Yorick's World: Science and the Knowing Subject

By Peter Caws

Peter Caws provides a fresh and often iconoclastic treatment of some of the most vexing problems in the philosophy of science: explanation, induction, causality, evolution, discovery, artificial intelligence, and the social implications of technological rationality.

Caws's work has been shaped equally by the insights of Continental philosophy and a concern with scientific practice. In these twenty-eight essays spanning more than a quarter of a century, he ranges from discussions of the work of French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, to relations between science and surrealism, to the concept of intentionality, to the limits of quantitative description. A lively mix of history, theory, speculation, and analysis, Yorick's World presents a vision of science that includes human history and social life. It will interest professional philosophers and scientists, and at the same time its directness will make it readily accessible to nontechnical readers.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.
Peter Caws provides a fresh and often iconoclastic treatment of some of the most vexing problems in the philosophy of science: explanation, induction, causality, evolution, discovery, artificial intelligence, and the social implications of technological r

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Apr 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520912878

Peter Caws

Peter Caws is University Professor of Philosophy at George Washington University. Among his recent books are Sartre (1984), and Structuralism: The Art of the Intelligible (1988).

Book preview

Yorick’s World

Yorick’s World

Science and the Knowing Subject

Peter Caws

University of California Press

Berkeley / Los Angeles / Oxford

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press

Oxford, England

Copyright © 1993 by The Regents of the

University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

Data

Caws, Peter.

Yorick’s world: science and the knowing subject I Peter Caws, p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-520-07919-1 (alk. paper)

1. Science—Philosophy. 2. Knowledge, Theory of. I. Title.

Q175.C4363 1993

501—dc20 92-31834

CIP

Printed in the United States of America

123456789

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984 @

For Nancy and Elisabeth

Contents

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Preface to Part I

1 Aspects of Hempel’s Philosophy of Science

2 Science and System

3 Gosse’s Omphalos Theory and the Eccentricity of Belief

4 Creationism and Evolution

Preface to Part II

5 The Paradox of Induction and the Inductive Wager

6 The Structure of Discovery

7 Induction and the Kindness of Nature

Preface to Part III

8 Three Logics, or the Possibility of the Improbable

9 Mach’s Principle and the Laws of Logic

10 A Quantum Theory of Causality

11 A Negative Interpretation of the Causal Principle

Preface to Part IV

12 Science, Computers, and the Complexity of Nature

13 Praxis and Tedine

14 On the Concept of a Domain of Praxis

15 Individual Praxis in Real Time

16 Towards a Philosophy of Technology

17 Scientific Theory as an Historical Anomaly

Preface to Part V

18 Is There (Scientific) Knowledge? Who Knows?

19 The Law of Quantity and Quality, or What Numbers Can and Can’t Describe

20 On Being in the Same Place at the Same Time

21 On a Circularity in Our Knowledge of the Physically Real

22 Truth and Presence

Preface to Part VI

23 Science, Surrealism, and the Status of the Subject

24 Subjectivity in the Machine

25 Rethinking Intentionality

26 Yorick’s World, or the Universe in a Single Skull

27 A Case for the Human Sciences

Notes

Notes on Sources

Index

Preface

Yorick appears in the title of this book because of his head—or more exactly, his skull. He stands, however, more for the materiality of humans than for their mortality. The point is that he had a world, once, and he had it by virtue of what was in his skull. Hamlet was no neurologist but he got the materiality right: Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, till he find it stopping a bunghole? I have more to say about Yorick later on (and in chapter 26). For the moment he serves truth in advertising: the reader may know from the start that in my view if I have a world, and if I have science—which is a second- order aspect of that world—it is thanks to my individual embodiment as part of a material universe, a part that enjoys the status of subject in relation to its world as object.

Science is not in the material universe except by way of the embodiment of the knowing subject. Science is the subject’s way of having the structure of its world—the theoretical part of that world—match what it takes to be the structure of the universe. (Match covers a multitude of possibilities; it is not necessarily an exact function.) The reality of the universe is hypothetical, but that obviously does not mean that the hypothesized universe is to be regarded as less than real. These elliptical remarks will, I hope, be illuminated by what follows, but my particular brand of materialism is developed in an earlier work, Structuralism: The Art of the Intelligible (1988), especially chapter 12, and the interested reader may pursue it further there.

This book assembles in one place most of the more or less finished products of that part of my professional activity over the last three decades which has been devoted to the philosophy of science, excluding however (with one exception) material already published in book form in The Philosophy of Science: A Systematic Account (1965) and Science and the Theory of Value (1967). As the dates of those works suggest, my main concentration on this field was early in my career; and as is clear from the title of the second, my attention soon wandered from mainstream philosophy of science to the relevance of scientific practice to other parts of philosophy and culture. I say mainstream because this is how part of the discipline has regarded itself, though the term is relative. As will become clear, it has not always seemed to me a stream usefully navigable for cargoes of the greatest philosophical import. This is because it has systematically failed to pay sufficiently serious attention to a precondition of its own possibility, namely (as suggested above), the dependence of science itself, and a fortiori of any reflective analysis of science, on the engagement of a knowing subject—and in every case an idiosyncratic one at that.

