Abstract
The first phase of my work on the metaphysics of science resulted in an MA thesis that was completed in 1965, and three papers extracted from the thesis published in 1966 and 1968. These papers tackled the problem of how to reconcile the world as depicted by physics with the world of common sense – the world as we experience it. A key idea is that physics is concerned only with a highly specialized aspect of all that there is, the causally efficacious aspect. I argued in one paper that Hume was wrong to deny that necessary connections cannot exist between successive states of affairs. On the contrary, we can interpret physics in such a way that it may, one day, specify what exists at one instant that necessitates what exists subsequently, necessity here having all the force of logical or analytic necessity. Given that physics is concerned only with this highly specialized aspect of everything – the causally efficacious aspect – we should not be surprised that other aspects exist about which physics says nothing. Such aspects exist – the experiential aspects of things, both perceptual features of things external to us, and mental aspects of brain processes going on inside our heads. In order to know about the experiential aspects of things – colours, sounds, smells – we need to have had, at some stage in our lives, experiences of these things. No special sort of experience is required, however, in order to understand physics. This means physics cannot predict the experiential. But physics does not need to predict the experiential in order to carry through its predictive and explanatory tasks. Since physics is specifically designed to avoid referring to the experiential, its failure to do so provides no grounds whatsoever for holding that the experiential does not really exist or, if it does exist, it is inherently inexplicable. All this goes some way towards solving the philosophical part of the mind-body problem.
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Notes
- 1.
Throughout the book, as far as I am concerned, a thesis is metaphysical if it is about the world and is neither empirically verifiable nor falsifiable. It may be empirically fruitful, however, as we shall see in Chap. 3.
- 2.
- 3.
Popper (1963, p. 5).
- 4.
Smart (1963, p. 94).
- 5.
MA thesis, 1965, University of Manchester Library.
- 6.
As I conclude in Maxwell (1968a), only a true theory of everything that is a field theory can depict necessary connections between successive states of affairs.
- 7.
An analytic proposition is one which is true in virtue of the meaning of constituent terms. An example is the one given in the text, “all bachelors are unmarried”, which must necessarily be true as long as it is built into the meaning of “bachelor” that a bachelor is an unmarried man. In an inexplicably famous article, Quine (1963) casts doubt on whether a sharp distinction can be drawn between analytic and synthetic statements (the latter being genuinely factual statements which make factual assertions and cannot be true necessarily). But Quine’s arguments fail to establish the point. They apply to sentences, and sentences, and the constituent words of sentences, can change their meaning from time to time, and from context to context. The analytic/synthetic distinction applies to propositions, not sentences; the former, unlike the latter, are stipulated (as it were) to have definite, fixed meanings that do not change from time to time, context to context. Quine’s arguments, decisive against sentences, are simply inapplicable when it comes to propositions. It should be noted that in mathematics and physics, “analytic” has a quite different meaning from the one the word has in philosophy. An analytic function is one that is infinitely differentiable and can be represented as a Taylor series.
- 8.
One objection that has been raised to the possibility of Newtonian theory being interpreted in a fully essentialistic way, with all the laws interpreted as analytic propositions, is that in that case we would not be able to understand what the key terms, such as “gravitational charge”, “inertial mass”, and “force” mean. But this does not pose a problem. We may take Newtonian theory given its ordinary interpretation, the meaning of which can be understood, and then progressively modify these meanings so that more and more factual, lawful content is built into the meaning of these terms, until the laws of Newtonian theory become true analytically. Because we can understand the meaning of the Newtonian terms given that the theory is interpreted in the usual way, we can also understand these terms when much more factual content is built into the meaning of these terms.
- 9.
In the paper I formulated a toy “theory of everything”, T, consisting of six postulates, (i)–(vi), specifying laws, interpreted as analytic propositions, and one final existential statement asserting “(vii) The world consists entirely of particles mass m, charge +q, unstressed radius r, elasticity E”: Maxwell (1968a, p. 19). And I went on to point out that “the fact that the postulates (i)–(vi) of T are analytic does not mean that T itself is analytic, for of course (vii) is non-analytic. The entire empirical content of T is contained in the postulate (vii)”: Maxwell (1968a, p. 20); see also p. 22, where the statement is repeated!
- 10.
Let us ignore quibbles that involve the invention of ad hoc hypotheses that save the theory from refutation!
- 11.
Precisely this solution to the problem was sketched in my (1968) paper: see Maxwell (1968a, pp. 22–3).
- 12.
The crucial point made here, and in my 1968 paper, namely that a theory can be contingent even though all its laws are analytic, has been blythely ignored by all those who have argued subsequently that laws of nature are only necessary metaphysically, not analytically. I can only regard such doctrines, put forward after my 1968 paper, sometimes inspired by my paper, but never acknowledging it, as somewhat debased versions of what I originally argued for. Metaphysical necessity seems to me to be a very dubious notion. I discuss this issue in a little more detail in Chap. 2.
- 13.
For limitations of predictive power of physical theories in practice see Maxwell (1998, pp. 33–4).
- 14.
Maxwell (1968a). See this paper for further details.
- 15.
I made it abundantly clear, however, that my refutation of Hume on causation did not solve the problem of induction. It is just as difficult to verify that physical entities with specific necessitating properties actually exist as it is to verify the corresponding physical law, interpreted as a factual, empirical statement.
