The Spirit of the Enterprise

Abstract

In this chapter I shall describe how experimental physics is an inherently realist enterprise to discover the “natural mechanisms” and “natural laws” that are presupposed to pre-exist the attempt to discover them. To this end, I shall describe in detail the operational metaphysics of mechanical realism that makes experimental physics conceptually possible as a means to obtain knowledge about the structures, mechanisms, laws, and content of Nature. This metaphysics provides a unifying conception of “the physical” that underwrites the foundational principles and assumptions justifying the whole epistemological enterprise of experimental physics as a natural science. It is premised upon the following set of operational precepts that provide principles of action and function as a technical guide for the conceptual establishment of a methodology to explore Nature:

• (i) Natural and technological phenomena both share a unitary origin;

• (ii) Both natural processes and machine performances come into being by the same causal principles;

• (iii) There is a unique, eternal, and universal cause for every effect (or set of effects);

• (iv) The connections between causes and effects are the fundamental mechanisms of Nature;

• (v) The realization of any mechanism is governed by a Natural Law and, consequently, the performance of any machine is governed by Natural Law;

• (vi) The mathematical descriptions of the motions of mechanical devices, and machines, are mathematical descriptions of Natural Law; and,

• (vii) The only distinction between natural phenomena and machine performances is that the latter require human intervention to come into being whilst the former do not.