment. Any claim of contingent truth beyond the reach of such verification was to be regarded as metaphysical, and anything metaphysical was derided as literal nonsense. This had the effect of raising the question even in science of the status of unobserved entities. Just how acute this issue could be was shown by the fact that, at that time, even the position of the unobserved side of the moon raised a problem. How could we know what it was like if it had never been seen?

Another member of the Vienna Circle, Rudolf Carnap, stressed that the group did not interpret the principle of verifiability as narrowly as this. He said that “we emphasized that the principle required, not the actual possibility of determination as true or false, but only the possibility in principle.”¹⁰ He claimed the Circle did accept a sentence about a mountain on the other side of the moon as meaningful. This was sensible as, of course, it was not until years later that observations of such terrain became possible. Science cannot progress unless there was a gap between what we can observe and what we might hope to look for, given technological advance. The difference between what is observable in principle and what is at present possible may give a motivation for scientific and technological change. Even so, the notion of what is “in principle” accessible to us, however elastic, must have intrinsic limitations.

According to the program of the Vienna Circle, “the scientific outlook knows no insoluble riddle.”¹¹ What could not be dealt with by the empirical sciences had to be a “pseudoproblem.” While this was a tremendous vote of confidence in the capabilities of scientific method, it gave a rather empty victory to science. It was one purely thorough definition. What it could not deal with was to be dismissed. It was not so much that science could explain everything, but what it could not explain was just unverifiable, unscientific, and therefore “nonsense.”

Carnap explained that all statements belonging to metaphysics (i.e., those beyond science) were to be placed in this category, adding that the terminology implied a logical, rather than a psychological, distinction. We, as humans, might think them perfectly meaningful, but logical analysis will demonstrate that they do not stand in any logical relation to empirical statements and certainly cannot be deduced from them. Therefore, they are to be discarded. The issue of accessibility to humans, though, still hung in the air, and a problem arose from the increasing need for physics to rely on theoretical entities that could not be directly observed. If they were inaccessible, did that mean that reference to them was unverifiable and therefore nonsense? If, in the days before the space program, philosophers hesitated about the status of the other side of the moon, where did that leave the theoretical entities referred to in physics, such as subatomic particles?

The influence of positivism lay heavily on some interpretations of quantum mechanics. Subatomic particles seemed inaccessible from the point of view of human experience, and their status was thereby put into question. The so-called Copenhagen interpretation, put forward by Niels Bohr and opposed by Albert Einstein, made great play of the combination of particle and measuring apparatus. In fact, the measurement, rather than the supposed particle, became the basic unit because it was part of the macroscopic world. Measurements and observations are the very stuff of empirical verification. The idea of a subatomic reality that could not be observed, even if its effects might be, left some scientists, as well as philosophers of science, uncomfortable. Yet, though it was all very well to talk of measurements, wasn’t it necessary to conceive of what was being measured? Measuring the spin of an electron became problematic if it was unclear what the process of “spin” actually described. The very strangeness of quantum reality with its seeming intrinsic indeterminism compounded the problem.¹²

The more we stress the importance of verification and the issue of accessibility to humans, the more the issue of the nature of reality as it is itself becomes irrelevant. Many philosophical views challenge the idea of such a reality, and verificationism is one of them. When we concentrate on methods of investigation or our practices, as is the case with both verificationism and pragmatism, reality as a guiding principle appears to drop out of account. The stress moves to humans and their capabilities, and the vision becomes very anthropocentric. Another, more philosophical way of putting it is that issues concerning the nature of reality, namely ontology, become indistinguishable from those of epistemology, or how we gain knowledge. Yet the former contains no necessary reference to human beings, whereas the latter has to be about us and the methods available to us for obtaining knowledge.

A further underlying issue is that if we ignore the role of an independently existing reality but concentrate on how we can obtain knowledge, it is less clear what constitutes knowledge or truth. As we shall see, truth is sometimes held to consist in the coherence and consistency of theories. Yet it is a truism that there can be different sets of coherent beliefs, and there have been many times in the history of science, when, given available knowledge, a set of all beliefs has cohered very nicely only to be disproved later.

THEORIES AND DATA

Despite difficulties about theoretical entities, many contemporary scientists still insist that our judgments about reality must in the end be connected with human experience. The biologist Richard Dawkins, in a “popular” book about science, summarizes a commonly held view that although we can imagine many fantastic things, even fairies and hobgoblins, in the end our knowledge comes only in three ways. He lists them as getting knowledge directly through our five senses, indirectly through special instruments, or “even more indirectly” by creating models of what might be real to see whether “they successfully predict things that we can see (or hear, etc.) with or without the aid of instruments.”¹³ His main point is that “ultimately, it always comes back to our senses, one way or the other.” It does not, of course, escape Dawkins’s notice that this rules out metaphysics and what he terms “the supernatural.” He says trenchantly that “to claim a supernatural explanation of something is not to explain it at all, and even worse, to rule out any possibility of explaining it.”¹⁴ For Dawkins, explanation and “evidence” have to be as firmly rooted in human experience as any logical positivist ever thought. Anything explicable must be within the reach of science and, as he puts it, “the well-established, tried, and tested scientific method that has been responsible for the huge advances of knowledge over the last four hundred years or so.”¹⁵

Dawkins’s reference to models suggests that theories can themselves play a significant role in understanding the physical world. One problem with old-style empiricism, as exemplified by the Vienna Circle, was that it relied on the idea that we were somehow passive recipients of data through our senses. We then just deduced theories from the experience that was given to us. Yet scientific practice is a more active process than that. We all have to sift out what is significant for our current purposes in our environment. It is like a detective searching for clues in a garden after a crime has been committed in a house. No one would expect to find something with a label saying “clue” tied to it. What counts as a clue, whether a footprint or something else, would depend on what the detective was looking for and thought relevant. In the same way in empirical science, with a confusing range of empirical data at hand, a scientist has to decide what is significant for building up a theory and what is considered irrelevant background noise. It is a common experience that the irrelevant background of one generation may be the means to an important scientific advance later; what was ignored is suddenly seen as of crucial importance.

Karl Popper, the eminent Austrian philosopher of science who was finally based in London, was contemptuous of what he dismissed as the “bucket theory of the mind.” For him the mind was active, building up theories about what there is. His p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• CHAPTER 1: Is Science the Sole Authority?
• CHAPTER 2: Science and Reality
• CHAPTER 3: World and Mind
• CHAPTER 4: Is the World Intelligible?
• CHAPTER 5: The Unity of Science
• CHAPTER 6: The Success of Science
• Notes
• Index