Does doing physics entail metaphysical commitments?
Another discussion stream on commonsense and physics lead me to take a look at a website dedicated to metaphysics where I read this blog piece
https://metaphysicsnow.com/2018/03/21/stephen-hawking-a-scientist-dies-philosophy-lives-on/
Not sure I completely understand it, but the general idea seems to be that modern physics is up to its eyeballs in metaphysical commitments it has nothing to say about. Doesn't seem correct to me - I've met a few physicists in my time and they tend to think that what they are doing commits them to nothing other than constructing models. Are they wrong about that?
https://metaphysicsnow.com/2018/03/21/stephen-hawking-a-scientist-dies-philosophy-lives-on/
Not sure I completely understand it, but the general idea seems to be that modern physics is up to its eyeballs in metaphysical commitments it has nothing to say about. Doesn't seem correct to me - I've met a few physicists in my time and they tend to think that what they are doing commits them to nothing other than constructing models. Are they wrong about that?
Comments (42)
According to their (constructed) models, some scientists make ontological/metaphysical commitments and some make ontological/metaphysical claims (where claims/proposals don't necessarily equate with commitments). Both approaches (commitments or claims) can still allow for practical development in science. This is because there can be instrumental value (i.e. instrumentalism) in how commitments/claims help develop ideas and outcomes, regardless of whether the commitments/claims are ontologically true.
Firstly, some ontological claims are identical with ontological commitments. That's why I wrote "where claims/proposals don't necessarily equate with commitments."
Ontological claims can be logical propositions about stuff that don't need to be committed to. For example, "I propose that based on model x and model y, String Theory could be true, but I'm not making an ontological commitment to it being true. String Theory could be true; it could also be false."
Ontological claims that aren't made from this logical perspecitve are identical to ontological commitments, which require a belief that some thing is the case, and it's not just a proposal one is considering or holding as a counterfactual, for example.
The scientific models allows for scientists to avoid absolute "commitments" because they are working with hypotheses and theories. The (good) scientist tests his/her hypotheses and upon reaching a point where it doesn't work, can go back and edit their assumptions until they find out what does work.
So, for instance, the scientist dropping an apple on the ground to test gravity assumes s/he and the apple are real--perhaps it would be difficult for the scientist to adjust a hypothesis if s/he found out his/her own existence was false :joke: but if the apple turned out not to exist, or be a helium balloon, or something like that, the scientist could, should, and hopefully would go back to the drawing board.
Of course, I'm talking about the ideal scientist--it is likely that many scientists could not be so open-minded about some of their metaphysics, especially those beliefs that we all rely on in our day to day lives.
Seems to me that constructing models requires background assumptions - that's all metaphysics is, at least in the sense philosophy of science tends to use. Fundamentally, to construct models about reality presupposes that reality has some kind of formal, rational structure that can be modeled, typically with the use of numbers and logic.
Generally scientists are at least methodological, if not metaphysical naturalists, and work on science within this naturalistic framework. When approaching a question about the world, the explanation sought is one that is naturalistic and has no reference to something that cannot, in principle, be studied by science. Note that this does not entail circular scientism but rather is merely a methodological bracketing-off of anything not within the parameters of science.
Then, of course, there are the assumptions that other people do in fact exist, that there is actually a real, external world that continues to exist without our participation, that there are "laws" that are explicable mathematically, etc. Sometimes assumptions are proven false, or have to be revised: we call these paradigm shifts. Look at special relativity, biological evolution, quantum mechanics, etc.
Basically, then, if science is the study of the ontic, phenomenal, natural world, then there must be some basic assumptions ("metaphysical" ones), that are required for science to even get off the ground. These don't need to be complex, necessarily, and I hardly think scientists "need" metaphysicians to help them out. What's important to remember is that these are metaphysical, and not scientific, and that they can be up for debate, and, historically, have been. What's dangerous and incorrect is the ahistorical belief that science has operated under one continuous framework since its "inception", whenever that is claimed to be.
