Abstract
Though measurement and the discovery of empirical laws presuppose the adoption of an epistemological realism, they leave untouched that aspect of reality which empiricists have been most concerned to avoid, namely causes that are actually productive of their effects. In the belief that such causes are truly unknowable, empiricists have either forbidden their investigation, or replaced them with ‘causes’ that are simply manifestations of the principle of the uniformity of nature, i.e. constant conjunctions. The aspect of modern science we shall consider now is precisely that which investigates the nature of real causes, and it is thus fundamentally realist in its orientation. In its paradigmatic form it involves the construction of theories intended to explain empirical laws by indicating both the regular causes underlying them, as well as how those causes operate in such a way as to be contiguous with their effects.
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References
In this regard, see Whewell (1847), Part 1, pp. 651–652: “The Study of Phenomena leads to Theory. — As we have just said, we cannot, in any subject, speculate successfully concerning the causes of the present state of things, till we have obtained a tolerably complete and systematic view of the phenomena. Yet in reality men have not in any instance waited for this completeness and system in their knowledge of facts before they have begun to form theories. Nor was it natural, considering the speculative propensities of the human mind, and how incessantly it is endeavouring to apply the Idea of Cause, that it should thus restrain itself.”
Thus our conception of theory is very much in keeping with the notion expressed in the Concise Oxford Dictionary viz.: “Supposition or system of ideas explaining something, esp. one based on general principles independent of the facts, phenomena, etc., to be explained.”
The notion is Carnap’s. For a concise presentation of this approach, see Hempel (1965), where it is admitted that “reduction sentences do not seem to offer an adequate means for the introduction of the central terms of advanced scientific theories” (p. 110).
The idea of causal powers can be traced at least as far back as to Leibniz, the substantiality of whose monads is identified with their power. Boscovich’s theory of matter was close to being a pure causal-power theory, the only ‘substantial’ entities being points of force. For a relatively recent philosophical treatment of causal powers, see Harré & Madden (1975).
This can be distinguished from the origin of the (Aristotelian) teleological notion of causality, which, it may be argued, lies in the propensity of living organisms to grow. It should also be distinguished from the origin of the (Humean) positivistic notion, which lies in the passive observation of change of motion. For others’ considerations on the origins of the modern-scientific notion, see Fröhlich (1959), where he suggests that “if we list those factors which are necessarily involved when we move objects, we should have a roughly accurate selection of those properties in terms of which we can understand the operations of bodies on each other or by reason of which we say objects act on each other. In all such situations we exert force against a body which, if stationary, resists our efforts to move it, or, if in motion, resists our efforts to stop it.” (pp. 212–213); and Weyl: “In our will we experience a determining power emanating from us, and were we not thus actively and passively drawn into the stream of nature (be it even merely in the role of an experimenter who creates the conditions of the experiment), we would hardly regard nature under the metaphysical aspect of cause and effect.” (1949, p. 192).
In this regard cf. Campbell (1920), p. 156: “[A] change of colour, of pitch, of electric charge is not a change of motion, so far as experiment can determine. But if [change] is produced voluntarily it is always a result of motion produced by force; .... And though we cannot express this relation in our laws, we have an opportunity to do so in our theories. By framing a theory in which the hypothetical ideas are concerned with motion and force, and in which the dictionary relates these ideas to colour, pitch or charge, we can establish that these changes are ‘really’ the effects of change of motion.”
Cf. Harré (1970b), p. 74: “By and large the sciences do not recognize, and never have recognized, action at a distance. It has seldom been accepted as more than a temporary and unwelcome expedient, at the best a metaphor for ignorance of causes. It is often just when a gap of space and time intervenes between two parts of a process that we invent hypothetical entities or processes to satisfy the principle of the proximity of some cause to an effect.” In this regard see also Enriques (1934), p. 25: “[T]he whole development of physics after Newton and up to the most recent conception of relativity tends to frame phenomena, or the reciprocal actions of bodies, as propagating by contiguity in space and time.” This has often meant the theoretical conception of either fields or particles as constituting causal mechanisms affording the contiguity of particular causes and their effects.
In this regard, see Newton (1687), p. 634: “That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of any thing else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity, that I believe no man, who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it.” See also Helmholtz (1894, pp. xxxivxxxv): “Gravitation still remains an unsolved puzzle; as yet a satisfactory explanation of it has not been forthcoming, and we are still compelled to treat it as pure action-at-a-distance.” Consider also Fröhlich (1959, p. 216): “Many scientists and philosophers rejected gravitation as a fundamental property of matter and even rejected the whole Newtonian system of explanation, on the ground that it was inconceivable that one body should act on another at a distance. This rejection was not due to their never having seen material objects attract each other at a distance, for they were familiar with magnets; it was due more probably to their keeping, as an implicit model of how bodies can act on each other, our ways of voluntarily acting on objects.”
Cf. Campbell (1920), p. 130: “But a theory is not a law; it cannot be proved, as a law can, by direct experiment.”
Cf. J. C. Graves: “There seems to be no way of verifying or falsifying an ontological hypothesis by seeing whether or not it corresponds with observable facts, since its very nature is to transcend our experiences by exhibiting them as merely the sensible manifestations of an underlying reality.” (1971, p. 54).
On the importance of sense-extending instruments in this regard, see Harré (1970b). n. 83.
Thus we do not agree with Galileo if, in his argument with Bellarmine, he is to be taken as suggesting that the only criteria for the acceptability of claims about the trans-empirical are empirical. There are other criteria as well, based on the principles of the discipline in question.
In this regard, cf. McMullin (1984b), p. 210: “Theory explains by suggesting what might bring about the explananda. It postulates entities, properties, processes, relations, themselves unobserved, that are held to be causally responsible for the empirical regularities to be explained.” This of course is not to deny that theories may also be of value in other respects, such as in suggesting the existence of hitherto undiscovered laws, or in indicating the common causal basis of previously unconnected laws.
In this regard cf. Boltzmann: “In order to understand the phenomena which actually occur, we may draw conclusions from hypothetical assumptions, that is, from processes which, though possible on analogy with similar phenomena in other circumstances, cannot be observed and may not even be observable in the future, owing to their speed or small size or something similar.” Cited in Flamm (1983), p. 261, from a lecture given by Boltzmann in 1903; emphasis added.
Basically the same distinction as that being drawn here has also been made by Peter Alexander; in his words: “The aim of explanation is to achieve understanding, to make things intelligible, whereas the aim of description is to say how things are.” (1963, p. 138). This distinction is also taken up by d’Espagnat (1992), Fleischhacker (1992, p. 249), Ellis (1992, pp. 266–277, 279) and Manicas (1992, pp. 283, 296–297).
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© 1996 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Dilworth, C. (1996). Scientific Theories: Closing the Circle. In: The Metaphysics of Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 173. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8621-4_5
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