- 16.
When the true physical “theory of everything” has been discovered, necessitating physical properties will be specified precisely, and phenomena will confirm the theory precisely!
- 17.
McTaggart’s A-series constitutes just such a confusion. His B-series corresponds to the spacetime view: see McTaggart (1908).
- 18.
Objects may be fields, entities that persist and change, they are not just marbles or billiard balls.
- 19.
See Maxwell (1968a, pp. 5–9).
- 20.
My thesis concerning necessary connections was not even deemed to be of sufficient interest, it seems, to receive discussion, criticism, or even refutation. Just complete neglect.
- 21.
- 22.
Or on some space-like hypersurface.
- 23.
- 24.
Maxwell (1966a, p. 304).
- 25.
Maxwell 1968b, p. 127.
- 26.
- 27.
See especially ‘Physics and Common Sense’, pp. 303–8; and ‘Understanding Sensations’, pp. 127 and 134–7.
- 28.
T could be deterministic or probabilistic; my work on quantum theory led me to hold that T is, in all likelihood, probabilistic. Given T, and initial conditions, in general only a range of outcomes are predicted, each with a probability assigned to it.
- 29.
I attempted to convince Smart of this point in an exchange of letters that I had with him, but I did not succeed. I do remember, however, that Smart treated my argument with great courtesy. He called it “very ingenious”.
- 30.
That something along these lines might be possible has been suggested by Nagel (1998). I agree with Nagel when he calls for a conceptual revolution in order to solve the mind-body problem, but disagree with him about the nature of the revolution required. In my view the revolution required is the one argued for in Maxwell (1984). For a discussion of Nagel’s suggestion see Harré (1999).
- 31.
Maxwell (2000b).
- 32.
- 33.
Some philosophers, notably Hilary Putnam, have denied that there are laws correlating the physical and mental aspects of processes going on in the brain. What this denial comes down to is that there are no simple laws correlating physical and mental aspects of brain processes. Such laws would have to list the many different kinds of brain processes that correlate with each mental process, such as the visual sensation of redness. But this just reinforces my point that T* would be a horribly complex, and therefore non-explanatory theory.
- 34.
This argument requires that we can say what it is that makes one theory “simple”, “unified” or “explanatory”, another theory “complex”, “disunified”, “non-explanatory”: for this see the brief discussion of theory unity in Chap. 3 (pp. 88 and 93–8). For a full account of theory unity see Maxwell (1998, ch. 3 and 4; 2004a, appendix, sect. 2).
- 35.
- 36.
- 37.
Maxwell (1968b, p. 127).
- 38.
- 39.
Wisdom-inquiry, unlike knowledge-inquiry, puts the intellectual activities of articulating problems of living, proposing and critically assessing possible solutions, possible and actual actions, at the heart of academic inquiry. According to personalistic understanding, these intellectual activities are just what we need to do in order to enhance our personalistic understanding of another person. Thus personalistic understanding plays an intellectually central and fundamental role within wisdom-inquiry. It scarcely counts as explanation at all granted irrational knowledge-inquiry.
- 40.
- 41.
Maxwell (1968b, p. 141).
- 42.
- 43.
Galileo declared “I think that tastes, odours, colours, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we place them is concerned, and that they reside only in the consciousness”: Galileo (1957, p. 274). Along the same lines, Newton declared “colours in the object are nothing but a disposition to reflect this or that sort of rays more copiously than the rest; in the rays they are nothing but their dispositions to propagate this or that motion into the sensorium, and in the sensorium they are sensations of those motions under the forms of colours”: Newton (1952), pp. 124-5. More recently, Semir Zeki, a present day neuroscientist who has done much to unravel the neurology of colour perception, writes “Ever since the time of Newton, physicists have emphasized that light itself, consisting of electromagnetic radiation, has no colour”; and Zeki goes on to quote a part of the passage from Newton with approval: Zeki (1993, p. 238).
- 44.
- 45.
See Maxwell (2000b).
- 46.
I employed experiential physicalism to stand for this view in Maxwell (2010a; see p. 147). Earlier, I dubbed the view a combination of physicalism and experiential realism: see Maxwell (1984, p. 273). A few years later, I called it psycho-functionalism and explanatory dualism (Maxwell 2000b), and then the multiaspect view or multiaspect compatibilism to do justice to the fact that other kinds of non-physical features of things, such as value-features, exist in addition to the narrowly experiential: see Maxwell (2001a, pp. 96–103).
- 47.
All brain processes have physical properties; some have experiential, or mental, properties as well.
- 48.
Kripke (1981). A designator of an object is rigid if and only if it designates that object in all possible worlds in which that object exists and possesses its essential properties.
- 49.
Kripke (1981, pp. 144–155).
- 50.
See Appendix, especially Part II. Part I of the Appendix first appeared in Maxwell (2001a, appendix 2).
- 51.
I might add that widespread acceptance of Kripke’s argument for necessary a posteriori truths seems to have encouraged those who argue that laws of nature are metaphysically necessary (as we shall see in Chaps. 2 and 4). To that extent, Kripke’s argument has helped marginalize what I argued for in Maxwell (1968a).
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Maxwell, N. (2018). Chapter 1 Early Work on the Metaphysics of Science. In: The Metaphysics of Science and Aim-Oriented Empiricism. Synthese Library, vol 403. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04143-4_1
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