On the other hand, there is a huge and highly charged debate going on in current physics and cosmology, as to whether string theory and the speculative multiverse that flows from it, is really a matter for science or not. On the Nay side are those who say that these ideas can never be falsified even in principle, as they concern matters which are by definition outside the universe. On the Yay side are those who say that, because of the compelling nature of the mathematics and the solutions that these models offer to many intractable problems, then such speculations should be regarded as within the ambit of science. So part of this, is actually discarding Popper's idea of 'falsifiability' as a criterion for what constitutes a scientific hypothesis. And this is a debate that doesn't look like finishing any time soon. (Lots of useful discussion of it on Peter Woit's website Not Even Wrong, from the Nay perspective.)
On the other hand - one of the consequences of so-called Enlightenment thinking, is that science, and specifically physics, will do away with a lot of the 'fog of metaphysics'. It was felt that the useless scholastic blatherings about 'angels on the head of a pin' could be blown away by firm concentration on the undeniable objects of the physical realm.
Shame about [s]supervenience[/s] superposition, then.
According to this alternate perspective, any science , in any era, is always already a philosophical worldview , articulated via a particular vocabulary and methodology that marks it as science according to the conventions of that era.
A hot topic in current philosophy of mind is whether it’s time to jettison objectivist and physicalist presuppositions in the hard sciences, and how such a rethinking would change how science is practiced.
Nelson Goodman recognized the dependence of the objects of science on subjective construction.
“If the composition of points out of lines or of lines out of points is conventional rather than factual, points and lines themselves are no less so. ... If we say that our sample space is a combination of points, or of lines, or of regions, or a combination of combinations of points, or lines, or regions, or a combination of all these together, or is a single lump, then since none is identical with any of the rest, we are giving one among countless alternative conflicting descriptions of what the space is. And so we may regard the disagreements as not about the facts but as due to differences in the conventions-adopted in organizing or describing the space. What, then, is the neutral fact or thing described in these different terms? Neither the space (a) as an undivided whole nor (b) as a combination of everything involved in the several accounts; for (a) and (b) are but two among the various ways of organizing it. But what is it that is so organized? When we strip off as layers of convention all differences among ways of describing it, what is left? The onion is peeled down to its empty core.”
:up:
Right, there are assumptions made about the nature of space, the nature of time, the nature of living beings, etc., which form the fundamental conventions that are used by science. These assumptions are the metaphysical principles which science relies on. When we apprehend these conventions as metaphysical principles rather than as brute facts, we see how metaphysics underlies science.
Not only in the example given, but also in modelling exercises, which aim to do nothing less than track possibilities among actual systems. One can also think of the relevance of statistical thinking in biology and thermodynamics, not to mention quantum physics. Hell, cosmology even creates entire toy universes to play with so that they can shed more light on how our universe works. Feynman's sum-over-paths method of measuring particles literally assumes that a particle travels along all possible paths to get to a destination. It does this by quite literally mathematizing possibility. The idea that 'science only concerns itself with the actual' seems bizarre to say the least, and seems to evince nothing other than a poor and unrecognizable conception of science shared by no actual scientists. To this degree the blog seems to be beating on a wide open door, or at least an imaginary one.
If there's a grain of truth in the blog post it's that the exact ontological standing of 'possibility' is often left untheorized, but for the simple reason that it doesn't really need to be. If a prediction comes out right, or your model correctly tracks the phenomenon under investigation, then you've done your work as a scientist. One can employ possibility without ontologizing it. At the very least the post reeks of the same kind of arrogance and one-upmanship that it so dislikes, and so is as much a part of the problem it tries to diagnose.
