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The Philosophy of the Present
Supplementary Essay 1: Empirical Realism
I
EMPIRICAL REALISM
There are two points of incidence of any act of
knowledge: the deduction of what must occur in experience if the idea
we entertain is true, and the reconstruction of the world which the
acceptance of the idea involves. Thus, in the theory of relativity,
the calculation of the apparent positions of stars close to the rim
of the eclipsed sun and the agreement of the calculations of the theory
with the revolution of the orbit of Mercury are illustrations of the
first. Einstein's theory of a curved space-time or Whitehead's doctrine
of intersecting time-systems is an illustration of the second. Barring
errors of observation, the so-called experimental proofs remain as
data under any alternative theory, while the reconstructed world that
arises out of the theory is never in its own right definitive. A new
theory will reconstruct this as it has reconstructed its predecessor.
It is interesting to note that this difference in the definitive
value of data and of theories under which data are organized and from
which they gain new meanings is not due to a higher degree of competence
in reaching them. The more competently data are isolated and observed
the more likely they are to remain as secure elements in the formulation
and solution of later problems; but the logical perfection of a theory
and its wide applicability have no bearing upon the likelihood of
its survival in the presence of new problems. This is clearly evidenced
in the attitude of present-day physicists toward Newtonian mechanics.
In fact the very perfection and comprehensiveness of an hypothesis
lessen its (94) survival value in the face of fundamental
problems. Scientists find themselves in possession of a constantly
increasing body of reliable data, while the very character of their
research-undertakings calls for a constant reinterpretation of the
world within which their research goes on.
What bearing has this upon the scientist's realism, upon his assurance
that there is an intelligible world there over against his
investigation? Such a phenomenalist as Mach finds his reality in the
data, and is or should be ready to recognize new uniformities among
them without feeling that his field of reality has changed. He can
regard things and the world made of things as mere convenient and
subjective orderings of data which can be rearranged without affecting
the only reality with which science is concerned. But our constructive
scientists are not phenomenalists. Einstein condemns phenomenalism[1]
and among theorists such as Eddington, Weyl, Minkowski, or Whitehead
we find no phenomenalist. Technicians such as Rutherford, Bohr, Sommerfeld,
Planck, or Schroeder, can state their findings only in terms of things
and a world of things, however far removed from perceptual experience.
Data are isolated elements in a world of things. Their isolation
is overcome in the new world of the scientist's hypothesis, and it
is in this world that the reality lies which he is seeking. He cannot
stop with the data in his cognitive advance. They belong to a stage
in the investigation which comes before the attainment of knowledge.
However uncertain he may be of the achievement, his impulse is not
satisfied until the data have taken on the form of things in some
sort of an ordered whole. These things may be removed from our perceptual
experience and lie in a mathematical or logical intuition belonging
to the expert only;(95) but it is a world made up
of objects, not of data, to which his hypothesis gives at least a
provisional reality not attaching to them as mere data.
A further trait of the scientist's reality is its independence of
the observer. This is strikingly illustrated, in the doctrine of relativity,
by the geometry of space-time. An absolute independent of the frames
of reference of all observers was an inevitable goal of the most fundamental
criticism of commonsense spatial and temporal experience. However
ready the scientist has been to recognize the perspectivity of all
perception, he has never been infected by those scepticisms that have
arisen from such recognition in philosophic doctrine. He has recognized
far more adequately than the layman the insurmountable obstacles that
defend the cognizable world from any complete comprehension by his
science; but he has never relegated the object of his knowledge to
the creations of his own perceptions and thought. He has always assumed
the existence of something independent of his perception, and of the
thought with which his research is occupied. It is this independence
which underwrites his experiment. But this reality independent of
the perception and thought of the observer is not presented in the
data of science, apart from the world to which such data belong. These
data are perceptual experiences, isolated by the problem within which
they appear, and occurring under such exacting conditions that they
can be counted upon to be repeated not only in the scientist's own
experience but also, under similar conditions, in that of others.
In no case would the independent reality be identified with the refined
measurement of points on a photographic plate, or with the observations
of an astronomer, in so far as these are in contradiction to current
doctrine. It is these latter which constitute the data of science.
Independent reality belongs either to the world in so far as not affected
by the (96) problem, or to a reconstituted world.
The observations are indications of the necessity of reconstitution,
and evidences of the legitimacy of an hypothesis by which such reconstitution
is undertaken; but in the form of data they cannot belong to a reconstituted
world. Such a world is a system of intelligible things whose meanings
have wiped out the isolation of the data, and perhaps have removed
their import from the perceptual experience within which they occurred.
