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Overview
This book critically examines several well-known philosophical positions from a time-transcending Aristotelian point of view. It defends an Aristotelian or "realist" interpretation of science, employing the textual Aristotle as commented upon and amplified through the centuries. The book shows that although modernity has offered a significant challenge, only a realist interpretation of science is compatible with the advances made in theoretical physics since the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. Dougherty discusses the so-called "sciences of man," their starting points, and limitations.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jude P. Dougherty, dean emeritus of the School of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America, is author of The Logic of Religion, Jacques Maritain, and Western Creed, Western Identity, editor of the Review of Metaphysics, and general editor of the Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy series published by CUA Press.
PRAISE FOR THE BOOK:
"A broad, wide-ranging approach that covers and ably defends a time-transcending Aristotelian understanding of the nature of science."—Louis Groarke, associate professor of philosophy, St. Francis Xavier University
"Nothing today so powerfully shapes the mind of man as the spirit of positive science. Against this backdrop it takes a critic respectful of the achievements of positive science to expose its conceptual foundations in the thought of Aristotle and his commentators. Jude Dougherty is ideally suited to undertake this task. He is a modern philosopher firmly grounded in classical philosophy, respectful and informed in modern science, and its cultural heritage. Dougherty writes clearly and gets to the ancient conceptual foundations of science with learned candor."—Edmund D. Pellegrino, M.D., Professor Emeritus of Medicine and Medical Ethics, Georgetown University
"Few if any contemporary intellectuals could duplicate Dougherty's effort. Considered in it itself the book constitutes a masterful example of its chief topic of consideration: how to give a scientific explanation. As such, it is a pearl of great price from which any contemporary thinker who professes to be a philosopher or scientist can learn much." -International Philosophical Quarterly
"[Dougherty's] work represents an extensive knowledge of both science and philosophy. And he shows, with meticulous care, how modern science, in disregarding metaphysics has reduced science to mere description and prediction, thereby omitting important realities that transcend empirical observation." -The Wanderer
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780813220147 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The Catholic University of America Press |
| Publication date: | 01/16/2013 |
| Pages: | 312 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d) |
About the Author
JUDE P. DOUGHERTY, dean emeritus of the School of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America, is author of The Logic of Religion, Jacques Maritain, and Western Creed, Western Identity, editor of the Review of Metaphysics, and general editor of the Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy series published by CUA Press.
Read an Excerpt
THE NATURE OF SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATION
By JUDE P. DOUGHERTY
THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA PRESS
Copyright © 2013 The Catholic University of America PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8132-2013-0
Chapter One
LECTURE ONEHISTORICAL CONTEXT
WHAT IS AT STAKE
The necessity of providing an adequate interpretation of natural science is a task inherited from the eighteenth century, wherein John Locke and David Hume challenged the notions of substance and causality and thereby undermined a classical understanding of science. The awakened Kant accepted Hume's psychological account of causality and went on to ask how science is possible, whereas metaphysics is not. The emphasis Kant placed on the categories as mental structures whose function consisted mainly in organizing data received by the senses had a profound effect on the common understanding of science. Karl Popper's questioning the value of induction may be regarded as a logical consequence.
At the end of the nineteenth century the European philosophical turf was shared by two factions, both coalitions: those of an idealistic strain, largely Hegelians, on one side, and those of a materialistic or skeptical bent, indebted to British empiricism and the Critiques of Kant, on the other. Long eclipsed was the metaphysics of Aristotle and the Schoolmen.