That being said, I have to echo some of what StreetlightX says above. The blog post does come across as a bit odd. In particular...
is just a bad argument. There is no such thing as "the action of this system", and the Principle of Least Action is something the writer is importing here. There isn't anything to be said about paths in basic energetic modeling, only that energy is neither created nor destroyed. So Kinetic Energy is converted into Potential Energy as the javelin travels to its apex, and converted back into Kinetic Energy as it descends to the Earth where it is transferred to the Earth upon impact. Further, motion is different from energy in that it has a direction that is specified, and deals in forces rather than in energy.
If the principle of least action requies that the actual value for the action of the system during any interval should be the smallest, such reasoning doesn't enter in arguing where the javelin is going to fall or what is going to happen. The writer may see something of his principle in basic motion puzzles, but I sure don't. It just seems inserted in the middle of a text-book problem meant to explain the basics of motion without doing any argumentative work, and then is assumed to be required.
If that be the case then the rest -- possibility, actuality, paths -- are likewise not really part of the reasoning, since they all follow from this principle.
While it's the case that metaphysics is part and parcel to science -- or so I believe -- I'd say the writer here is way off, and hasn't really done the work necessary to understand the science.
It's not about getting rid of metaphysics. To do science, you must do metaphysics. But the metaphysics scientists need to operate is not something only a metaphysician can figure out. The problem is not that metaphysicians are being ignored - the problem is that some scientists are ignoring metaphysics, and some metaphysicians are ignoring science. The ideal scientist should also be a philosopher, and vice versa. So you have some scientists who think "Science" is a magical, perfect, self-contained intellectual project that can do no wrong and will ultimately figure everything out, "given enough time" - this is a problem.
Typically these sorts of scientists (or science-fanatics) are annoying and not wise. They make grandiose claims about the scope and potential of science, with little to no actual evidence to back it up. There's science, and then there's scientism, and the problem is that the latter is being appropriated into the former, so that science must now necessarily be scientistic. With the development of any kind of monism, such as scientism, comes the threat of dogmatism, so that intellectual progress is no longer open and free but now constrained within the metaphysical parameters that are informed by a select few charismatic individuals and their biases. These people can, upon realizing their position of authority in the public eye, use their platform to push unscientific and sometimes immoral public policies.
There is something unsettling to me about power-structures, and science isn't exempt. In my opinion, scientific realism might be justified, but anti-realism certainly provides a solid foundation for healthy relationship between science and the rest of society. It keeps scientists from getting too arrogant and presumptuous, and it helps secure the freedom of individuals to choose a worldview that fits their way of life.
This is not at all true. Thales predicted a solar eclipse. Following motions, and predicting what will be where at a future time, does not conclude the work of a scientist. The scientist's endeavour is to produce a complete understanding of the phenomenon. This attitude, that the work of science is simply to predict, is a philosophic illness, a mental laze.
I guess the example is just meant to be illustrative, though, rather than definitive. And yeah, it does seem more general. I had myself a bit of a wikipedia reading session after your reply to check myself and see if I was mistaken, and I was indeed ignorant of it being present in physics at a higher level. So I could be speaking a bit too ignorantly here, after all.
It seems, though, that the point could be made more simply. We don't need the most general form of physical theory to demonstrate that metaphysical commitments are part of physics. Interpretation of force, gravity, inertia, mass, and so forth fall squarely within the realm of metaphysics, by my lights.
The scientific methodologies wouldn't change a bit.
In (very) short, science is self-critical, bias-minimizing model ? evidence convergence, where tentative hypotheses can be derived from the models.
Evidence, observations, experimental results accumulate, and the models convergence thereupon.
The convergence protocols are what scientists do.
So, on that angle at least, only regularities are required, without which everything would be incomprehensible chaos anyway.
Regularities may be all that are required, but even specifying some belief in regularities is already a commitment. And if scientists said all things were made of pixie dust, rather than particles, then these would also be commitments. Since they are commitments about what exists, they are metaphysical commitments.
A commitment can be changed, of course, upon pain of further reasoning or new discoveries. We could just as well use "belief" for "commitment", I'd say.
Right.
There's a difference between merely that something exists (?) and what exactly something is (quiddity), though.