We are thus brought back to the intelligible reality that is the fundamental
assumption of the scientist's undertaking. I have already referred
to the meaning of the intelligibility of reality in the scientist's
quest for knowledge. It is found in the possibility of deducing, from
determining conditions of events as given in experience, what the
nature of those events must be. There are, then, two assumptions involved
in such intelligibility: (1) that events in their passage are determined,
although the degree of this determination is not fixed by the assumption;
and (2) that in so far as the determining conditions are given, the
character of later events is also given. There is, however, a difference
between the givenness of the determining conditions and the givenness
of the later events. The former is that of the temporal dimension
of experience. But while there is in all passage determination-in
abstract phraseology the carrying on of relations-there is also the
indeterminateness of what occurs. There is always qualitative difference
in passage, as well as identity of relation extending through passage.
The "what" that is occurring is given in this relational
aspect only. In this lies the rationality of all experience, and the
source of symbolism. It is here also that we find the fundamental
distinction between the objective and subjective phases of experience.
The carrying on of relations is objective. The anticipated qualitative
"what" that will (97) occur is subjective.
Its locus is mind. Here we find the second sort of givenness-- that
which belongs to later events. In so far as the relations in the passage
are there in experience they pass in their identity into further events,
but the "what" that will occur is only symbolically present.
And the indeterminate "what" involves always a possibly
new situation with a new complex of relationships. The givenness of
later events is then the extension of the structure of relations found
in experience, in which the event can be defined only in its relational
import, though we imaginatively anticipate with varying degrees of
probability its qualitative character. The intelligibility of the
world is found in this structure of relations which are there in experience,
and in the possibility of following them on beyond the specious present
into a future in so far as this future is determined. The data are
such emergent events as fail to fit into the accepted structure of
relations, and become nodal points from which a new structure of relations
arises. They thus are isolated, though they lie within a world which
has not been entirely disrupted. It is in their isolation that they
are interesting; and while they are defined in terms of objective
relations which are not affected, it is in their opposition to previously
accepted meanings that they must be presented. A relaturm that hangs
in the air without as yet the structure of relations to which it belongs
is given in a type of experience which can embody both its inherence
in a world that is there and its contradiction of certain characters
of that world.[2] The Michelson-Morley findings are
an illustration of this type of experience. The interference rings
were unchanged, whether the light waves travelled with the motion
of the earth or at right angles to it. Motions were simply (98)
there in a world of exact measurement which was the condition of any
experiment. But they were in flagrant opposition to the assumption
that these waves travelled in an ether unaffected by that motion,
occupying the Newtonian space of current physical doctrine. The unquestioned
thereness of these rings in their unexpected conflict with the character
of the spatial world to which they had belonged expresses the data's
independence of certain characters of that experience in so far as
they are in conflict with these findings.
There is an old quarrel between rationalism and empiricism which
can never be healed as long as either sets out to tell the whole story
of reality. Nor is it possible to divide the narrative between them.
When rationalism tells the tale, the goal is a Parmenidean identity;
when empiricism tells it, reality disappears in phenomenalistic sands.
But in fact contingency presupposes a universal necessary order that
has been transgressed, and we achieve universal law only when we have
triumphed over exceptions. Empiricism presents the ever-recurrent
problem with its hard recalcitrant fact; rationalism, the verified
theory in which it disappears. For example, the interpretation of
things as events causes "things" to disappear in the geometry
of a space-time which is the modern edition of the rationalism of
Descartes. Neither the Minkowski space-time, nor Whitehead's intersections
of an infinite number of time-systems with the ingression of eternal
objects, opens the door to any reality in the perceptual findings
of research science. For research science, perceptual findings are
part of a world whose unquestioned security is the basis for the reality
of the exceptional instance from which the problem springs, and for
the reliability of the experimental verification of the later hypothesis;
yet they have lost the meaning which had belonged to that world but
which the exceptional instance has now annulled. The world was implicitly
rational up to the (99) advent of the problem. It
is again rational once the problem is solved. The hard facts of the
exceptional instance in observation and experiment have a reality
independent of that rationality. To say that their reality is found
in the faith that the world nevertheless is rational, is to substitute
an emotional state for the immediate datum which asserts itself against
a rational order and conceivably might maintain itself even in an
irrational universe. It is essential to the scientist's method and
attitude that he accept his findings just in their contravening of
what had been their meaning, and as real in independence of whatever
theory is advanced to explain them. Otherwise they would have no probative
power. Such instances, with the problems they involve, constitute
the contingency of the scientist's world. They are in the nature of
the case unpredictable, and they are in the nature of the case real
in spite of their non-rationality. It is also true that every consistent
hypothesis rules out all later exceptions to its uniformity, or rather
that it will be demolished by any exceptional instance. It is therefore
no argument against the geometry of space-time that it opens no door
to the contingent. No formally rational doctrine can include within
itself the repugnant fact. But it is another matter to give such an
account of reality as has within it no place for the authority of
new scientific findings. The scientist who welcomes facts that fail
to accord with his theory must have a place in his doctrine for the
experience within which those facts can appear. Nor can we account
for the repugnant fact, for the emergent, by relegating it to an experience
that is simply that of a mind that has made a mistake or been in error
and now corrects it with a true or at least a truer account of reality.