Henri Bergson, in an attempt to confront the skeptical bent of the mechanistic and deterministic philosophies of his day, philosophies often presented by their adherents as the rational foundation of modern science, developed a metaphysics critical of both Hegel and the empiricists. Bergson was not alone in the search for a way out of the prevailing philosophical climate. In reaction to German idealism, which itself was framed as a reaction to Kant's Critiques, new and critical realisms began to emerge on both sides of the Atlantic. Hegel, initially embraced as an antidote to empiricism, was abandoned when it became clear that Hegelians were hard-pressed to account for the march of new scientific techniques that were leading to remarkable discoveries in the natural sciences. The positivism of Auguste Comte similarly had clear limitations. Comte, schooled in the British empiricism of his day, not only ruled out metaphysics, but ruled out theoretical physics, as well, and both for the same reason: a denial of the efficacy of causal reasoning. According to Comte, physics errs, as does metaphysics, when it postulates abstract entities as explanatory causes. The success of nineteenth- and twentieth-century theoretical physics had yet to undermine positivism as a philosophy of science. Quite apart from its speculative implication, Comte recognized that the social implications of the empiricism emanating from the British Isles led directly to secular humanism, which he codified in his "Religion of Humanity." Parenthetically, it may be noted that Comte is generally accorded the title "Father of Positivism" and is regarded as one of the progenitors of sociology. Although Comte's interests led him away from the philosophy of science per se and into the field of sociology, the term he coined came to be used in the wider sense of a philosophy of knowledge that limited knowledge to sensory experience.
Reflections on the nature and capacity of human knowledge date to the pre-Socratics. Plato's discussion of science and the claims to knowledge by the Greeks will forever remain a starting point of the philosophy of science. It was Plato who bequeathed to Western philosophy the notion that all science is of the universal. Aristotle concurred, but found the universal in nature common to members of the species. Aristotle taught that by a process of abstraction we come to know the essence, quiddity, or nature of a thing, prescinding accidental features that it may or may not have, while the thing remains what it is. Such is the object of science: the nature of an entity, the structure of a process, its properties and potentialities. Yet to have scientific knowledge is not simply to know what is, not simply to have uncovered a law of nature. For Aristotle, to have scientific knowledge is to know the entity, process, or property in the light of its cause or causes. Presupposed by Aristotle are two principles, the principle of causality and the principle of substance, both principles rejected by the British empiricists. The positivism advanced by Comte denies at once the intelligibility of nature and the power of intellect to grasp "the more" that is given in the sense report. From an Aristotelian perspective, there is more in the sense report than the senses themselves are formally able to appreciate. Locke, in denying the reality of substance, reduces what we call substance to a "constellation of events" or sense reports. According to Locke, we use terms that imply substances, but this usage is merely a shorthand way of pointing to something without repeating at length the properties we associate with that something or constellation. David Hume's account of causality similarly limits knowledge to a simple sense report. We experience succession, Hume tells us, not causation. "Cause" is the name we give to the antecedent, contiguous in place, continuous in time, and that we habitually associate with the consequent that we call the "effect."
If there are no natures or substances independent of the mind's creating them, if there is no causality, not only does the enterprise of metaphysics collapse, but modern science is transformed into something other than an attempt to understand nature and its operations in the light of its causes. Metaphysics is based on the assumption that the realm of being is greater or wider in designation than the being reported by the senses. If the material order reported by the senses is all there is, then the most general science of reality is natural philosophy or the philosophy of nature. If there is an immaterial order of being as well as the material world of sense, then the most general science of reality is the philosophy of being known as metaphysics or ontology. One can acknowledge an immaterial order only by a process of reasoning. Such reasoning has led mankind through the ages to affirm the existence of God, to posit an immaterial component of human knowing and a spiritual or immaterial soul.
It is to be noted that the same sort of causal reasoning that leads one to affirm the existence of God also leads one to affirm the existence of the submicroscopic. As Auguste Come himself recognized, causal reasoning is common to both natural theology and theoretical physics. The efficacy of causal reasoning is dramatically seen in those sciences where the postulated entities of one generation become the encountered ones of another. It can be shown that limiting knowledge to the sense report has implications not only for the natural sciences, but for law and the social sciences, as well. On a strict positivist account, science in effect is reduced to description and prediction, thus denying the social sciences their proper object, "human nature."
