The Rationality of the Real

Abstract

Underlying science’s pursuit of explanation there is obviously a postulate: it is the affirmation that nature is explicable, in other words, that the way it behaves is in conformity with the paths followed by our reason. That is an assumption human thought has formulated from the dawn of its evolution. Anaxagoras and Hermotimus before him, Aristotle tells us, proclaimed that “reason was present — as in animals, so throughout nature — as the cause of order and all arrangement” throughout the world (Metaphysics 984^b14–19 [W. D. Ross trans.]). However, in the affirmation of this mysterious and (as we shall see later) quite imprecise agreement, there seems to be a thesis our understanding is reluctant to call upon, at least directly, in its immediate lines of argument, and from which it would attempt rather to free itself. The prestige of the positivistic conception of science — undoubtedly a completely theoretical prestige, we saw in the preceding chapter, but nevertheless a very real one, as can easily be seen by the study of epistemological works as well as science books — certainly rests in large part on the vague feeling that by dispensing with hypotheses, metaphysics, one would have no need to appeal to the agreement between nature and mind.