This question of the subject is one that I have pursued in other domains. But my original attachment to science and the philosophy of science, if temporarily bracketed, has remained—to borrow an expression of Husserl’s—as the bracketed in the bracket, emerging from time to time as occasions, problematic or professional, have demanded. There is a sense in which, even when engaged in so-called continental philosophy, or in the philosophical aspects of literature or psychoanalysis or politics, I have never abandoned the realist and empiricist stance bred into me by physics and the philosophy of science. But instead of declining to entertain possible objects of experience outside the scientific, or refusing them a place in the realist scheme of things—as many of my colleagues in those domains tend to do—I have taken it as a philosophical challenge to distinguish between different objects of experience, and to show how those that lie outside the purview of natural science have their own claim to reality.

In the end these lines of inquiry have converged. I do take it to be possible to draw a radical distinction between the natural sciences on the one hand and the social, or as I now prefer to say the human, sciences on the other. My way of doing this is to assign as objects to the human sciences (under a covering realist hypothesis) just those events and processes that have, among their causal antecedents, episodes of conscious human intentionality, and to assign as objects to the natural sciences events and processes that have no such episode among their causal antecedents. This has in the first instance nothing to do with the methodologies of the respective sciences. It is an ontological move: it has the effect of dividing the world of my attention into a natural part and a human part. The division is a human, not a natural, one—there is a sense in which we and all our works are a part of nature. But it is plausible and effective: a simple but illuminating exercise is to classify familiar objects in its terms (assigning as objects of inquiry, to give a quick example, the mechanisms of intoxication and the principles of the production of intoxicants to the natural sciences, but the desire for these substances, their distribution and consumption, and what is done or made under their influence, to the human sciences).

In principle it looks as though the human might be reducible to the natural. But the very idea of a natural-scientific explanation of human action involves a circularity, because the explanation of nature, even in its own terms, is already a human enterprise. If therefore we consider them in themselves, apart from any distinction in terms of their objects, the natural sciences and the human sciences are entirely the products of conscious human intentionality; the theories that constitute them are (as their name suggests) outlooks on the worlds of their practitioners, explanatory stances adopted for the purpose of bringing the complexity of experience into intelligible order. And the relations that hold between the sciences and their objects, natural or human, must themselves be animated and sustained by knowing subjects.

These subjects have the additional property of being free (a point I claim here without argument, though I have provided plenty of that elsewhere), and as such enjoy great latitude in the choice and formulation of problems. The idiosyncrasy of one such subject and of his choices is reflected practically in the heterogeneity of the work collected here. But the underlying theme—the primacy of the knowing subject—is recurrent, if sometimes only implicit. The tone and level are variable, from the popular to the scholarly, and I have made no attempt to impose uniformity in these respects. The previously published chapters are essentially unchanged except in one significant way, namely, that I have consciously sought out and corrected the sexist use of pronouns, which was once transparent to everyone but should now, given the feminist prise de conscience, be unacceptable to anyone.

In the case of material presented orally but not previously published I have allowed myself greater freedom to adapt, but even here the individual chapters (though not arranged chronologically) bear the marks of their contingent origins and have not been made to speak in one voice. A small but telling point: as a theoretician preoccupied with the embodiment of the subject, I have tended to stress from time to time the obvious but crucial importance of brains, and particularly of their complexity, one primitive measure of which is the number of neurons they contain. In the course of my professional career neurologists have continuously revised upward their estimates of this number, so that in different chapters the reader may find casual allusion to anything from five billion to a hundred billion neurons. But I have not gone back to change the earlier numbers; it is instructive, I think, to leave them where they lie, as testimony—if any be needed—to the always provisional character of scientific knowledge.

The arrangement of the material is roughly thematic, which helps clarify what problems are being dealt with but has the disadvantage that chapters of varying technical difficulty are lumped together. It may be helpful, therefore, to identify a few chapters, written in a more colloquial style and originally intended for a wider audience than some of the others, as routes of access for nonprofessionals. For readers whose main interests are historical and social a good starting point would be chapters 3 and 4. Those with interests in practice and technology might first try chapters 12, 13, and 16. Chapters 18 and 19 deal with issues in the theory of knowledge, and chapters 25 and 26 with metaphysical issues, in more or less self-contained and, I hope, approachable ways. But I do not mean that these chapters contain nothing of interest to the professional, nor that the others are out of reach to everyone else.