The repugnant fact is without doubt an emergent; it has, however,
been customary to place its essential novelty in a mental experience,
and to deny it to the world that the mind is experiencing.
(100) Thus radiation from black bodies presented
facts repugnant to the formulation of light in terms of a wave process.
Presumably an hypothesis will be found in which this repugnancy will
disappear. Meantime, we do not question the facts, once they have
been tested by approved technique. This comes back to pointer-readings;
but we are apt to overlook the fact that pointer-readings involve
very complex and extensive apparatus together with the physical housing
of this apparatus-the whole perceptual world that is not involved
in the doctrine of radiation-and that the facts are but parts of that
perceptual world. In that world the pointer readings are emergents.
From the scientist's standpoint this world is not mental. Is the emergence
of the quanta mental? The Einsteinian must answer yes to this question.
There can be no novelty in the geometry of an extension in which time
is simply one dimension. In our different frames of reference we happen
upon events and all the freshness of novelty is in the adventurer.
Whitehead does locate the perspective of the organism within the world
with which the scientist deals, and undertakes to open the door to
contingency by way of alternative patterns of eternal objects which
may have ingression into the perspective, or particular intersections
of time systems dependent upon the percipient event. But this logical
separation of the event-the occurrence from the characters of the
event-the "what it is" that takes place-finds no reflection
in the scientist's object. The "what the object is" reflects
its characters in its occurrence. If there is contingency in the selection
of eternal objects, that contingency surely appears in the happening.
Not only etymologically but logically contingency attaches itself
to occurrence. Yet from the standpoint of Whitehead's doctrine the
event is as unalterably located in a space-time as in the Einsteinian
doctrine.
The scientist's emergent appears in his observation of the (101)
repugnant fact. Unquestionably in his experience something novel has
occurred, and his experience lies within the world. He is then interested
in establishing as a fact that what is novel in his experience is
also firmly imbedded in an unquestioned perceptual world. In so far
as it is novel--e.g., in so far as the radiation of the black body
does not conform to the wave theory of radiation-the new fact exists
only as his experimental finding, as his perceptual experience, and
he must make sure that any other person under like circumstances will
have the same perceptual experience. The reality of this experience
of his, and of others carrying out the like experiment, in its opposition
to current meanings, is the cornerstone of experimental science. The
novel fact is no mere sensation of the scientist, nor any mental state,
but something that is happening to things that are real. In its repugnancy
to a certain structural character of that world it arises only in
the experience of this, that and the other individual; but these experiences
must nevertheless belong to an unquestioned objective world. It is
important to recognize that this world is not made up out of these
individual experiences. They lie within this world. If it were made
up of such individual experiences it would lose all its reality; whereas
in fact it is a court of final appeal-there is no scientific theory
that does not seek its decision, and there is no theory that may not
be brought before it. It is entirely conceivable that facts repugnant
to the current doctrine of relativity may appear, and it is the anticipation
of research science that such will be the case.
It is customary to interpret the independence of data as a metaphysical
affirmation of a real world independent of all observation and speculation.
There is no necessary implication of this in the scientist's methodology.
For the metaphysical affirmation is of a reality that is final, while
the scientist's procedure and method contemplate no such (102)
finality. On the contrary, they contemplate continued reconstruction
in the face of events emerging in ceaseless novelty. The scientist's
method and technique are those of research. Unless his metaphysical
predisposition leads him to identify the unquestioned thereness of
the data with the finality of a world metaphysically independent of
all experience, he cannot discover this finality in the data; for
their very form moves toward a doctrine that will relieve them of
the character of data and merge them in things. It is only in the
identity of the relation in passage that he can find a character which
could belong to such a final world. But, as Meyerson has pointed out,
[3] such a reflection of reality in the identities
that scientific method seeks leads only to a Parmenidean solid.
