Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science

William M.R. Simpson, Robert C. Koons, Nicholas J. Teh, William M.R. Simpson, Robert C. Koons, Nicholas J. Teh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351813235
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The last two decades have seen two significant trends emerging within the philosophy of science: the rapid development and focus on the philosophy of the specialised sciences, and a resurgence of Aristotelian metaphysics, much of which is concerned with the possibility of emergence, as well as the ontological status and indispensability of dispositions and powers in science. Despite these recent trends, few Aristotelian metaphysicians have engaged directly with the philosophy of the specialised sciences. Additionally, the relationship between fundamental Aristotelian concepts—such as "hylomorphism", "substance", and "faculties"—and contemporary science has yet to receive a critical and systematic treatment. Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science aims to fill this gap in the literature by bringing together essays on the relationship between Aristotelianism and science that cut across interdisciplinary boundaries. The chapters in this volume are divided into two main sections covering the philosophy of physics and the philosophy of the life sciences. Featuring original contributions from distinguished and early-career scholars, this book will be of interest to specialists in analytical metaphysics and the philosophy of science.

Part 1
The Philosophy of Physics

1
Dodging the Fundamentalist Threat

Xavi Lanao and Nicholas J. Teh

1. Introduction

As demonstrated by the collection of essays in this volume (as well as Tahko (2012) and Novotny and Novak (2014)), Aristotelianism has recently been enjoying a revival in various subfields of philosophy, including metaphysics and the philosophy of science. To take an example that will play a motivating role in our discussion, the theme of “hylomorphism” has been widely discussed in analytic metaphysics (see Koons 2014) and references therein), as well as in the philosophy of quantum theory (Pruss 2017), the philosophy of mind (Jaworski 2017), and the philosophy of biology (Austin 2017).

Although the term “hylomorphism” is sometimes used very loosely, Neo-Aristotelians of a strict observance will want to reserve this term for a theory of substance that avoids collapsing into either dualism or materialism. In particular, in order to avoid the latter collapse, Neo-Aristotelian substances must exhibit a strong form of unity, i.e. a unity such that the powers of a substantial whole cannot be completely grounded in the powers of its parts. (On this score, see Koons (2014), who argues for the more specific thesis that there must be a mutual relationship of partial grounding between a substantial whole and its parts.) More generally, many Neo-Aristotelians are interested in the possibility of a kind of emergent causal efficacy (such as the powers of an organism) which cannot be reduced to forms of causal efficacy that are sometimes regarded as more “fundamental” (such as the powers of the electrons that comprise the organism).

While it is a truism that one cannot directly read metaphysics off of science, the above Neo-Aristotelian position can still be threatened by weaker claims about the relationship between science and metaphysics. Consider, for instance, the metaphysical thesis called “fundamentalism”, which holds that the laws of a (hypothetical) unified physical theory exhaustively govern all of material reality: In this view, it is difficult to see how the powers of substances could be anything other than entirely grounded in the powers of the entities of the unified physical theory; hence, this metaphysical picture is inconsistent with Aristotelian hylomorphism.¹ But why should anyone believe in such a metaphysical thesis? It is at this juncture that many thinkers implicitly or explicitly invoke a connection with scientific practice:²

Fundamentalist Unification

The success of science (especially fundamental physics) at providing a unifying explanation for phenomena in disparate domains is good evidence for fundamentalism.

Thus, although Neo-Aristotelians are not directly threatened by anything in science, they will want to find ways of warding off this interpretation of the “unifying role” that physics plays with respect to disparate domains of phenomena.

The goal of this essay is to recommend a particular set of resources to Neo-Aristotelians for resisting Fundamentalist Unification and thus for resisting fundamentalism. The set of resources in question originates in the work of Nancy Cartwright, who has famously drawn on the details of scientific practice in order to launch an argument against fundamentalism.³ We would like to urge two points in particular:

• (i) Anti-fundamentalism is a live option, because genuine arguments in favor of Fundamentalist Unification are hard to come by, and the best (and most fully worked-out) argument for it rests on assumptions that beg the question against Cartwright’s epistemology of scientific models.
• (ii) Neo-Aristotelians should find Cartwright’s epistemology of scientific models appealing because it adopts the broadly Aristotelian approach of prioritizing the concrete over the abstract—call this approach “concretism”.

Bringing these two points together, we submit that Cartwright’s approach offers Neo-Aristotelians a distinctively concretist epistemology of scientific models that has the added benefit of making room for robust forms of Aristotelian metaphysical doctrines, such as hylomorphism. Nonetheless, we will also urge that Cartwright’s approach is in many ways underdeveloped and that it needs to be more fully worked out if it is to be incorporated into a compelling Neo-Aristotelian picture of the relationship between metaphysics and science.