There is, no doubt, something arbitrary and whimsical in having put all this under the sign of Yorick—alas, poor Yorick! as Hamlet says—and it certainly isn’t the mortuary aspect of his skull that I want to invoke, though Shakespeare won’t allow that to become too depressing: his gravedigger is, after all, a clown. About Yorick when alive the play doesn’t tell us a great deal: he was the king’s jester; he used to carry the child Hamlet on his back; he once poured a flagon of Rhenish on the gravedigger’s head; he died when Hamlet was about seven. But Hamlet says of him that he was a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy, whose flashes of merriment … were wont to set the table on a roar—an agreeable chap, in short, and not at all a bad patron for a book, even a serious book. Not that I want to invoke the jest or the merriment either (though I would certainly align myself on the side of Democritus as against Heraclitus, the laughing philosopher against the weeping one), but there is something suggestive in the fancy. For fancy has its origins in fantasy (or phantasy), which puts it in the same linguistic family as phenomenology—it is a matter of appearances, which constitute the life-world of the knowing subject. Science is creative, it is imaginative, and as Edmund Husserl points out it is just one of the things that occupy the life-world;¹ if that world is in the end (and Shakespeare would certainly be of this opinion) a play of fancies, science would surely count among the most excellent.

Acknowledgments

The body of work collected here owes so much to so many people—from teachers to fellow-students to friends and professional colleagues, not omitting readers for journals, lecture audiences, and my own students over decades of university teaching—that even constructing an exhaustive list, let alone specifying what was due to the individuals named in it, would tax memory and self-knowledge beyond their present resources. I mention some names from the earlier stages of my intellectual development in the Introduction; later on, as numbers grow, specific influences become harder to isolate.

The usual acknowledgments are in order to editors and publishers who have allowed me to reprint what appeared in their books or journals, a listing of which will be found on page 381. Redoubled thanks are due in those cases where the contribution in question was solicited by them, rather than submitted by me, since that often induced me to attend to issues I might otherwise never have tackled. I think in this connection especially of Jon Moreno, whose long-standing invitation to write about quality and quantity inspired the excursion into the philosophy of mathematics that appears as chapter 19.

In a somewhat similar vein I should perhaps record my gratitude—not that I felt it at the time—to the authorities of Trinity College, Hartford, who after I had accepted it withdrew, on budgetary grounds, the position the philosophy department had offered me for my first year out of graduate school, thus ensuring that I should begin my career not by teaching philosophy in the East but by teaching science in the Middle West. The one year I spent lecturing undergraduates on basic science forced me to get up to speed in the biological and earth sciences, an invaluable complement to the physics in which I had spent my undergraduate years. To this day I remain grateful to Michigan State for rescuing me from unemployment, and to the University of Kansas for calling me back to philosophy the following year.

To colleagues and institutions who have entrusted me with lectureships and with offices that required the delivering of addresses I also owe debts of gratitude: Max Wilson for chapter 4, Russ Hanson for chapter 6, Grover Maxwell for chapter 9 (and posthumously for chapter 7), and George Bugliarello for chapter 13. In other cases the connection is less direct; I owe to Mel Kranzberg, for example, the invitation to be a national lecturer for Sigma Xi, which helped keep up my activity in the philosophy of science even though none of the lectures found their way into this book. Again, readers and commentators have been many; I am especially indebted to Marx Wartofsky and an anonymous reader for the University of California Press for reactions to the book as a whole, and most recently to Steve Fuller for a helpful critical reading of the final chapter.

Without the enterprise and encouragement of Ed Dimendberg at the Press, much of this work might never have appeared in book form. Lisa Chisholm’s resourceful and nonintrusive copyediting made the last stages of production a pleasure instead of the ordeal they often can be. My secretary, Karen Greisman, cheerfully performed prodigies of retyping, and my graduate assistant, Leslie Baxter, helped immensely at every stage, assembling the constituent materials and bringing her sharp eye and mind to bear on countless details.

My wife, Dr. Nancy Breslin, and my daughter, Elisabeth Breslin Caws, to whom this book is dedicated, filled and continue to fill the lifeworld of this particular knowing subject with a happiness no less prized for its having become habitual. Elisabeth also tried to eat the manuscript; I think this was an expression of approval, though I have to admit that, if so, it is one she confers somewhat indiscriminately at this stage of her life on reading matter that happens to come her way.

Peter Caws

Washington, D.C.

Introduction

From Physics to the Human Sciences— The Itinerary of an Attitude

Taken in itself, each of the chapters that follow makes a more or less circumscribed point in its own way. They were not originally conceived in relation to one another, but their publication together offers an opportunity to rethink them as a coherent body of work, or at least as one facet of such a body of work. The best way of doing this is to say something of the project, in the Sartrean sense, out of which they arose.

