Teleology and Modernity

William Gibson, Dan O'Brien, Marius Turda

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351141864
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The main and original contribution of this volume is to offer a discussion of teleology through the prism of religion, philosophy and history. The goal is to incorporate teleology within discussions across these three disciplines rather than restrict it to one as is customarily the case. The chapters cover a wide range of topics, from individual teleologies to collective ones; ideas put forward by the French aristocrat Arthur de Gobineau and the Scottish philosopher David Hume, by the Anglican theologian and founder of Methodism, John Wesley, and the English naturalist Charles Darwin.

Section III
Philosophy

7
Can the sciences do without final causes?

Stephen Boulter

Few ideas in the history of philosophy have come in for the sustained criticism meted out to Aristotle’s notion of final causation. Indeed, it was a truth universally acknowledged amongst canonical early modern philosophers that teleological thinking was part and parcel of a discredited and outmoded cosmology and metaphysics.¹ And the standard historiographical studies have it that philosophy and the sciences took a great leap forward only when teleological thinking was finally banished from the natural order in favour of a mechanistic world view. Although criticism of final causation has softened somewhat over time – mainly because the biological sciences have found house room for notions like function and purpose – the expectation remains that respectable philosophers and scientists operate with only a severely curtailed notion of causation,² effectively confining themselves to what the scholastics would consider a broken-backed version of ‘efficient causation’.³ This fêted transition from teleological to mechanistic modes of thinking is perhaps the outstanding instance of ‘heroic’ philosophy in the orthodox canon.⁴ But can the sciences really do without final causation? In this chapter, I lay out some reasons for thinking they cannot.

Such a proposal will bring many up short. Why would one want to resurrect final causation? The short answer is that the cost of abandoning final causes is too great. And the basis for this claim is the seldom noticed but nonetheless systematic connection between Hume’s analysis of ‘efficient’ causation and the rejection of final causation, the former being the consequence of the latter. According to Aristotle and the scholastics, final causes are not just one kind of cause among many, but the very ‘cause of causes’. Remove the cause of causes and one removes efficient causation proper. Combine this with a failure to recognise material and formal causation, similarly dependent upon final causation, and it is but a further short step to the Humean inspired re-combination thesis according to which any re-arranging of the elements of the natural order is realisable short of those implying a logical contradiction.⁵ But to uphold the recombination thesis is to deny that the natural order is indeed an order at all, and so an essential precondition of success in the natural sciences is undermined. Thus, Hume’s approach to causation is nothing short of a reductio of the rejection of final causation. Contrary to prevailing orthodoxy, final causation, when understood aright, is indispensable to the scientific enterprise.

Telling this less familiar story is the main business of this chapter.⁶ The principal burden is largely expository: to lay out precisely what the scholastics mean and do not mean by the phrase ‘all things act for an end’. But the best way to achieve this is to begin with what everybody knows, that is, with what Armstrong calls the ‘fatal legacy’ of Hume’s account of causation.⁷ For the unwitting genius of Hume’s account lies precisely in exposing the full implications of abandoning final causation in the natural order. I begin then with some reminders of the difficulties bequeathed to us by Hume. Appreciating why such problems do not arise within the Aristotelian context is crucial to understanding precisely what final causation was taken to be by the scholastics themselves, and what they meant, and what they did not mean by the claim that ‘all things act for an end’. The next section outlines the Aristotelian account of causation in general, and efficient and final causation in particular, as understood by the scholastics themselves, the essential point being to show how this account avoids the problems associated with Hume while providing the framework necessary for the successful prosecution of the scientific enterprise. I end by considering what the scholastics themselves took to be problematic in final causation. As we shall see, the problems that worried them are associated primarily with the role of final causes in the explanation of human action – precisely where moderns are most inclined to admit final causation without demure.

Final causation and natural agents

To understand scholastic thinking on final causation in natural agents, one must begin with an introductory semantic point. Aristotle and the scholastics did indeed claim that every agent acts for an end, and so they did indeed sign up wholeheartedly to what has been called teleological thinking. But as the scholastic tag has it, action follows being, by which they meant that an agent’s actions, manner of acting and the ends the agent can pursue, depend on what sort of being it is. And the scholastics recognised three fundamentally distinct sorts of beings:

• God (the creator and sustainer of all other entities)
• Human beings and angels (creatures endowed with rationality and so able to act voluntarily)
• Natural agents (animate and inanimate creatures lacking rationality)

