From owner-bhaskar Mon Nov 11 17:31:31 1996
Date: Mon, 11 Nov 1996 15:25:49 -0700
Message-Id: <199611112225.PAA01908@marx.econ.utah.edu.econ.utah.edu>
From: Hans Ehrbar
Subject: BHA: rts2-21
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Chapter 2. Actualism and the Concept of a Closure
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1. INTRODUCTION: ON THE ACTUALITY OF THE CAUSAL CONNECTION
(i) `We have no knowledge of anything but
phaenomena; and our knowledge of phaenomena is relative
not absolute. We know not the essence, nor the real mode
of production, of any fact, but only its relations to
other facts in the way of succession or similitude.
These relations are constant; that is, always the same in
the same circumstances. The constant resemblances which
link phaenomena together, and the constant sequences
which unite them as antecedent and consequent, are termed
their laws. The laws of phaenomena are all we know
respecting them. Their essential nature, and their
ultimate causes, either efficient or final, are unknown
and inscrutable to us.'1
(ii) `To give a causal explanation of an event means
to deduce a statement, using as premises of the deduction
one or more universal laws, together with certain
singular statements, the initial conditions.'2
(iii) `Since in a fully-stated D-N
[deductive-nomological] explanation of a particular event
the explanans logically implies the explanandum, we may
say that the explanatory argument might have been used
for the deductive prediction of the explanandum-event if
the laws and the particular facts adduced in its
explanans had been known and taken into account at a
suitable earlier time. In this sense a D-N explanation
is a potential D-N prediction.'3
(iv) `Criteria of refutation must be laid down
beforehand: it
1 J. S. Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism, p. 6.
2 K. R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, p. 59.
3 C. G. Hempel, Aspects of Scientific Explanation, p. 366.
64 A Realist Theory of Science
must be agreed which observable situations, if actually
observed, mean the theory is refuted.'4
(v) `Important though other considerations may be,
the acid test of a theory is its predictive power.'5
It is the argument of this chapter that there is a
distinction between open and closed systems, which most
existing philosophy of science ignores; that closed
systems are a condition of its most important doctrines,
such as those expressed in (i) - (v); and that once the
significance of this distinction is grasped the
plausibility of these doctrines collapses.
(i) - (v) possess a family connection, in that they
all depend upon the Humean theory of law. This theory
has often been criticized on the grounds that a constant
conjunction of events cannot be sufficient for a law.
But most of its critics have been content to allow that
it is at least necessary.6 It is this notion, viz. that
laws are constant conjunctions of events (plus some
disputed contribution of mind), that I intend to
challenge. It arises as follows: If atomistic events or
states of affairs constitute the world then, for general
knowledge to be possible, the relations between such
events or states of affairs must be constant. (This is
the assumption that the concept of a closure is designed
to mark.) On the other hand if, as I intend to argue,
they are not in general constant, then atomistic events
cannot provide the only basis of ontology. And the
philosophical theories based on the identification of
causal laws with empirical regularities plus must all be
radically wrong.
I shall use the term `actualism' to refer to the
doctrine of the actuality of causal laws; that is, to the
idea that laws are relations between events or states of
affairs (which are thought to constitute the objects of
actual or possible experiences).7 Behind this idea of
course lies the notion that only the actual (identified
as the determinate object of the empirical) is real.
Given it, the constant conjunction plus analysis of laws
must
4 K. R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, p. 39, n. 3.
5 J. Gibbs and W. Martin, Status, Integration and Suicide, p. 197.
6 See e.g. N. R. Hanson, Observation and Explanation, p. 45.
7 M R. Ayers, The Refutation of Determinism, p. 6 and
passim uses the term `actualism' to refer to the
doctrine that only the actual is possible. The
connection between the two concepts will become clear in
due course.
Actualism and the Concept of A Closure 65
follow. In this chapter I shall not be concerned with
the `plus'. Moreover for convenience I shall use the
term `empiricism' in a generic way so as to cover the
entire post-Humean tradition of empirical realism, and in
particular both its positivist and neo-Kantian wings. No
harm will be done by this usage as I am here attacking an
assumption, viz. that a constant conjunction is necessary
for a law, common to both.