Scientific Roots

My engagement with the philosophy of science goes back to readings of Sir James Jeans, Sir Arthur Eddington, and Alfred North Whitehead while I was still in school. The Jeans and Eddington were my father’s; he wanted to understand the mysterious universe because it glorified God—or rather, I suspect (he was a humble man), he just wanted to feel how mysterious it was, thus savoring at once God’s greatness and his own insignificance. He was impressionable, and continually awed by the dimensions of the atom (the nucleus as a pea in St. Paul’s Cathedral) or the distance of the galaxies.

The effect of his sharing all this was that it became familiar to me and not very mysterious at all. I took physics in school, being initiated (which is, after all, the old sense of mystery) at the hands of a crusty and acerbic teacher whose name was S. V. Shingler. Two memories of Mr. Shingler stand out: first, his daily tirades in class about the hopeless stupidity of his pupils, and second, a more personal rebuke. In working up some notes on fluid pressure—one of the very first assignments in the fourth form perhaps (I must have been about thirteen)—I ended with a flourish, writing the basic formula p = f/a in large letters in the middle of the notebook page and drawing a little box around it. It was a neat bit of work and I was proud of it. Mr. Shingler struck the formula through with his red pencil and made me redo the page. No physical expression, he said, was more or less important than any other; I would please make them all the same size. His tone as he administered this lesson was one of withering scorn mixed with genuine affection.

Thanks to the peculiarities of the British educational system I studied nothing formally except physics, mathematics, and a bit of chemistry between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one. This coincided—sometimes to the detriment of academic work—with a period of personal struggle against a set of beliefs into which I had been indoctrinated since infancy by my parents, who belonged to a small and fanatical sect known as the Exclusive Brethren. The Brethren were always metaphorically writing things in large letters in the middles of pages: they hung great framed Biblical texts everywhere, making insistent claims on belief or action, and conducted their lives in an atmosphere of exaggerated fear and piety.

Physics seemed obvious from the beginning; religion became more and more dubious. Questions about belief, what it was and under what conditions it was justified, arose on both sides. Some of the claims of cosmologists and quantum theorists were every bit as implausible as those of theologians. But scientists were tentative where preachers were dogmatic, and it helped to remember that things didn’t become truer because they were written large, or—as I was to put it many years later, in a review of a fellow philosopher of science—that hypothetical do not turn into categoricals just because one shouts them at the top of one’s lungs.¹ Nothing in science had the canonical and sacrosanct status of religious belief; everything was provisional. Local observations, suitably specified, and rule-governed derivations from stated givens—like the formula for fluid pressure—had what I would now call apodictic certainty (which, Kant to the contrary notwithstanding, is not the same thing as necessary truth), but beyond that every step had to be argued. Extrapolations and hypotheses were all right, but only as long as one remembered that that was what they were.

Science, therefore, never had for me the megalomaniacal pretensions so many people claim for or attribute to it. It was certainly not a substitute for religion—on the contrary, it was an antidote. The idea that science is just another kind of faith overlooks an essential difference between science and religion: as a scientist I might share with believers a kind of practical confidence in the stability of the everyday world, but I rejected not merely as unnecessary but also as unworthy any commitment to an explanatory account of the origin or meaning of that world made simply for the sake of having something to believe, or for that matter any unwarranted extrapolation of the scientific account itself. As I came to see it, Newton’s recommendation in his third Rule of Reasoning in Philosophy that locally encountered qualities should "be esteemed [emphasis added] the universal qualities of all bodies whatsoever, subject always to the qualification in the fourth Rule (till such time as other phaenomena occur"),² only made sense, while on the other hand Laplace’s postulation of an intelligence … able to embrace in a single formula the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atom³ was just a bit of unwarranted melodrama.

At the same time science didn’t seem, locally, to be more than a part of the story; it coexisted happily with the rest of life. Even if everything turned out to be explainable, that would not necessarily spoil its quality as experience. Eddington had been quite good on this point; I quote one of the relevant passages in chapter 22. So again, one of the things frequently held against science, one of the things that Whitehead himself had held against it—that it reduces reality to the mere hurrying of material, endlessly and meaninglessly, or words to that effect—struck me as based on a misunderstanding. To do Whitehead justice, what he was criticizing was the scientific world-view that emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but he seemed to think, as many people still think, that scientific work led more or less inevitably to this view, and that simply was not my experience.⁴

One other attitude to science that dates from this early period is that it has always seemed to me a great playground of ideas. I read science fiction more or less avidly, but even in everyday life there were all sorts of ways in which scientific knowledge could transform or deform the ordinary, thus rendering it more interesting. One juvenile example of this is from roughly the period of my apprenticeship with Mr. Shingler, though it belonged in the chemistry laboratory next door, which was presided over by Dr. Stubbs. The structural elegance of organic chemistry came just too late in the curriculum to convert me to the subject (chemistry up to that point had been rather a cookbook affair), but it fed a certain speculative bent. Hydrocarbons come in series of ascending complexity; for example, the series of acids goes from formic (H.COOH) to acetic (CH3.COOH), then to propionic (C2H5.COOH), and so on. The alcohol series however begins with methyl (CH3.OH) and continues with ethyl (C2H5.OH), and so on. It is obvious on comparison that there is a missing first member in the alcohol series, namely the analogue of formic acid, with its single hydrogen rather than a hydrocarbon group. In the case of the alcohols this would clearly be H.OH. But that is water—so a case could be made for regarding water as an alcohol.