Shamelessly pointing over at an old post: ? and quiddity
In general, the sciences tend to suppose that something is, and then try to learn more about what it is.
That said, of course some make commitments to specific metaphysics about what exactly things are, but, on the angle above, the sciences don't really care much.
How would a biologist work under such a regime? "We agree that yeast exist, but we do not characterize them" isn't exactly what microbiology looks like.
Perhaps you could say you are a sort of agnostic and say that all entities named by science may or may not exist, but even this sort of ploy seems to me to take a sort of skeptical stand towards metaphysics -- which is either a convenient opinion which suits one's feelings, in the absence of an argument, or a sort of belief with regards to the knowability of entities in the presence of an argument, and would count as a kind of commitment with respect to metaphysics because it deals with entities and our minds relation to said entities in such a case.
Unless science, in spite of appearances to the contrary which seem to make claims about what exists and how it exists, could be construed to somehow be about something else in actuality -- sort of like an error theory of science -- science talks about what does or does not exist, therefore is discussing metaphysical topics. And any argument which says science does not deal with entities would itself be a metaphysical thesis, so I don't see much escape from the charge of "doing metaphysics" here.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, by my lights. I don't think there's anything useful to be had by trying to separate the two. Science is just a bunch of arguments, in part empirical and in part more a priori. It's a hodge-podge of impurity interested in asking and answering questions, not some sort of regimented methodology followed with ritual precision to obtain the pure stuff of nature.
I would also add
It’s more that modern science wished to start with assuming the ‘apodictic certainty of the testimony of the senses’ by first of all discarding the ‘fog of metaphysics’ [Bertrand Russell’s term] and beginning with what could be analytically and experimentally known and measured. And who could possible disagree with that, right? Galileo rolled two balls down an inclined plane and showed that their arrival was not dependent on their mass - thereby disproving scholastic philosophy once and for all, which was thrown out with Ptolemaic cosmology, right? What could be more obvious?
Sorry I came late to this discussion. I looked through the other posts. I don't think what I say will duplicate others, although several people have touched on issues discussed in this post.
What Wayfarer says, above, is something I've thought about a lot. It does seem to me that if something can't be falsifiable, even in theory, it's not science. It's either metaphysics or meaningless. On the other hand, if the mathematics and the solutions that these models offer solutions to many intractable problems, why isn't that an example of falsifiability?
Quoting darthbarracuda
@tim wood steered me towards "An Essay on Metaphysics," by R.G. Collingwood. I really like it, at least partly because his definition of "metaphysics" is similar to mine, although different from many others on this forum and elsewhere. Here's what he says:
"Metaphysics is the attempt to find out what absolute presuppositions have been made by this or that person or group of persons, on this or that occasion or group of occasions, in the course of this or that piece of thinking."
Here's what he says about absolute propositions:
"An absolute presupposition is one which stands, relatively to all questions to which it is related, as a presupposition, never as an answer."
"Absolute presuppositions are not verifiable. This does not mean that we should like to verify them but are not able to; it means that the idea of verification is an idea which does not apply to them...."
Here are some statements I think are absolute presuppositions:
Popper devised the criterion of falsifiability to distinguish empirical hypotheses from speculative ideas that could not in principle be tested against some observation. Mathematics is a different matter as it concerns purely mathematical or logical facts.
As to why speculative mathematical theories such as string theory are scientific matters or not - obviously a highly vexed question. Have you heard of a book called Farewell to Reality, by Jim Baggott? It's a sceptical analysis of the current state of physics speculation by a physics-educated science writer. That and Peter Woit's book Not Even Wrong are both highly critical of string theory and its proponents.