It is of course possible to approach the problem from the standpoint
of this relational structure. Modern mathematics and relational logic
are outstanding illustrations of this approach. The first step was
taken in the Renaissance, in the freeing of the numerical relations
of geometrical elements from the forms of perceptual intuition. Descartes'
Analytic Geometry not only opened the door to the powerful instrument
of analysis, but also freed the qualitative content of the object
of observation from the common-sense structure of things. Scientific
analysis was then free to attack the problems of physics and chemistry
with the instruments of molecules and atoms, which could be defined
in terms of the equations of mechanics. justification for the hypothetical
constructions this made possible could be found in the logical deductions
of the theory when these were put to the test of experiment. It was
mathematical analysis that freed the modern mind from Aristotelian
metaphysics, by giving men new objects that could be exactly defined
in (103) terms of relational structures and then
bringing these structures to the test of observation, through the
deduction of their consequences. The profound distinction between
the atomic elements of ancient and those of modern thought lies in
the exact definition which modern science gives to its ultimate elements
in terms of the mathematical account of the proportions they must
submit to and of the changes they must undergo. An Aristotelian science
could give no definition of the elements of things except the nature
of the things as they lay in experience. There was no method open
to the thinker except that of the metaphysics of potentiality and
realization. Elements could be thought of only in terms of what they
were to become. In the atom of Democritus, weight was an ultimate
quality which was conceived as a cause of motion and of changes in
motion; but the cause had nothing in common with the effect. It was
not possible to utilize the analysis of motion into velocities, accelerations
and decelerations and then define the weight the dominant character
of the atom-in terms of these determinable elements of motion. Weight
was one character and the changes it brought about were other characters.
The one could not be defined in terms of the other.
But when mass could be defined in terms of inertia and this in terms
of the tendency of a body to remain in a state of rest or motion and
in terms of the character of the motion in which it is found, it became
possible to use the mathematical account of motion to define both
the body and any part of it that this analysis rendered accessible
to thought and experiment. It is not simply that there arose a new
set of concepts for defining things, but that the situations arising
from the mathematical analysis involved relational formulations of
the objects. Both the inadequacy of the Cartesian mechanical doctrine
and the striking success of Newtonian mechanics emphasized the importance
of the (104) new physical objects that had arisen
out of a mathematical dynamics. Their indifference to the teleological
natures of things in human experience rendered them peculiarly serviceable
for fashioning means for new human ends. Newtonian mechanics gave
man a control over nature from a source of which Bacon had not dreamed.
Of equal if not of greater importance was the experimental proof
which the exact deduction of consequences from the mathematically
formulated hypothesis offered to the scientist. Here was a mathesis
which instead of withdrawing into a Platonic world of forms came
back to a perceptual world that could be submitted to exact measurement,
and found here final support. And again and again the development
of mathematical theory has provided the structure within which new
objects could be defined. Einstein's speculation upon the relations
of motion to measurement and its units antedates his realization that
the Michelson-Morley findings and the Lorentz transformations presented
the data for the doctrine of relativity. Quanta, on the other hand,
present perceptual findings defined in terms of current theory, yet
contradicting it. The approach to the problem may be from either side:
from that of the particular experience that controverts the theory,
or from that of the developed relational theory that offers new objects
to scientific investigation.
If we ask, then, what is the logical or cognitive value of the scientist's
realism, we receive two different answers. The one breaks out of his
attitude in seeking the solution of the problems with which his research
is occupied. The other appears in his metaphysical interpretation
of this attitude. In the first we find that the scientist's assumption
of the independence of the world in which are found the data of science
and the objects a tested theory reveals over against the observation
and speculation of the scientist, refers always to the world in so
far as it is not involved in the (105) problem upon
which he is engaged, and in so far as that world is revealed in scientifically
competent, undisputed and tested observation and hypothesis. His acceptance
of a real world independent of his processes of knowledge is not based
upon the finality of the findings of science, either in its data,
or in its logically consistent and experimentally tested theories.
Although the data of science, when rigorously ascertained, have a
much longer life in the history of science than its theories, they
are always possibly subject to revision. This conceivable lack of
finality does not, however, affect the data's independence of observation
and thought within the field of research. The world to which the data
belong is independent of the perception and thought which had failed
to recognize them, and any conceivable revision of these data will
simply find itself in another world of scientific findings. The scientist
has no way of presenting the impermanence of his data except in terms
of improved technique, and the same is true of the objects into which
the data disappear when a theory has been tested and accepted. They
are independent only of the perception and thought of a world whose
eyes were as yet closed to them.
The elaborate and highly abstruse relativistic theories carry with
them the logical finality of any consistent deduction; but their finality
in the history of science depends, first, upon their competent formulation
of the independent reality, and, second, upon their success in anticipating
later events. And the scientist himself expects this doctrine to be
reconstructed just as other scientific doctrines have been reconstructed.
He is confident that any later theory will assimilate into its relational
structure the data of present-day science-in so far as these stand
the test of repetition and improved technique-and the logical structure
of present-day theories, as relativity has assimilated the logical
structure of classical mechanics; but neither his attitude as a (106)
research scientist nor his method anticipates the finality of the
doctrine. What calls for emphasis is that the independent reality
carries with it no implication of finality.