This was surely not original with me, though it was my own at the time. Also the argument had a fatal flaw: as Dr. Stubbs patiently pointed out, you can’t have an organic compound without carbon. It amused me anyway, but I must I think have been after provocation as well—for example, people would have to redefine temperance. With my family I acquired a reputation for frivolity. This was no laughing matter, but then they took almost everything with deadly seriousness, whereas I thought (and still do) that there were very few things in life, with the possible exceptions of love and justice, worth taking altogether seriously. Traces of this perverse rethinking of the familiar are to be found here and there in this book.

Systematic Philosophy

of Science

To a first degree in physics I added, after a transatlantic flight from religious suffocation, a doctorate in philosophy, for which it was natural to write a dissertation in the philosophy of science. The task of this discipline I took to be the understanding of what science was doing conceptually, not historically or anecdotally, which explains a lack of sympathy for subsequent efforts to make it a more accurate reflection of actual scientific practice, as some revisionist philosophers of science put it. The structure of science as I envisaged it at this time involved a lowest level of concepts that corresponded to recognizable complexes in the perceptual domain, a next higher level of constructs which were qualitatively similar to concepts but had undergone a process of refinement (definition, quantification, etc.), and a highest level of isolates that had no direct or obvious correspondences in experience but were invoked because of their theoretical power. The isolates were hypothetical and for the most part invented, though it seemed possible that some of them might be called into being by structural considerations, as a matter of inference or of Gestalt completion. This terminology, largely adapted from that of my sponsor Henry Margenan, was not destined for wide acceptance, though I still think it lends itself to an interesting variant treatment of the observational-theoretical dichotomy (about which I shall have more to say). I had already abandoned it—at least the part about the isolates—by the time of my attempt at a systematic account of the philosophy of science in 1965. But I did not abandon then or later the realist conclusion of the dissertation nor my reasons for reaching it; they are dealt with briefly in chapter 21 of the present book, which was originally written as a contribution to a Festschrift for Margenan.

My realism was what would now be called a structural realism, in that I did not necessarily expect the separateness and identity of things in the perceptual world to be faithfully mirrored in the real one, even though all their properties corresponded to something in the real, understanding by this term a universe independent of and ontologically prior to my knowledge of it. One could reasonably postulate an isomorphism, under some transformation, between the percep- tual/conceptual and the real, but to ask what something is like when we aren’t attending to it was to ask a silly question, since things are only like anything when we are attending to them. This did not mean a fall into idealism: attending to them didn’t constitute the world in which the things were grounded, it only fixed how they would appear in my world. Again, my realism itself was hypothetical, and entertained by individuals, whose conceptual schemes were idiosyncratic and only partially isomorphic to one another. It made no sense to object that because something was hypothetical, it couldn’t be real—that missed the whole point of making the hypothesis in the first place. That it was real was the hypothesis. I had not yet encountered phenomenology—one could get a doctorate in philosophy at Yale without ever hearing of it, an astonishing testimony to parochialism when one thinks of it, and a devastating indictment of places where it may still be true—and could therefore not see the hypothetical structure of the real as intentional. (It may be worth remarking that conceptual schemes as I construed them, meaning the conceptual furniture of individual thinkers, do not fall under Donald Davidson’s later strictures in The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.)⁵

The Philosophy of Science: A Systematic Account,⁶ written after a number of years of teaching in this area, set out to organize, for didactic purposes, the content of what was at that time still an emerging discipline among the major subdivisions of philosophy as taught in universities. I did not consider that it had itself to be scientific or to mimic the technicalities of science. For heuristic purposes I made use of some diagrams and simple formulae, especially when dealing with logic and probability theory, but my main concern was to convey a sense of conceptual structure—always remembering that the subjects who were to entertain it were embodied macroscopically in place and time (in what I would later call the flat region) and would stay that way, no matter how the objects of their interest might be pushed in the direction of the small or the fast or the distant.