I take issue with every one of your 'absolute presuppositions', as they're not actually part of the curriculum of metaphysics proper (especially #3). I think what you're doing there is conflating metaphysical naturalism with metaphysics proper. Metaphysical naturalism is the commitment of science to seeking natural explanations and causes, which is all well and good. However when that becomes a global statement about what is real, what kinds of causes exist, then you're no longer in the territory of metaphysical naturalism, but of metaphysics proper. You're making statements about 'the nature of reality' on the basis of naturalism. And that's susceptible to the 'metal detector' analogy that Feser gives in his criticism of 'scientism':
1. The predictive power and technological applications of the natural sciences are unparalleled by those of any other purported source of knowledge.
2. Therefore what science reveals to us is all that is real.
Compare:
1. Metal detectors have had far greater success in finding coins and other metallic objects in more places than any other method has.
2. Therefore what metal detectors reveal to us (e.g. coins, gold nuggets) are all that is real.
Metal detectors are keyed to those aspects of the natural world susceptible of detection via electromagnetic means (or whatever). But however well they perform this task -- indeed, even if they succeeded on every single occasion they were deployed -- it doesn't follow that there are not aspects of the natural world other than the ones they are sensitive to.
I guess what I was trying to say is, if I can't directly observe a phenomenon, but it's existence explains things I can observe, which is what I thought you were describing, then it may be reasonable for me to infer it's existence.
Quoting Wayfarer
Not sure I understand the distinction. Collingwood is talking about absolute presuppositions "made by this or that person or group of persons, on this or that occasion or group of occasions, in the course of this or that piece of thinking." I interpret this as similar to what I have said in previous discussions - metaphysical approaches are chosen based on usefulness, not some absolute correspondence with reality. As he says, "Absolute presuppositions are not verifiable."
It sounds a simple principle - but what about 'bubble universes' or 'multiple worlds'? Is it 'reasonable' to posit the reality of those? That is the salient point here.
Quoting T Clark
If Collingwood is writing from within the Western philosophical tradition, then he's talking in terms of Aristotelian metaphysics, which has a definite domain of discourse. Sure it's 'general' in the sense of being a 'philosophy of first principles', but at the same time, it articulates the issues using a particular kind of vocabulary and set of concepts.
Actually, the bubble universes was what set me off down this path. If I understood him correctly, @apokrisis was talking about them as an effect of one current understanding of inflation during, or before, or whatever, the big bang. If a phenomenon is required in order to understand something that is observable, even though it isn't, then it seems to me it meets the requirement as suitable for scientific evaluation.
Quoting Wayfarer
Collingwood starts out talking about Aristotle, but it doesn't seem that hard to understand what he is trying to say. Unless I am misunderstanding something, his statements speak for themselves. I'll go back and read again.
Just to be clear, I have a lot of confidence in the way you see things. It's been a big help to me in the past. That makes me want to go back and re-examine what I'm saying.
That seems question begging about how you would define "real" here. How does it not wind up sounding idealist or subjective - that is, anti-realist?
And an even greater difficulty. The least action principle is an example of how science does appear to discover a unity, rather than a pluralism, at the deepest ontic level.
You can try any theory you like ... but the historical evidence is that it needs to be based on the least action principle with its focus on closure and symmetry.
Well, I am not too concerned with how this sounds, but what question is being begged here?
Quoting apokrisis
That to me suggests a structural relationship between theories. One is tempted to conclude that what accounts for this common trope is that in their different ways these theories all get a hold on the same truth. But one should always keep a bit of wary skepticism and not be totally seduced by theoretical elegance. That way lies dogmatism.
So instrumentalism and pluralism would be the same thing I would suggest.
You may have been making the point that every model advances its own ontic commitments. They talk of “real” entities like temperature or charge. But that wasn’t clear, and would still be pragmatism anyway.
Even that implies a fair amount of metaphysics, I think. Who or what are "they", what is a "commitment", what is "construction", what is a "model"?
It's not really possible to think at all without taking a good deal for granted, and actually what's taken for granted is a bunch of fairly boring stuff that most people agree with and that comports with common sense.
However, one understand what those scientists mean: they mean they're not committing themselves to anything particularly bizarre or unusual.