unbent@ecsvax.UUCP (04/30/84)
==>
Hmmm. Just got back from hobnobbing with my fellow
wizards at the Western Division Meetings of the American
Philosophical Association and found Ken Arndt's notes from the
Bus Station Washroom thrashing about in my net. Wish his
itinerant ex-physicist has been with us in Cincinnati. Might
have perked things up a bit. (Although there was a nice
donnybrook about the best way to read Nietzsche....) Lots of
stuff to chew on. Let me just drop a few notes and references.
Some of the best current stuff on causation that I
know is from Nancy Cartwright. See if her new book *How the
Laws of Physics Lie* (great title!)--Oxford Univ. Press,
1983--is in the bag. If so, have a look at Ch. 1 ("Causal
Laws and Effective Strategies") and Ch. 4 ("The Reality of
Causes in a World of Instrumental Laws").
That hypotheses are not testable singly and in
isolation from systemic embedding in global theory-structures
is old news (Duhem, 1914). I'm not thrilled with limiting the
tests of such theory structures to the enumerated four "C"s,
however. (Consistency, coherence, comprehensiveness, and
congruity. What *is* 'congruity' anyway?) I see science as
in the business of *explaining* phenomena, not just "fitting"
or "systematizing" or even "predicting" them. (The term
'explanation' was markedly missing in Ken's visitor's
disquisitions.) What *formally* looks like "affirming the
consequent" is often a pattern of reasoning which C.S. Peirce
called "abduction" and which nowadays is often referred to as
"inference to the best explanation":
If A were the case, that would (best)
explain (the phenomenon) C.
C indeed occurs.
--------------------------------------
Therefore, there is *some* (good, if non-
conclusive) reason for believing that A is the
case.
In various of my writings, I've argued that theories qualify
for (epistemic) acceptability insofar as they discharge a
double explanatory responsibility vis-a-vis the world-stories
which they replace:
(1) The new theory explains some of the failures
of its predecessor(s), i.e., affords explanatory accommodation
for phenomena which were *anomalies* when conceived under
predecessor-theoretic descriptions, and
(2) The new theory explains the *apparent*
explanatory success of its predecessor(s), i.e., offers a new
world-story which explains how and why the world could have
*seemed* to be what the predecessor(s) *took* it to be.
These constraints are, in fact, a direct consequence
of a "metaphysic"--a version of realism. They arise from a
recognition that the connexion between "appearance" and
"reality" is an *explanatory* one: Things seem as they do
*because* things are as they are. Natural science, as I
understand it, then, is simply the systematic methodical
working-out of the dialectic of appearance-vs-reality as such.
Details on request (with references)--but perhaps best
requested by mail. This is already getting awfully long--even
for net.philosophy.
Yours for clearer concepts, --Jay Rosenberg
Dept. of Philosophy
...mcnc!ecsvax!unbent Univ. of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC 27514