The argument of this chapter is both simple and, I
think, novel. Leaving aside astronomy, it is only under
conditions that are experimentally produced and
controlled that a closure, and hence a constant
conjunction of events, is possible. The empiricist is
now caught in a terrible dilemma: for to the extent that
the antecedents of law-like statements are instantiated
in open systems, he must sacrifice either the universal
character or the empirical status of laws. If, on the
other hand, he attempts to avoid this dilemma by
restricting the application of laws to closed systems
(e.g. by making the satisfaction of a ceteris paribus
clause a condition of their applicability), he is faced
with the embarrassing question of what governs phenomena
in open systems. If he refuses the question, he is still
left with the problem of accounting for experimental
activity, and thus the establishment of `laws', however
restricted, in the first place. His only options here
are to deny either that men are causal agents or that
experimental activity plays any role in science. For if
laws are sequences of events and men, being causal
agents, can bring about and prevent such sequences, there
can be no rationale for according one rather than another
sequence the status of law. A sequence of events can
only function as a criterion for a law if the latter is
ontologically irreducible to the former. And so we come
back to the argument of 1.3, where I showed how the
intelligibility of experimental activity presupposes the
ontological distinctiveness of causal laws from the
patterns of events. But it can now be seen that not only
the experimental establishment but the practical
application of our knowledge depends upon this same
ontological distinction. For unless causal laws
persisted and operated outside the context of their
closure, i.e. where no constant conjunctions of events
obtained, science could not be used in the explanation,
prediction, construction and diagnosis of the phenomena
of ordinary life.
The empiricist makes matters worse for himself by
the fact
66 A Realist Theory of Science
that he not only ties laws to closed systems, but
typically ties the activities of explanation, prediction
and the identification of causes to our knowledge of
laws. A reductio ad absurdum quickly follows. For to
the extent that we seek to explain, predict and identify
the causes of phenomena that occur in open systems, these
activities become impossible. And to the extent that
they are necessary for our social life, empiricism does.
Thus there is no necessity that we should exist. But,
given that we do, if our social life is to be possible we
must ascribe causal responsibility in open systems. And
given this, the Humean theory just cannot apply. Now I
want to argue both that laws apply in open and closed
systems alike; and, in a subsidiary thesis, that these
other activities do not necessarily depend upon (though
they may make use of) a knowledge of laws. From this
perspective the Popper-Hempel theory of explanation, for
example, may be seen to involve a double mistake: first,
that explanation always involves laws; and secondly, that
laws are or depend upon empirical regularities.
My overall aim, it will be remembered, is to argue
that the ultimate objects of scientific understanding are
neither patterns of events nor models but the things that
produce and the mechanisms that generate the flux of the
phenomena of the world. Scientists attempt to discover
the way things act, a knowledge typically expressed in
laws; and what things are, a knowledge (to be discussed
later) typically expressed in real definitions.
Statements of laws, I have suggested, are statements
about the tendencies of things which may not be
actualized, and may not be manifest to men; they are not
statements about conjunctions of events, or experiences.
But in developing this theory I do not attach any great
importance to the word or even the concept `law'. Rather
what is essential to the realism developed here is the
idea that the things and mechanisms of nature, that
constitute the intransitive objects of scientific theory,
both exist and act independently of the conditions,
normally produced by men, that allow men access to them.
For experimental science to be possible the world must be
at least partially open. But if there is a real
distinction between open systems and closed and our
intuitions about the rationality of science are to be
preserved there must be a real distinction between
structures and events. In this respect the
differentiation
Actualism and the Concept of a Closure 67
of phenomena still provides the best argument for the
stratification of the world.
In isolating the special conditions under which a
regular sequence or pattern of events occurs; that is, in
which (to adopt the realist mode) there is a
correspondence between causal laws and the pattern of
events, I will be leaving it up to the epistemologist
whether he wants to sustain the universality of laws (and
inter alia the intelligibility of experimental activity)
by postulating a categorical ontological distinction
between them. If this is done by the development of a
non-empiricist ontology and an analysis of laws as
non-empirical and normic along the lines indicated in 1.5
above, the way is also open for an adequate theory of
natural necessity and natural kinds. On the other hand
without this, I shall argue in Chapter 3, our intuitions
about the lack of sufficiency of the Humean criteria for
law (and the theories of science based on it) cannot in
the last instance be sustained.