We have seen that this independent reality, which is an essential
part of the scientist's apparatus, breaks out at two points. First,
in the scientific datum it is an accredited experience which runs
counter to interpretations and meanings that have hitherto had their
place in the world within which we have been living: for example,
the reflections of radiations of dark bodies in the quantum problem.
Or it is a new object, relationally defined, a so-called "conceptual"
object, in so far as experimental evidence can be given for its existence:
for example, the electron, as evidenced in Millikan's oil-drop experiment,
or the alpha-particle in Rutherford's photographs. Here is a reality
actually there, standing on its own feet in spite of accepted meanings
and doctrines that contravene it. Or, in the second place, it is the
reality of a new theory justified by unquestioned logical implications
and supported by observations and experiments that fulfill its own
prophecies. The spear-point of independence is thus always directed
against objects or ideas belonging to the very experience within which
the scientific datum, or the new theory, has appeared.
In the perspectives of every-day perceptual experience we give directly
or inferentially to the distant object predominantly a visual object-the
dimensions it assumes or will assume in a field of common distance
and contact experience. The "reality" of a visual object
is what one can see himself handling. The visual structure is dominant
and even the contact values are ordered in a visual space; but the
visual space of immediate proximity to the individual, within which
perceptual perspectives have disappeared, lies within a uniform spatial
structure coinciding with the grosser structure of contact experience.
Contact experience (107) is the "matter"
of common-sense, for it is the goal of that mediate experience within
which lie all physical objects, which are in advance of the consummations
within the physiological act, and which serve, in organisms that are
capable of manipulation, as implements for final consummations. But
the spatial structure remains visual because of the superior fineness
and exactitude of vision. All distant visual experience is symbolic,
in Berkeley's sense; but it is symbolic not of pure contact dimensions,
but of those exact dimensions which are ordered in the visual space
of our radius of manipulation. Final perceptual reality, however,
always presupposes actual or possible manipulatory contact, i.e.,
it presupposes matter.
The conduct of the individual organism does not necessarily involve
more than successful organization of distant stimuli into manipulatory
responses under the control of the visual field. That is, appropriate
conduct with reference to a distant object may take place without
the appearance of physical objects in the experience of the organism.
For a physical object in experience is not only a spatially distant
stimulus to which we respond. It is a thing which acts or may act
upon us. This experience of interaction we undoubtedly have primarily
in the pressures located in things which we feel and manipulate. The
condition for the experience may be found in the pressure of the hands
or of other different parts of the body against each other; but the
action upon us of the thing from its inside is a fundamental character
that cannot be thus accounted for.
What has just been said has two different possible settings; that
of the epistemological problem, and that of the development of the
infant's immature experience into that of the community to which he
belongs. The epistemologist has assumed that all perceptual experience
involves awareness, that is, that all of it carries a cognitive reference
to (108) a something that is not itself, and his
problem is found in the attempted identification of this cognitive
reference to a world that lies outside of the experience of the individual
with the cognition of the individual that attains its goal within
experience. The epistemologist starts, therefore, with the immediate
experience of the individual and attempts by way of this cognitive
reference to reach a world outside of the individual's experience.
The biologist and genetic psychologist, on the other hand, start with
the world which the individual enters, and undertake to show how this
world fashions the experience of the individual, and how he refashions
it. The scientist, of course, is working within the setting of the
biologist and the psychologist. In his research he must start with
a problem that lies within an unquestioned world of observation and
experiment. His problem has thrown into doubt certain features of
this world but the scientific data are established in what is not
shaken. In so far as the perceptual experience of the individual is
inadequate-falls short of objectivity-it must be possible to analyse
out of it what is not questioned and can be tested by competent observation
and experiment. This observation and experiment imply a perceptual
world not lying within the problematic area. For the scientist the
problem of knowledge does not arise until the exception appears, or
until the logical development of the structure of the world brings
with it new objects that call for reconstruction.
But while the scientist must observe, measure and experiment within
a perceptual world, the hypotheses of recent years, supported and
confirmed by experimental tests, have led to the construction of scientific
objects which have invaded the field of the perceptual object, and
seem to have made of those objects upon and among which his most accurate
measurements are carried out, a problem which his scientific doctrine
cannot ignore.
(109)
Under the doctrine of the classical mechanics, the perceptual experiences
of weight and effort were directly correlated with mass and force.