A historical digression is of use here to illustrate our basic point—i.e., the intellect's ability to grasp the intelligible in the sensory report. Metaphysicians and philosophers of science have devoted many a paper to the seeming irreconcilable discontinuity between the classical and quantum worlds—that is, between Newtonian mechanics and quantum mechanics. From its very introduction it has been recognized that the quantum world of atoms does not operate by the same roles of physics that govern the everyday classical world. Max Planck is credited with introducing the word "quanta" into the lexicon of physics in 1900, and he was to play a significant role in the quantum revolution of the mid-1920s. Acknowledging that a distinction can be made between quantum mechanics and quantum theory, most authors prefer simply to speak of "quantum physics."
There is no obvious point at which the old order of physics gave way to the new order of quantum physics, just as there is no obvious point at which Newtonian physics replaced Aristotle's natural philosophy. Mathematical physics is used to describe how the quantum world operates (quantum mechanics), but explanations of why the quantum world behaves as it does are another thing (quantum theory) and defy the imagination. In classical physics, energy flows in a continuum, but in quantum physics it comes in chunks or quanta, which can only be described mathematically. In the early twentieth century, for most physicists it wasn't necessary to visualize the quantum world, so long as their calculations matched their experimental results. It did not matter that the symbols and mathematics they used might or ought to have any link with the physical world. Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann is quoted as saying, "We all know how to use it and apply it to problems; and so we have learned to live with the fact that nobody can understand it." After more than eighty years, physicists are still having trouble reconciling the Newtonian and quantum worlds.
It was the failure of Newtonian physics in the nineteenth century to construct a mechanical or atomic model of matter and ether that would explain thermal and magnetic properties and lead Ludwig Boltzmann to develop his probabilistic physics in a seminal article in 1877 and Planck to introduce the notion of "quantum" a little more than a decade later. Boltzmann's statistical mechanics not only assumed the existence of invisible molecules, but relied on mathematical probabilities instead of experimental measurements. For that he incurred the scorn of Ernst Mach and the positivists of the Vienna Circle. Mach's positivism, following the lead of Auguste Comte, denied the power of intellect to reason from the seen to the unseen and led Mach to oppose the use of atoms and probabilities in scientific explanation. The only meaningful statements a scientist can make, Mach held, are about what can be measured, counted, or tested or that otherwise rest on the experience of the senses. Mach refused to accept the existence of atoms, even when presented with experimental evidence.
Sheilla Jones, from whom this account is taken, remarks, "Positivism, perhaps more accurately called negativism, had all but killed theoretical physics in France." Aware of the philosophical landscape at that time, she offers her assessment in a humorous passage: "Positivism has no God and no external world; logical positivism has no God and no external world, but it does have mathematical logic; Kantianism has no external world but does have God; and realism allows for both God and an external world." German mathematicians and physicists of the period, Sheilla Jones tells us, while not philosophically illiterate, did not usually demonstrate philosophical leanings, at least not on the job, and for the most part did not try to bring their scientific activity into logical connection with their philosophy. By 1930, most physicists simply abandoned the need for a philosophical theory of quantum physics. We know that Einstein initially objected to the rules of quantum physics because they appeared to preclude any means of reconciliation with the classical rules upon which his generalized theory of relativity was based.
Our historical digression apart, it must be acknowledged that a primary task of a philosophy of science is to defend the first principles of thought and being. Those principles can be formulated in different ways. They cannot be demonstrated, but are presupposed by all demonstration. They can be defended. Put simply, they are: Things exist apart from a knowing mind (intelligibility); things are what they are (identity); a thing cannot be and not be at the same time and in the same respect (noncontradiction); a thing is intelligible in terms of itself or in terms of another (efficient causality, sometimes called sufficient reason). These principles are fundamental, and there are none prior to them by which they may be demonstrated. They are principles upon which all demonstration depends, principles that, though they cannot be demonstrated, can be defended. A realist philosophy of science may be regarded as their defense against Locke, Hume, and certain misleading interpretations of relativity theory and quantum mechanics.
The British empiricists, as well as Comte, failed to pay much attention to actual practice in the sciences of their day, practices that in no way and in none of its parts were in accord with their positivist scheme. Reasoning on a causal basis from the observed to the non-observed, then as now, is common practice in the natural sciences. The existence of bacteria was inferred long before the microscope displayed their reality. In physics and chemistry, molecular structures were similarly inferred long before electron microscopes and particle accelerators confirmed their reality.
