Part 7 (1/2)

Before continuing, however, I wish to make certain interpretations of these statements for which, of course, Professor Cohen is not responsible, and with which he would not be wholly in agreement. My general att.i.tude will be shown by the first comment. Concepts are only means of denoting fragments of experience directly or indirectly given.

If we then try to speak of a ”nature of a thing” two interpretations of this expression are possible. The ”thing” as such is only a bit of reality which some motive, that without undue extension of the term can be called practical, has led us to treat as more or less isolable from the rest of reality. Its nature, then, may consist of either its relations to other practically isolated realities or things, its actual effective value in its environment (and hence s.h.i.+ft with the environment as Professor Cohen points out), or may consist of its essence, the ”relations within the system,” considered from the point of view of the potentialities implied by these for various environments. In the first sense the nature may easily change with change in environment, but if it changes in the second sense, as Professor Cohen remarks, it ”drops out of our system.” This I should interpret as meaning that we no longer have that thing, but some other thing selected from reality by a different purpose and point of view. I should not say with Professor Cohen that ”the same thing may present different essences in different contexts.” Every reality is more than one thing--man is an aggregate of atoms, a living being, an animal, and a thinker, and all of these are different things in essence, although having certain common characteristics. All attribution of ”things.h.i.+p” is abstraction, and all particular things may be said to partic.i.p.ate in higher, i.e., more abstract, levels of things.h.i.+p. Hence the effort to retain a things.h.i.+p through a changing of essence seems to me but the echo of the motive that has so long deduced ontological monism from the logical fact that to conceive any two things is at least to throw them into a common universe of discourse. Consequently I should part company from Professor Cohen on this one point (which is perhaps largely a matter of definition, though here not unimportant) and distinguish merely the nature of a thing as _actual_ and as _potential_. Of these the former alone changes with the environment, while the latter changes only as the thing ceases to be by pa.s.sing into some other thing. In other words, if the example does not do violence to Professor Cohen's thought, I can quite understand this paper as a stimulator of criticism, or as a means of kindling a fire. Professor Cohen would, I suspect, take this to mean that the same thing--this paper--must be looked upon as having two different essences in two different contexts, for ”the same thing may possess two different essences in different contexts,” whereas I should prefer to interpret the situation as meaning that there are before me three (and as many more as may be) different things having three different essences: first, the paper as a physical object having a considerable number of definite properties; second, written words, which are undoubtedly in one sense mere structural modifications of the physical object paper (i.e., coloring on it by ink, etc.), but whose reality for my purpose lies in the power of evoking ideas acquired by things as symbols (things, indeed, but things whose essence lies in the effects they produce upon a reader rather than in their physical character); and third, the chemical and combustion producing properties of the paper. Now it is simpler for me to consider the situation as one in which three things have a common point in things.h.i.+p, i.e., an abstract element in common, than to think of ”_a_ thing” s.h.i.+fting contexts and thereby changing its essence.

But now my divergence from Professor Cohen becomes more marked. He continues with the following example (p. 622): ”Our neighbor M. is tall, modest, cheerful, and we understand a banker. His tallness, modesty, cheerfulness, and the fact that he is a banker we usually regard as his qualities; the fact that he is our neighbor is a relation which he seems to bear to us. He may move his residence, cease to be our neighbor, and yet remain the same person with the same qualities. If, however, I become his tailor, his tallness becomes translated into certain relations of measurement; if I become his social companion, his modesty means that he will stand in certain social relations with me, etc.” In other words, we are ill.u.s.trating the doctrine that ”qualities are reducible to relations” (cf. p. 623). This doctrine I cannot quite accept without modification, for I cannot tell what it means. Without any presuppositions as to subjectivity or consciousness (cf. p. 623, (a).) there are in the world as I know it certain colored objects--let the expression be taken navely to avoid idealistico-realistic discussion which is here irrelevant. Now it is as unintelligible to me that the red flowers and green leaves of the geraniums before my windows should be reducible to mere relations in any existential sense, as it would be to ask for the square root of their odor, though of course it is quite intelligible that the physical theory and predictions concerning green and red surfaces (or odors) should be stated in terms of atomic distances and ether vibrations of specific lengths. The scientific conception is, after all, nothing more than an indication of how to take hold of things and manipulate them to get foreseen results, and its ent.i.ties are real things only in the sense that they are the practically effective keynotes of the complex reality. Accordingly, instead of reducing qualities to relations, it seems to me a much more intelligible view to consider relations as abstract ways of taking qualities in general, as qualities thought of in their function of bridging a gap or making a transition between two bits of reality that have previously been taken as separate things. Indeed, it is just because things are not ontologically independent beings (but rather selections from genuinely concatenated existence) that relations become important as indications of the practical significance of qualitative continuities which have been neglected in the prior isolation of the thing. Thus, instead of an existential world that is ”a network of relations whose intersections are called terms” (p. 622), I find more intelligible a qualitatively heterogeneous reality that can be variously part.i.tioned into things, and that can he abstractly replaced by systems of terms and relations that are adequate to symbolize their effective nature in particular respects. There is a tendency for certain attributes to maintain their concreteness (qualitativeness) in things, and for others to suggest the connection of things with other things, and so to emphasize a more abstract aspect of experience. Thus then arises a temporary and practical distinction that tends to be taken as opposition between qualities and relations. As spatial and temporal characteristics possess their chief practical value in the connection of things, so they, like Professor Cohen's neighbor-character, are ordinarily a.s.sumed abstractly as mere relations, while shapes, colors, etc., and Professor Cohen's ”modesty, tallness, cheerfulness,” may be thought of more easily without emphasis on other things and so tend to be accepted in their concreteness as qualities, but how slender is the dividing-line Professor Cohen's easy translation of these things into relations makes clear.