And they were continua which actually or in imagination could be subdivided
indefinitely. From the visual-tactual space of what I have termed
the manipulatory area, the here and the there, the right and left,
and the up and down of perceptual space could be abstracted and there
still was left a continuous medium, whose systems of coordinates were
subject to arbitrary change of position without affecting the validity
of mechanical laws when applied to systems of bodies related to different
coordinates. Newtonian absolute space carried with it no incongruity
when the physicist made his observations and carried out his experiments
in his perceptual world. His own system of coordinates was replaceable
by any other without affecting the value of his deductions. Imagination,
therefore, carried on indefinitely what the microscope accomplished
within its limited range. It presented as perceptual what lay beyond
the range of perception, without implying that that which it presented
was other than a fractional part of that which was perceptual. Physicists
could construct models of their hypotheses that were but the finer
anatomy of the perceptual world.
But with the theories of electro-magnetism came an analysis which
led to elements which could no longer be fractional parts of perceptual
things. Lord Kelvin sought to hold on to them, and stated that he
could not understand an hypothesis which he could not present in the
form of a model. But the lack of invariance in the Maxwell equations,
the transformations of Larmor and Lorentz by which this difficulty
was conquered, and Einstein's interpretation of the Lorentz transformations
got behind the very structure of the percept- The perceptual thing
separates space and time. It is what it is maugré time. And if it
is subject (110) to time's decay, it is the function
of science to get back to those permanent elements which persist.
The imperishable atoms of Newton possessed contents of mass which
were irrelevant to time. In the perceptual world physical things are
the preconditions of events. In the electro-magnetic world the ultimate
elements of physical things are events, for time has become an essential
characteristic of their contents. Velocities determine mass and dimensions.
The outcome, as we have already seen, is a space-time within which
events are geometrically plotted, and which should in its geometrical
configurations swallow up not only inertial and gravitational energy
but also that of electromagnetism, if the program which Einstein has
presented, after his initial success in dealing with gravitation,
is carried through to its completion.
The scientist finds himself, then, in a perceptual world within which
he can make carefully devised observations and refined measurements,
the reality of which he does not question in the face of the problem
that engages his attention. What he does question are the objects
of that world within which contradictions or discrepancies have broken
out. Abstraction from these questionable characteristics leaves him
still with perceptual objects constituting his scientific data, which
moreover will be made the test of any hypothesis that he may advance
as a solution of his problem. It is the scientific datum in the world
to which it belongs which constitutes for him the independent reality,
that reality that is independent of any hypothesis. In so far as he
recognizes that a problem may break out anywhere in experience, such
data may be said to be independent of any object or structure of objects;
but such a problem must arise in a world which will present its own
unquestioned scientific data. That is, the scientist never approaches
the world as a whole. He must cease to be a research scientist (111)
and become a philosopher before the so-called epistemological problem
can be his problem.
In the field of classical mechanics his own abstracted space and
time could be imaginatively conceived of as indefinitely divisible.
They were continua whose fractional parts made up the wholes of this
abstracted perceptual space and time. Furthermore there appeared in
perceptual experience not only volumes that were continua capable
of such divisions, but also contents of pressure and resistance that
were also continua capable of like subdivision, and were correlated
with the physical concept of mass, both as quantity of matter and
as inertia. These contact experiences occupy a critical position in
perception, since they present within the manipulatory area what is
symbolized in the distance experience. They constitute the "matter"
of the physical object promised by our distance experiences. The objects
the scientist observes, and the apparatus he handles and with which
he makes his most refined measurements, are subject to this test of
perceptual reality. The contact experience must answer to the visual
experience if the objects and their world are there. The close correlation
of mass and motion with the matter of perceptual experience, and that
of the continua of the space and time of physical science with those
abstracted from perceptual experience, made it possible without friction
or incongruity to present the scientific objects of classical mechanics
in the perceptual field of the scientist's own scientific data.
I have already referred to the profound revolution in the conception
of the physical object which the theories of electro-magnetism and
relativity have brought about. The perceptual object must be there
in order that it may endure. The perceptual object cannot be an event.
Events in the perceptual world presuppose physical things that have
locations, and material contents that are irrelevant to time. In (112)
the structure of the perceptual world space and time are inevitably
separated. A world of space-time occupied by events is no longer congruous
with the perceptual world, and the only correlation between the two
is that of logical patterns. The world of the scientist's experimental
findings cannot belong to the world to which they refer.
And there is another revolutionary phase in this most modern physical
theory. While all of our distance experience-predominantly the world
of vision-points to a reality of contact, though this is placed and
ordered in a structure in which eye and hand mutually control each
other; the universe of relativity is entirely visual, fashioned by
the mechanism of light signals. These signals, immediately directed
toward physical things, are reflected from one consentient set to
another, so that their reality is never found in any moving or resting
thing but rather in transformation formulae by which one distance
structure may be translated into another; while the ultimate space-time
to which they are referred is a texture that is so caught in its own
curvature that these distance symbols can only symbolize the logic
of symbolization. It is as though the possibility of formulating any
set of meanings in terms of any other set of meanings were used to
reduce all meanings to the mechanism of translation. Matter transferred
to distance experience becomes only a curvature of space-time.