In the history of theoretical physics, we find successive schema depicting the atom as our knowledge increased. We are led to recognize that our knowledge of nature is open-ended, the focus of an intellectual quest that is never satisfied. In 1933, the state of particle physics was such that it seemed necessary to postulate the existence of a particle as yet undetected. The Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, assuming its existence, built his theory of beta decay upon it and gave the undetected particle a name, "neutrino," Italian for "little one." In spite of the support of Niels Bøhr, he was subjected to remarks about his "poltergeist," since no one had empirically shown it to exist. It remained a hypothetical entity until Clyde Cowan, who with access to a particle accelerator at Hanford, Washington, performed an experiment that confirmed the neutrino's existence. He duplicated the experiment in 1956 at the Savannah River Laboratory in Georgia. The rest is history, for no one today challenges Fermi. I use this example as an illustration of the principle of sufficient reason, sometimes called the principle of efficient causality, where an explanation is sought for something otherwise unintelligible.
It is not misleading to say that in physics causal explanation is taken for granted. The encountered is routinely explained by the non-encountered. No one who examines the course of nineteenth-and twentieth-century physics can affirm that science is simply description and prediction. Scientific knowledge is knowledge in which, under the compulsion of evidence, the mind understands why things are the way they are and not otherwise. Science deals with things considered in their abstract permanence, not with the flux of the singular. It lays hold of what things are, their nature, by means of a process of abstraction in which the intellect grasps the intelligible nature of the object under consideration—a universal nature, not the contingent singular. The contingencies of the singular escape science. Necessities expressed by the universal are the proper object of its grasp. The universality of the object of scientific knowledge is the condition of its necessity. To use Jacques Maritain's poetic way of expressing it, "The sciences of explanation set before the mind intelligibles freed from the concrete existence that cloaks them.... Essences delivered from existence in time." Science is possible because of the mind's ability to abstract from the singular, to capture the universal or intelligible nature common to many, to see the many as a class. The abstractive power of intellect enables us to identify laws of nature and is the basis of all taxonomy. This takes place at the level of what Aristotle and the Scholastics call the first degree of abstraction. Mathematical abstraction is something else.
Modern physics, up to the coming of quantum physics, was commonly spoken of as "Newtonian physics." In the seventeenth century with Newton we entered the age of Galileo, Kepler, Boyle, Halley, Descartes, Gassendi, and Leibniz, intellectual giants all. Seventeenth-century physics, in replacing the qualitative analysis of the ancients with quantitative precision, created a new set of problems. Newton himself wrestled with the problems of how to relate the common and new algebraic analyses of the Moderns with the venerated methods of the ancients. For him, large questions loomed. When is a geometrical construct exact? What guarantees the applicability of geometry to mechanics?
With Descartes and Leibniz, Newton meant to introduce certainty into natural philosophy, the purification of physical science from classical metaphysics, even though it meant parting company with his beloved Plato and Aristotle. Mathematics is the mind's tool or instrument in the whole process. The motions to be studied must be measured and reduced to mathematical formulas. But he resisted what he took to be the anticlassical stance that he perceived in Descartes' Géométrie and portrayed himself as indebted to Euclid and Appollonius. Furthermore, he tried to reformulate the analytical methods of discovery into a synthetic form, a form in which all references to algebraic analysis are suppressed.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE NATURE OF SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATION by JUDE P. DOUGHERTY Copyright © 2013 by The Catholic University of America Press. Excerpted by permission of THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Preface ix
Part 1 An Aristotelian Perspective
1 Historical Context: What Is at Stake 3
2 Induction: The Perennial Value of the Aristotelian Perspective 16
Part 2 Basic Principles
3 The Principle of Substance 31
4 Potentiality Uncovered 45
5 The Principle of Final Causality 55
Part 3 Cultural Considerations
6 Use and Abuse of Analogy and Metaphor in Scientific Explanation 69
7 Science and the Shaping of Modernity: The Reciprocal Influence of Science and Culture 79
Epilogue 101
Bibliography 113
Index 119