It was my first book and in it I made a deliberate attempt to be approachable. As some sharp-eyed reviewers pointed out, it was flawed by errors of scholarship, not excusable—as I am quite ready to admit—even on the grounds that I was painting in broad strokes on a large canvas. But as I look back I am struck by something that, now that it occurs to me, may be relevant to some of the material in the present book. The reviewers’ complaints were not at all that I had got it wrong about science, nor indeed that any of my main claims were off target, but rather that I had misrepresented some details about the work of other philosophers of science—that I had attributed to Carnap a view he had once explicitly disavowed, that I had implicitly conflated the positions of Poincare and Duhem on a point where they had in fact diverged. I think the trouble was that for me scholarship wasn’t the main point, that I lacked the appetite for detail and the talent for perseverance that marked many of my colleagues. (Perhaps this plays out yet further the rejection of the kind of reverence for the Word I was surfeited with in youth.) At all events my attitude has always been that the fact that X said Y isn’t really important, philosophically speaking, even if X is Plato or Kant; what matters is what reasons he or she gave for saying Y and whether they should compel our assent. Of course if X didn’t say Y nothing excuses the misattribution, which is why my post facto contrition is genuine, and why I apologize in advance for such lapses as may have escaped my now more critical eye in what follows. But in cases like this history, not philosophy, is the offended party. In a similar way, when my students tell me what they think, I sometimes say—taking care to temper the point (perhaps I learned something from Mr. Shingler)—that it doesn’t matter what they think; their opinions will become interesting to me only when they can tell me why they hold them.

More germane to the philosophy of science proper was the gentle reproach of a former student of mine, himself on the way to becoming a distinguished philosopher of science, who wrote to say how it worried him that while Putnam, Feyerabend, Hanson, Kuhn et al. seem[ed] to have pretty effectively destroyed the tenability of the theory-observation dichotomy, I on the other hand seemed to cling to it in my book. But I thought they had done no such thing, and think now that I concede too much in chapter 1 of this book in calling the strong dichotomy untenable. In a subsequent paper (which, bucking such a trend, was never published and is now lost, or I should have included it here) I produced, as a test case, the Chinese observation of a guest-star in the year 1054. Thanks to astrophysics we now know, from the celestial house in which it appeared, that this was the supernova whose remains were recorded by Charles Messier in 1784 as Ml (the first item in his catalogue of nebulae) and were later named the Crab Nebula by the Earl of Rosse, who thought them very like a crab. Even if the observations of Messier and the Earl of Rosse were colored by astrophysical theory, which I doubt to have been the case in any developed sense, those of the Chinese certainly weren’t—and yet, because they fit the retrodicted light curve of the supernova, they count as confirming evidence of the theory.

Of course if what is meant by the rejection of the observational- theoretical dichotomy is that all grasping of anything in perception involves judgment, or, in Coleridge’s words, the meanest of men has his theory, and to think at all is to theorize,⁷ that gets rid easily enough of theory-free observations. However, on the one hand it trivializes theory and on the other it makes room for the reemergence of the dichotomy at a higher level. For it will frequently be true that the background theory that is thought to contaminate the observations will also be a background theory for the theory that is invoked to explain them—but that the explanatory theory will be quite distinct from the background theory and will share no terms with it. So once again there will be a sharp distinction, against that background, between observation statements and theoretical statements.

Branching Out

A normal career in the philosophy of science would no doubt have involved plunging into the professional fray with these and other arguments, but even while engaged on the systematic project my interests were beginning to turn away from the defining problems of the field. Those problems, some of which are noticed occasionally in what follows, came to include paradigms, research programs, the realism-pragmatism debate, anthropic speculations, and eliminative materialism. As will become clear in the later parts of this book, a kind of recon vergence has taken place, especially in the domain of artificial intelligence (see for example chapter 24), now that the hardwired locus of the knowing subject is beginning to be taken more seriously.

A decisive event at the time of which I am speaking was a request from some bright and insistent students at the University of Kansas, who wanted to read existentialism with me. I was the youngest member of the department and the others had already refused. My job was to teach logic and the philosophy of science, but on the one hand I was curious about Kierkegaard, whom I had encountered in a backhanded way at Yale (where he had been introduced as a prelude to an exemplary dismissal), and on the other I liked the students. We read Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Heidegger, and Sartre; later I added Husserl on my own. It amazed me that this rich material was held in such low esteem in the trade. It made no internal difference to the technical problems of the philosophy of science but it put, as it were, a modal prefix in front of the whole enterprise, the absence of which constituted, as I saw and still see it, a culpable failure of self-knowledge. And it did make an external difference (see for example chapter 20 of the present book).

Also I had begun even earlier to have some curiosity about the possibility of extrapolating results in the philosophy of science to theories in other contexts, notably at first that of value, an inquiry that resulted in Science and the Theory of Value * Attending to these and other eccentric speculations made all the more sense because of a growing feeling that much technical philosophy of science was in some quite deep way beside the point. It was full of what I thought spurious formalisms and aimed for what I suspected to be a spurious exactitude—spurious because the formalisms were often decorative and not used for any essential purpose (like proving theorems, as in mathematics) and because no adverse consequences followed (as they surely would have in the empirical sciences) from drawing conclusions with less than perfect exactness, or as Aristotle puts it in the Nicomachean Ethics, roughly and in outline.⁹ Aristotle goes on in the same passage to say that it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits, and it seemed to me that philosophers of science who thought that what they did should be formal and exact were getting confused about their subject.