The plan of the essay is as follows. Section 2 discusses the topic of what scientific practice-based reasons one might marshall in favor of fundamentalism. As we see it (and as the question has been understood in the literature), any practice-based attempt to adjudicate this issue has to reckon with two considerations that seem to pull in opposite directions. On the one hand, even our most impressive scientific theories seem to only apply to domains of reality in a “patchwork” way, and on the other hand, it is undeniable that much scientific work consists in devising theoretical structures that are in some sense “unifying”. Intuitively, the first consideration provides prima facie evidence against fundamentalism, and the second consideration provides prima facie evidence in favor of it. Thus, a successful argument for Fundamentalist Unification needs to provide a convincing account of “theoretical unification” that explains away the appearance of theories only having a patchwork application to reality. One such account that claims to be “practice-based” is that of Smith (2001), and we will consider his argument in favor of Fundamentalist Unification in this section.

In Section 3, we will argue that Smith’s account of theoretical unification turns on a specific and controversial epistemology of scientific models. We then highlight how Cartwright’s concretist account of the epistemology of models explicitly rejects Smith’s assumptions and leads to a different way of understanding substantive theoretical unification. Indeed, this rival epistemology forms the basis of Cartwright’s famous argument against fundamentalism, which we then discuss.

Section 4 draws on our previous discussion to sketch some general guidelines for the project of developing a concretist epistemology of models. Although we take inspiration from Cartwright’s anti-fundamentalist morals, we also highlight some ways in which the approach that we recommend diverges from hers.

2. Fundamentalism and Its Justification

Metaphysical fundamentalists believe that the universe is exhaustively governed by a limited set of principles, which are often called “fundamental laws of nature”. The popularity of metaphysical fundamentalism presumably derives from the metaphysical hope—shared by various scientists and philosophers alike—that science will eventually discover the laws of nature that exhaustively govern all of material reality, from the causal agents implicated in quantum gravity to human and non-human organisms. These fundamental laws of nature are usually taken to be truths expressed in mathematical language, which accurately describe the behavior of all things in the world, at all times and places. However, they are typically not taken to be the actual laws of our most fundamental physical theories, but the laws of some future “Final Science” or “True Physics” that our current scientific efforts aim at (cf. Sklar 2003: Sec. 5; Hoefer 2010: 308).

In this paper, we will put aside armchair metaphysical speculation and instead focus on the following question: Based on the practice of science, what reasons might one have for accepting or rejecting metaphysical fundamentalism? By our lights, all parties to the debate will have to reckon with two practice-based facts that appear to be in tension with each other:

• (1) Scientific theories have the appearance of having “patchwork” domains of application;
• (2) Theories have been successful at providing “unifications” of such domains.

Regarding (1), both fundamentalists and anti-fundamentalists should agree that our explanatory and predictive practices in science suggest a much more “dappled” or “patchwork” picture of scientific activity than what the fundamentalist hopes for. For instance, biology and chemistry are scientific disciplines which seem to operate autonomously from physics: They often construct theories, give explanations, and make successful predictions without taking into account any fundamental laws of physics. Furthermore, fundamentalists should concede that even upon restricting scientific activity to “physics”, it often appears to be the case that different domains of phenomena are described by different physical theories: To give an elementary example, point particle mechanics and fluid dynamics are physical theories that apply to relatively disjoint sets of classical phenomena.

With respect to (2), fundamentalists and anti-fundamentalists should likewise agree that various theories have had empirical and theoretical success in playing a “unifying role” with respect to phenomena in different domains. The issue at stake is how such “unifications” should be understood and what we are justified in inferring from them.

Let us briefly consider a fundamentalist narrative that emphasizes a particular understanding of (2) and uses this to explain away (1).⁴ Suppose that fundamentalists and anti-fundamentalists agree that, at least within the confines of certain experimental scenarios, we have good reason to believe in the truth of mathematical laws describing the behavior of basic kinds of particles/fields and their interactions. One fundamentalist strategy for describing the unifying role of particle physics is to then elaborate on the narrative as follows: We also have good reason to believe that everything in the physical world is made up of these same basic kinds of particles. So, from the fact that everything is made up of the same basic particles and that we have reliable knowledge of the behavior of these particles under some experimental conditions, it is plausible to infer that the mathematical laws governing these basic kinds of particles within the restricted experimental settings also govern the particles everywhere else, thereby governing everything everywhere (Hoefer 2010: 317–18). A fundamentalist of this stripe would resist claims that the “patchwork” picture of science constitutes prima facie evidence in favor of anti-fundamentalism by denying that the patchwork picture carves at the joints of reality. Thus, for instance, Sklar claims that although explanations in biology and chemistry describe real phenomena in the world and are certainly useful for predictive purposes, they are not characterizing how things “really are” (Sklar 2003:...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction: Reflections on Contemporary Science and the New Aristotelianism
• Part 1 The Philosophy of Physics
• Part 2 The Philosophy of the Life Sciences
• About the Contributors
• Index