I have already touched upon that character of the physical thing
which exhibits itself in its acting upon us and other physical things
from within itself, from its inside. This character does not appear
in the scientist's account of physical things. His statement of inertia
as the tendency of a body to remain in the state of rest or motion
in which it is found, and of force as that which is the cause of such
a state, is always in terms of velocities, accelerations, decelerations,
and their ratios to each other. It never deals with (113)
the inside of a body but only with the outside which the analysis
of the body reveals.
It is a matter of course that the things involved in the observation
of the scientist, and the apparatus of his laboratory and experiment
are not part of the uncertain field of his problem, and that they
have a reality independent of the solution of the problem. Otherwise
the problem could never be solved. For example, the actual observations
of the position of the stars about the eclipsed sun upon the negatives
and the apparatus by which these positions were measured to high degrees
of accuracy, unquestionably had a reality to the scientist upon which
he depended for his judgment of Einstein's hypothesis. His ultimate
reality is found in these carefully devised observations and experiments,
and the things there present do not fall under doubt at least until
a new problem arises which may involve these very things and the scientist's
experience of them. Then, however, he approaches the new problem with
a set of equally carefully devised observations and experiments and
the unquestioned things which these involve.
It is also true that at the other end of his undertaking when he
has assured himself of the viability of his hypothesis, and has perhaps
stated it with the finality of the geometry of a Minkowski space-time,
this finality in form has no place in his scientific attitude. He
is as ready to find a problem within this system as elsewhere in the
universe. His finality of statement is logical, that is, it is an
affirmation that the hypothesis has been brought into consistent relation
to all other pertinent findings in the world as it exists for us.
For the moment it meets the demands of what we call the facts, as
for example the Newtonian mechanics did for two centuries. Both the
factual setting of his problem and the successful dénouement of
his investigation have in the scientist's world a reality that belongs
(114) to the present, without the slightest prejudgment
as to their reality in a later present. It is only when he philosophizes
that the relation of these presents to each other becomes a problem.
It is not and cannot be a scientific problem, for it could neither
be stated nor solved by an experimental method.
If we recur to the reality of the data in the scientist's procedure,
we recognize, as I have already noted, that the data have in one sense
a longer period than the objects in terms of which they are stated.
In the case of photographs of the positions of the stars about the
rim of the eclipsed sun, these positions are stated in terms of the
changes in chemical structures on the plate. The nature of these chemical
structures, and what takes place under exposure to light, will probably
change with the development of physical science; but the relative
positions of these spots on the plate will remain unaffected by the
different nature of the plate as an object. In the same fashion relative
positions of the stars and planets can be traced in reports of the
observations of Mesopotamian astrologers, in the catalogues of Grecian
astronomers, in the recorded observations of Tycho Brahe, and in those
of Copernican astronomers. The objects these various watchers of the
sky saw were profoundly different, but it is possible to identify
in all these records the same relative positions. It would, however,
be a mistake to assume that the scientist could observe simply relative
positions, or that in the world of reality by which he tests hypotheses
such abstractions can have an independent existence. They are abstractions
from things and have reality only in the concretion of these things.
The scientist may or may not be uncertain of the nature of the stars,
but if his uncertainty were resolved, the stars would be objects in
his perceptual world whose positions he would be recording, though
the stars will presumably have another (115) nature
for later astronomers. Furthermore even in his uncertainty he must
be observing unquestioned perceptual objects-distant spots of light
and photographic plates. A world cannot be constructed from scientific
data that have been abstracted from the world within which the problem
arises. It is also true that in testing the logical consistency of
his theory the scientist carries his problem back, at least presumptively,
into the structure of those perceptual objects that his problem does
not affect, but if such objects lie outside the problem, any inconsistency
militates against the theory, not against the reality of the objects.
Now the import of this character of the scientist's method is, as
Professor Dewey has long since insisted, that the knowledge-process
lies inside of experience, and that the so-called percepts that have
not fallen under the doubt knowledge seeks to resolve are simply there,
and are affected with no cognitive character. We are not aware of
objects about us, except as we seek to reassure ourselves of their
existence, their qualities and their meanings; though any object may
fall under suspicion and so become an assured object of knowledge.
We must be able, for logical and methodological purposes, to state
things which are simply there in terms of what we do find in our cognitive
adventures.