Philosophy is not a natural science, nor an exact science, and trying to make the philosophy of science imitate the hard sciences by the refinement of its technical formulae (as I once remarked at a conference, to the indignation of the advocate of exact philosophy on whose paper I was commenting) made about as much sense as my moving to Boston from New York, where I was then living, because I really wanted to live in London. The difference is stark and simple but often not grasped. The natural sciences look for their objects in the natural world, and what happens in that world selects, in the final analysis, what the science in question can plausibly say. The object of the philosophy of science is science, but science is not in the natural world. One aphoristic way of putting this is to say the stars are indifferent to astronomy: they did whatever it is that they do long before astronomy was thought of, and news of what most of them are doing now may well arrive in these parts long after astronomy has been forgotten. Astronomy is something that human beings have made up—allowing themselves to be instructed by evidence from the stars, but deciding among themselves how to interpret that evidence and what conjectures to float in order to account for it.

I find myself hedging here, however, by taking care to say natural science, exact science, and so on. The philosophy of science is the philosophy of what, exactly? And how can I use exactly in this challenging way when I have just been making excuses for inexactitude? In the period of my professional formation science nearly always meant physical science and exactitude nearly always meant formal (or quantitative) exactitude. There were of course the biological and the social sciences, but these, when they were mentioned at all, tended to be compared to the physical sciences as ideals; their special problems were probabilistic or statistical but would become straightforwardly causal if only we knew enough. It was possible to expound the philosophy of the social sciences without once mentioning the feedback effect of knowledge of a theory on the population whose behavior it set out to explain. As to exactitude, the origins of the term certainly suggested something demanding—in the special and rather sinister case of exaction often enough a quantitative demand: the uttermost farthing, the pound of flesh. But exactus is the past participle of exigo, and it seemed possible to be exigent philosophically, to require reflective thinking-through, without insisting on axiomatic formalization. And science itself had only relatively recently, and only in the Englishspeaking world, come to have the narrow connotations of the quantitative (a term not itself always clearly understood—see for example chapter 19 of this book). Even in the English-speaking world, at Cambridge, older uses were preserved in the designation of science as natural philosophy, and of philosophy as moral science.

The idea of a thorough and demanding theoretical account is, in this light, the idea of a science, even an exacting science. In Science and the Theory of Value science still has the old meaning and there is no suggestion that there might be such a thing as a moral science. But a twenty-year detour through Continental philosophy—which began (as a main focus of professional work, rather than as a side interest) with the structuralists and only later, as a detour within a detour, involved concentration on the single figure of Jean-Paul Sartre¹⁰ —made me thoroughly comfortable with the European notion of the Geisteswissenschaften or the sciences humaines, inquiry into which made it clear that they were the lineal descendants of John Stuart Mill’s version of the moral sciences.

The Human Sciences

I said just now that natural science looks for its objects in the natural world; in a similar way one might say that a human science would look for its objects in the human world. Now philosophy, and the philosophy of science, are objects among others in the human world; the natural world itself is, paradoxically enough, also an object in the human world. Nobody has ever dealt with this situation better than Husserl (in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology). Husserl’s key idea is that of the Lebenswelt, the life-world, something that belongs in the first instance to the individual subject, although Husserl moves on (mistakenly, I think) to a collective form of it.¹¹

This world, this intentional domain of temporality and spatial extension, which is not an abstraction from anything but is the totality of lived experience at every moment, includes the natural and the human parts spoken of in the Preface—but as remarked there this very distinction is a human construction. The natural world component of the life-world encompasses everything I encounter or that happens, within my experience or within the reach of my learning, that would have happened even if there had been no human intentions (or intentionalities). Deciding just which things fall under that description is easy to a first approximation but becomes harder, as is usually the case at conceptual boundaries, the more human the natural becomes: What about language? What about the incest prohibition? But these contested cases do not vitiate the basic distinction. The life-world includes thought, and the distinction between natural and human is particularly interesting here: thoughts that occur to people unwanted, especially those that occur when they are very much not wanted, have to be treated as natural pathologies.

I do not wish to develop these ideas at much greater length here, since they form the object of several chapters in part VI of the book, but a couple of supplementary points may be in order. First—to return to a controversial issue—what I may call my scientific world is itself a complex domain in the life-world, by no means coterminous with the natural world; it will include parts of the natural world that fall under scientific explanation, and parts of the thought world that are involved in the explanatory activity. This being the case, however, it can readily be divided into an observational part and a theoretical part, once again no doubt with ambiguities at the boundary that, once again, do not vitiate the distinction itself. Second, all this talk of worlds invites a distinction, hinted at above, between world and universe. Universe would stand for the totality of what there is, including us but also including the vastly greater sphere of what underlies and surrounds and precedes and will follow us; world would stand, in effect, for the reach of the human—which the very term seems originally to have meant, a wer-ald or age of man, age being understood as an epoch or a life. Note once again however that the idea of the universe will be an item in my world.

