Fw: Reductionism, Determinism and A Priori Metaphysics

From: Technotranscendence (neptune@mars.superlink.net)
Date: Mon Mar 06 2000 - 08:24:47 MST


From: Will Wilkinson will@willwilkinson.net
To: objectivism@wetheliving.com
Sent: Sunday, March 05, 2000 9:37 PM
Subject: OWL: Reductionism, Determinism and A Priori Metaphysics

> Here is a little note I sent a few months ago to the Journal of
Consciousness
> Studies Online discussion group about the relation of naturalism (the view
> that there is no a priori knowledge and that science is the
knowledge-gathering
> enterprise par excellence) and determinism. I've long thought the
> determinist to
> be in the grip of a picture of what science is that has no firm
> relationship to
> actual science. In any case, I hope somebody finds the following
interesting.
>
> -- Will W.
> -----------
>
>
>
> For some time now, I've found debates on free-will and determinism
> somewhat hard to follow. My main difficulty has to do with separating
> out the naturalist rhetoric from what a naturalist really ought to
> maintain. Most of us, I suspect, agree that whatever happens is the
> effect of some cause, and that all causes have some basis in physical
> reality. But the correct naturalist notion of causality is not
> obviously deterministic. Physics surely isn't obviously deterministic,
> and I think the specific difficulty in making sense of fundamental
> physical causality simply brings out the general difficulty in making
> sense of causality as such.
>
> It offends against a naturalistic epistemological sensibility to
> assert, prior to inquiry, that fundamental physical causality *must*
> be deterministic. The naturalist gets out of the armchair and looks to
> see what assumptions about causality *are* embedded in seemingly
> successful scientific practice. And when one goes and looks, one finds
> that some sciences make deterministic assumptions and others make
> emergentist assumptions about sui generis causal powers. This fact is
> certainly exasperating to those who hope steadfastly for the unity of
> science. One may always choose in the face of exasperation to abandon
> one's naturalism and offer up transcendental arguments to the effect
> that science *must* be a unity, because scientific explanations *must*
> be causal and causal explanations *must* be reductive and
> deterministic. (So non-deterministic scientists, lacking a priori
> philosophical acumen, are just deeply confused.) But these arguments
> will carry very little weight when it appears that knowledge is being
> gathered despite violating these a priori strictures.
>
> Anyway, because science itself is not monolithically committed to a
> particular conception of causality, one cannot effectively use science
> as a bludgeon in debates about free-will. I really don't think it is a
> *scientific* theory that there is no agent causality (that agents are
> never relata in causal relations), and that thus agents are never
> ultimately responsible for what they do. It is an a priori
> *metaphysical* theory about what causality *has* to be. And if the
> argument for that theory is built on such a priori metaphysical
> grounds, there remains much to say against it (besides the fact that
> there is nothing to be known a priori).
>
> For one, determinism makes hash of convictions about possibility and
> necessity which, I believe, are well confirmed by successful
> commonsense and scientific practice. Additionally, psychological
> evidence supports the Reidian thesis that we form causal concepts by
> attending to our own powers as agents, and then revise, bit by bit,
> our conception of causality to better suit non-conscious beings. If
> this is how we *do* form and employ causal concepts, one may wonder if
> we *ought* to do it that way. Perhaps if one could provide a
> deterministic causal story for the way we form agent-causal concepts,
> then one could plausibly argue that agent causality is a ladder that
> ought to be thrown away once climbed. But I do not see any such
> deterministic story on the horizon.
>
> So, I find myself somewhat stupefied by those who move from naturalism
> to determinism in the same breath, as if there was a well understood
> intimate connection between the two notions.
>
>
> -- Will Wilkinson
>
> -----------------------------------
> Will Wilkinson
> Department of Philosophy
> University of Maryland
> College Park, MD 20742
> wwilkins@wam.umd.edu
> http://www.wam.umd.edu/~wwilkins/
> -----------------------------------



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