In showing how a closure is a condition of the
intelligibility of empirical realism my primary intention
in this chapter is critical. For it is when confronted
with the fact and implications of open systems that the
limitations of this approach to science - with its flat
ontology of undifferentiated experience - become most
apparent. But, in dealing with the problems posed by the
largely unanalysed phenomena of open systems, I will also
be compelled to develop new and more general alternatives
to the theories, such as those expressed in (i) - (v)
above, that are based on the tacit assumption that a
closure is the universal rule in nature; rather than the
rare exception I shall contend it is.
Underlying the widespread, if tacit, acceptance in
philosophy of the idea of the ubiquity of constant
conjunctions in nature (an idea which is not confined to
the empiricist tradition)8 and hence of the doctrine of
the actuality of causal laws is the notion that the
universe is at rock bottom deterministic; that, in the
image of Leibniz, the present is big (in the sense of
pregnant) with the future; that it, as it were, already
contains it now. It is the job of science to discover
the iron laws that uniquely determine its motion. Once
these laws are discovered, given only a knowledge of any
complete state-description, `nothing would
8 Leibniz's pre-established harmony of monads may be
usefully compared with Hume's constant conjunctions of
atomistic events.
68 A Realist Theory of Science
be uncertain [to science] and the future, as the past,
would be present to its eyes.'9 What accounts for the
hold of this fantastic conception on our philosophical
imagination? The philosophical arguments for it are,
taken on their own, as we shall see, pretty poor. Why
then do we feel the force of this picture? Partly no
doubt because many things are de facto predictable, many
processes are effectively isolated and many systems more
or less closed; so that, given that rough-and-ready
regularities are everywhere at hand, it seems plausible
to suppose that underlying them there must be more exact
ones. Partly no doubt because of an obsession with the
consequences and a neglect of the conditions of the
experimental paradigm, the single case that the
hypothetico-deductive view of science fits. Above all
perhaps because of the misconception created by the
celestial closure secured by Newtonian science, and in
particular by the idea that this closure embodied both a
model of phenomena and a model of science. This was a
double mistake. For it was not the human mind, as
Laplace thought,10 that gave its special perfection to
astronomy. Rather it was the peculiar conditions of the
planets, and in particular the constancy of both their
intrinsic states and the external forces on them, that
made possible the observed regularities. Moreover for
Newtonian, as for any other, mechanics celestial
phenomena functioned merely as evidence that bodies tend
to act in certain ways. The laws of motion, for example,
describe actions which are unobservable in principle.
But the tendencies of the bodies to which they apply are
real; and would account for any disruption in the
established order of our solar system.
But, it might be objected, is not the universe in
the end nothing but a giant machine with inexorable laws
of motion governing
9 P. S. de Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on
Probabilities, p. 4. Positivists still pay obeisance to
this concept of knowledge. See e.g. Brodbeck's
characterisation of it, in an echo of Laplace, as
`perfect knowledge' (M. Brodbeck, `Methodological
Individualism: Definition and Reduction', Readings in the
Philosophy of the Social Sciences, p. 289); and Hempel's
wry admission that classical deterministic
(i.e. Laplacean) systems conform `best' to his model of
explanation as deductive subsumption under universal laws
(C. G. Hempel, Aspects of Scientific Explanation,
p. 351). It is but a short step to identifying such
systems with theories. (See e.g. M. Brodbeck, op. cit.,
p. 288; C. G. Hempel, ibid; and R. Rudner, The Philosophy
of Social Science, p. 91).
10 P. S. Laplace, ibid.
Actualism and the Concept of a Closure
everything that happens within it? I want to say three
things: First, that the various sciences treat the world
as a network of `machines', of various shapes and sizes
and degrees of complexity, whose proper principles of
explanation are not all of the same kind as, let alone
reducible to, those of classical mechanics. Secondly,
that the behaviour of `machines', including classical
mechanical ones, cannot be adequately described, let
alone understood, in terms of the `whenever x, then y'
formula of regularity determinism. Thirdly, that even if
the world were a single `machine' this would still
provide no grounds for the constant conjunction idea, or
a fortiori any of the theories of science that depend
upon it. Regularity determinism is a mistake, which has
been disastrous for our understanding of science.
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