While all agents, regardless of their kind, act for an end, they do so in very different ways because they are very different kinds of beings. Thus, what it means to act for an end varies depending on the kind of agent involved. This is an example of the widely used notion of analogy in Aristotelian thinking. There is a focal sense of ‘acting for an end’ which anchors a set of systematically related analogous senses of the same phrase. To take the standard example used to illustrate this semantic point, the term ‘health’ has a focal sense drawn from the good condition of organisms. But the term ‘health’ can also be applied to diets, lifestyles, attitudes and samples insofar as these are either causes of health or signs of health in an organism. The semantic point is that to understand the term ‘health’ one needs to know that while it does not have the same meaning in all instances, its meanings are not equivocal either, for the analogous senses are systematically related to the focal sense. The same applies to the phrase ‘acting for an end’. The focal sense is drawn from the case of human free agency because this type of action is best known to us, and means (roughly) intentionally doing something for a reason. Now neither God nor rational creatures act in this way, but only analogously. This is important if one is to understand what the scholastics meant when they say that natural agents act for an end. There is no suggestion that natural agents act intentionally. Nor is there any suggestion that one must know God’s intentions with respect to a natural agent in order to know that it is acting for an end. The common element of ‘acting for an end’ across all agents is the far less demanding notion of being oriented or inclined in a particular direction. But there are importantly different ways of being oriented or inclined.

This semantic point granted, what are we to say about natural agents acting for an end? What is meant by the claim that oxygen, say, ‘acts for an end’, and why would one want to say this? To answer both questions, it is best to begin with Hume’s analysis of causation and its attendant problems. And this is so because Hume’s analysis of causation is the systematic consequence of abandoning final causation in the natural order. So to understand what the scholastics meant by final causation in natural objects, it helps to bear in mind that final causation shields Aristotle’s account of efficient causation from the challenges afflicting the Humean account.

Recall, then, that according to Hume all there is to efficient causation is (a) the constant conjunction of putative causes and effects, (b) their spatiotemporal contiguity, and (c) the temporal priority of causes to effects. There is no necessary connection between causes and effects themselves because (a) there is no logical or conceptual connection between cause and effect, and (b) there is no impression of necessity arising upon our perceiving causes giving way to their effects. Hume’s Fork forces the claim that the ‘necessity’ in such instances is a mere projection of ours arising out of our expectations given our past experiences. This is the basis of the Humean claim that there are no necessary connections between distinct existences.⁸

This approach to causation has since become philosophical orthodoxy. But, as is well known, this analysis of causation has proved problematic for the sciences. Scientific experiments, as opposed to observational studies, are designed specifically to identify real, that is, mind-independent causal relationships in the natural order. In particular, the sciences run experiments (when they can) to determine empirically whether a causal relationship obtains between As and Bs once a correlation between As and Bs has been noticed or is suspected. We want to know if the correlation is just a coincidence, or whether we can count on it continuing in the future because the relationship between As and Bs is somehow written into the nature of things. But Hume’s historically effective analysis undermines the very notion of there being a genuine causal order to discover in the first place. This becomes most apparent when the difficulties with his analysis of causation are made explicit. The following is a catalogue of the most commonly discussed difficulties:⁹

• (a) The distinction between correlations (constant conjunction) and causation is lost. But distinguishing between real causation and mere correlations is precisely the point of scientific experiments.
• (b) Thunder follows lightning regularly, similarly night follows day. But lightning does not cause thunder, and day does not cause night. Hume’s analysis does not allow us to discriminate between a case of a cause A causing effect B and a case where a cause C is responsible for both A and B.
• (c) Sometimes an earlier event brings about a later event only if another event does not occur. This is the problem of pre-emption.
• (d) It is difficult to distinguish in a principled manner between background conditions and causes. Both regularly precede the later event. So how do we identify one item as the cause and relegate others to the status of condition?
• (e) It is difficult to explain why we should think that a later event B is the specific effect of an earlier event A as opposed to all the other events C, D, E and F that regularly follow events of kind A. Innumerable events are later than the putative cause, so how do we identify what is a genuine effect of the cause as opposed to an unrelated but contemporaneous and contiguous event?
• (f) Before the invention of the microscope we knew nothing about germs. But presumably microscopic organisms have been causing diseases from time immemorial. But there was no regularity noticed in such situations. What is a Humean to say about causal relations that go undetected and consequently unprojected?
• (g) Finally, there is a related temporal ordering problem. Hume says that causes and effects are ordered temporally as earlier and later, and so uses the temporal order to identify causal relationships. But many metaphysicians want to use causal relationships to ground the temporal order.

Now it is clear that if the sciences are to be viable they need an understanding of causation that provides answers to these challenges. And modern ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• SECTION I Religion
• SECTION II History
• SECTION III Philosophy
• Index