Philosophers of science all too readily hypostatize the entities of which they speak—the propositions, the problems, the laws, the theories, the research programs, the revolutions, the sciences themselves—as if there were a domain in which they existed independently, waiting to be thought about, a domain whose internal structure would perhaps embody some truth about them all, and provide a ground for the settling of disputes. Karl Popper even invented such a domain, which he called the Third World, or (in order to avoid confusion with geopolitics) World III.¹² In this he seemed to be echoing Gaston Bachelard’s call for a bibliomenon to supplement noumena and phenomena,¹³ though when I suggested this to him privately he rejected the idea indignantly, claiming originality for all his ideas. At all events World III seems to me a perfect candidate for Ockham’s razor, since it is wholly unnecessary—everything it does can be accommodated in the life-worlds of individual subjects (always remembering that representations of other subjects, mediated by their embodiments, are included as elements in those life-worlds).

When a subject intends a problem or an argument, as I am doing now (and as I can assume the reader to be doing in his or her now), the problem and the argument, and what they are about, and their referents, and their histories, are all called into being, as it were, are invoked, are animated, by the subject in the moment of their being intended. There is no reaching out to some other domain: all that is happening has to be drawn, in the moment, from resources locally available: memory, including language, perception, conceptual apparatus, texts perhaps. It is as a thinking and knowing subject that I engage in scientific or philosophical pursuits, and such pursuits happen nowhere, as far as we have any means of knowing, except in life-worlds like ours. Nor of course do any other pursuits, in the sense of activities directed towards ends.

The human sciences deal with life-worlds and their products; they are themselves inscribed in such life-worlds, namely, those of their practitioners. The last chapter of this book is devoted to them. What I hope to have shown here is how a conception of science that I learned as a young physicist, among the hard sciences, has evolved through a long practice of philosophical reflection into something more inclusive, to which the hard sciences are integral but which they do not begin to exhaust. The hard sciences take their data from experimentation and their structure from mathematics—but experimentation and mathematics are themselves only human strategies for finding intelligibility in, or lending it to, an otherwise unintelligible world, and as such take their place in turn among the objects of the human sciences.

Part I

Explanation

Preface to Part I

Explanation

The thematic unity of this somewhat heterogeneous first part could be expressed roughly as: what science can do—and what it can’t be expected to do. The first chapter is a gesture, in two senses. I was fortunate to find myself at Yale during Peter Hempel’s last year there; in my first year he was at Harvard visiting and in my third he went to Princeton for good, but in that crucial second year (as things go in American graduate education) there he was, and I took both his courses in the philosophy of science. He was an exemplary teacher, from whom I learned more, perhaps, than from any other single person, and my putting his chapter first is an acknowledgment of that fact. But it also makes an implicit claim about the book as a whole. Hempel was and is a philosopher of science’s philosopher of science, and I would like what I have to say to be regarded as belonging to the conversation that he has animated over his long career.

The first chapter defends Hempel’s view of the central task of science as explanation and of the philosophy of science as the analysis of the structure of explanation. The second chapter, however, places some limitations on how that structure is to be instantiated. In the late fifties I had become interested in the general systems theory of von Bertalanffy, which seemed to promise a systematic extension of the network of explanation from physics to biology without compromising the specificity of the latter—and to do so under the rubric of cybernetics and information theory, something of automatic interest to an exphysicist because of its affinity with thermodynamics, the most philosophically intriguing branch of physics until the arrival of relativity and quantum theory. In 1966 I found myself in the presidency of the Society for General Systems Research and under the necessity of addressing the annual meeting. Among some of my colleagues in the Society I had detected a rampant tendency to suppose, somewhat after the manner of Hegel, that ontology could be read off from logic—that if one could build hierarchically layered theoretical systems the world must contain, somewhere, their real counterparts. The argument of the chapter serves as a gentle rebuke to these pansystematists.

Chapter 3 is a change of pace and has an earlier origin, but it fits in because it demonstrates in a dramatic context some limits of theoretical explanation. The context was of particular interest to me because Philip Henry Gosse had been a member of the sect to which my parents belonged and in which I grew up. He provides a splendid test case of the scientist who wants to believe an account that is at odds with the best current hypotheses in his or her field: it turns out to be possible, because of the fallacy of affirming the consequent, to reject any set of hypotheses and replace them with a magical account, and nothing in the philosophy of science can stand definitively in the way. (The fallacy of affirming the consequent occurs when someone tries to infer the truth of the antecedent, p, of a conditional "if p then from the truth of