I will not argue at length Professor Dewey's analysis of cognition,
since I am not likely to better his account of it, nor make it more
convincing to those whom he has not convinced. I should, however,
like to emphasize one feature of this experience which is called perception
even when it is applied to what is simply there apart from any attitude
of awareness on the part of the so-called percipients. This feature
is that of the distance-character of all our perceptual objects. As
I have already indicated, this experience is one which is dominated
by the head and its neural inheritance.
(116) The physical thing has arisen in experience
through the direct control of our conduct toward it in so far as it
is related to our organisms by the distance senses lodged in the head,
when this relation through the distance-senses calls out in advance
and controls manipulatory reactions toward the distant object we are
seeking or avoiding. The perceptual object answers to a collapsed
act, and if we are in doubt as to the reality of what we see or hear,
we must carry the act out to the point of actual contact. The doubting
Thomas can be convinced only by his hand. Even tactual illusion can
only be dissipated by other contacts. The world that stretches away
from our manipulatory area, especially in its perspective characters,
is most readily thrown into the cognitive field, though this never
concerns more than certain features of the world. There is always
a world of perceptual reality there which is the basis for our investigation.
It is easy therefore for the psychologist and the epistemologist with
his penny to generalize this attitude and attach awareness to all
perceptual experience. The answer to him is to be found in the location
of his doubt and the fashion in which he dispels it.
We cannot, of course, go back of the immediate experience of handling
or seeing an object. But we can state the conditions under which the
object of our manipulation and sight is there. These conditions include
not only the structure of the physical world in which the objects
are found, but also the organism which is related to it and to them.
In this sense we can follow out the reflected light as it travels
to the retina and the passage of the nervous excitation as it travels
along the optic nerve to the central tracts; and in the same fashion
we can follow out the excitation of the nerves which pass from the
skin, muscles and joints in our handling of the object.
But it is evident that this analysis takes place within a (117)
world of things not thus analysed; for the objects about us are unitary
objects, not simple sums of the parts into which analysis would resolve
them. And they are what they are in relation to organisms whose environment
they constitute. When we reduce a thing to parts we have destroyed
the thing that was there. It is no longer a table or a tree or an
animal. And even if by some process these parts should coalesce and
become the things that they were, it still remains the case that they
would not be things they were in this environment of this organism,
if they ceased to be parts of this environment. We refer to these
differences as the meanings these things have in their relationship
to the organisms. Still, these meanings belong to the things, and
are as objective as are those characters of the things that belong
to them in the environments of other organisms. The sensuous characters
are largely the same for organisms endowed with like apparatus of
sense perception; though there are always differences in these characters
due to differences in these apparatuses and to the conditions under
which the things enter into relation with the senses of the various
organisms. Other characters such as nutritiousness for an animal that
can digest and assimilate certain things, dangerousness or protection,
equally arise as objective characters when the objects enter relations
with certain organisms, and take on these meanings. Such characters
evidently emerge with the development of organisms and in their changing
experience.
Science undertakes to isolate the conditions under which these new
things arise, or have arisen. It abstracts from the peculiarities
of particular experience and seeks that which is common among as many
experiences as possible. It thus reaches things which upon the supposition
of analysis have a common reality apart from the particular experience
within which the analysed objects existed. We thus reach (118)
things that belong, to any possible experience up to the limits of
our powers of generalization. The question arises whether that which
answers to these widest generalizations escapes from experience, and
from the characters and meanings which belong to experience. Can we
in thought reach that which is independent of the situation within
which the thinking takes place? I am asking the question not from
the standpoint of the metaphysician and logician, who start with an
apparatus of thinking and a cognition that are preconditions of the
experience within which they appear; but from the standpoint of a
science that has undertaken to trace the development of thought out
of the lowliest types of behavior. If we posit a mind having an inherent
power of entering into cognitive relation with objects that are simply
there for its awareness and thought, this mind may be able to identify
things independent of the experiences of the organisms that have become
in some fashion endowed with such minds. Or we may with the idealists
transfer all environments to mind itself. But if mind is simply an
emergent character of certain organisms in their so-called intelligent
responses to their environments, mind can never transcend the environment
within which it operates. Nor can it by generalizing all possible
experiences get beyond any possible experience; for it must do its
thinking within some experience, and the meanings that arise out of
the relation of the minded organism to its environment must belong
to the object of its perception and its widest thought. It may be
claimed that an emergent evolution can not deny the possibility of
the emergence of a realist's mind, with just that power of entering
into cognitive relations with objects; the answer, however, will be
found in the natural history of mind and the study of mental operations.
Endnotes
- Cf. Meyerson, "La Déduction Relativiste," pages 61-62.
- For a much more extended discussion see Mr. Mead's essay on "Scientific
Method and the Individual Thinker" in "Creative Intelligence,"
page 176 ff.
- "Identity and Reality," page 231.
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Gordon Ward and Robert
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