Taken purely intellectualistically, there would be first a fiction of separation in what is really already continuous and then another fiction to bridge the gap thus made. This would, of course, be the falsification against which Bergson inveighs. But this interpretation is to misunderstand the nature of abstraction. Abstraction does not subst.i.tute an unreal for a real, but selects from reality a genuine characteristic of it which is adequate for a particular purpose. Thus to conceive time as a succession of moments is not to falsify time, but to select from processes going on in time a characteristic of them through which predictions can be made, which may be verified and turned into an instrument for the control of life or environment. A similar misunderstanding of abstraction, coupled with a fuller appreciation than Bergson evinces of the value of its results, has led to the neo-realistic insistence on turning abstractions into existent ent.i.ties of which the real world is taken to be an organized composite aggregate.

The practice of turning qualities into merely conscious ent.i.ties has done much to obscure the status of scientific knowing, for it has left mere quant.i.ty as the only real character of the actual world. But once take a realistic standpoint, and quant.i.ty is no more real than quality.

For primitive man, the qualitative aspect of reality is probably the first to which he gives heed, and it is only through efforts to get along with the world in its qualitative character that its quant.i.tative side is forced upon the attention. Then so-called ”exact” science is born, but it does not follow that qualities henceforth become insignificant. They are still the basis of all relations, even of those that are most directly construed as quant.i.tative. Quality and quant.i.ty are only different aspects of the world which the status of our practical life leads us to take separately or abstractly. ”Thing” is no less an abstraction, in which we disregard certain continuities with the rest of the world because we are so const.i.tuted that the demands of living make it expedient to do so. Things once given, further abstractions become possible, among which are those leading to mathematical thinking, in which higher abstractions are made, guided always by the ”generating problem” (cf. Karl Schmidt, _Jour. of Phil., Psy., and Sci. Meth._, Vol. X, No. 3, 1913, pp. 64-75).

V

THE FUNCTION OF THEORY IN SCIENCE

The controlling factors for the progress of scientific thought are inventions that lead the scientist into closer contact with his data, and direct attention to complexities which would otherwise have escaped observation. This end is best fulfilled by conceiving ent.i.ties that under some point of view are practically isolable from the context in which they occur. Only too often philosophic thought has confused this practical segregation with ontological separation, and so been obliged to introduce metaphysical and external relations to bring these ent.i.ties together again in a real world, when in reality they have never been separated from one another and hence not from the real world.

Furthermore, the conceptual model, built on the lines of a calculus of mathematics, is often considered the truth _par excellence_ after the a.n.a.logy of a camera's portrait. Progress in science, however, shows that these models have to be continually rebuilt. Each seems to lead to further knowledge that necessitates its reconstruction, so that truth takes on an ideal value as an ultimate but unattained, if not unattainable, goal, while existing science becomes reduced to working hypotheses. From a positivistic point of view, however, the goal is not only practically unattainable, but it is irrational, for there seems to be every evidence that it expresses something contrary to the nature of the real. Yet scientific theory is not wholly arbitrary. We cannot construe nature as const.i.tuted of any sorts of ent.i.ties that may suit our whim. And this is because science itself recognizes that its ent.i.ties are not really isolated, but are endowed with all sorts of properties that serve to connect them with other ent.i.ties. They are only symbols of critical points of reality which, conceived in a certain way, make the behavior of the whole intelligible. Indeed, the only significant sense in which they are true for the scientist is that they indicate real connections that might otherwise have been overlooked, and this is only possible from the fact that reality has the characteristics that they present and that, with their relations, they give an approximate presentation of what is actually presented just as a successful portrait painter considers the individuality of the eyes, nose, mouth, etc., although he does not imply that a face is compounded of these separate features as a house is built of boards.

The atomic theory, for example, has undoubtedly been of the greatest service to chemistry, and atoms undoubtedly denote a significant resting-place in the a.n.a.lysis of the physical world. Yet in the light of electron theories, it is becoming more and more evident that atoms are not ultimate particles, and are not even all alike (Becker, ”Isostasy and Radioactivity,” _Sci._, Jan. 29, 1915) when they represent a single substance. Again, while there is as yet no evidence to suggest that the electron must itself be considered as divisible (unless it be the distinction between the positive and negative electron), there are suggestions that electrons may themselves arise and pa.s.s away (cf.

Moore, _Origin, and Nature of Life_, p. 39). ”A wisely positivistic mind,” writes Enriques (_Problems of Science_, p. 34), ”can see in the atomic hypothesis only a subjective representation,”[34] and, we might add, ”in any other hypothesis.” He continues (pp. 34-36): ”robbing the atom of the concrete attributes inherent in its image, we find ourselves regarding it as a mere symbol. The logical value of the atomic theory depends, then, upon the establishment of a proper correspondence between the symbols which it contains and the reality which we are trying to represent.

”Now, if we go back to the time when the atomic theory was accepted by modern chemistry, we see that the plain atomic formulae contain only the representation of the invariable relations in the combination of simple bodies, in weight and volume; these last being taken in relation to a well-defined gaseous state.

”But, once introduced into science, the atomic phraseology suggested the extension of the meaning of the symbols, and the search in reality for facts in correspondence with its more extended conception.

”The theory advances, urged on, as it were, by its metaphysical nature, or, if you wish, by the a.s.sociation of ideas which the concrete image of the atom carries with it.

”Thus for the plain formulae we have subst.i.tuted, in the chemistry of carbon compounds, structural formulae, which come to represent, thanks to the disposition or grouping of atoms in a molecule, structural relations of the second degree, that is to say, relations inherent in certain chemical transformations with respect to which some groups of elements have in some way an invariant character. And here, because the image of a simple molecule upon a plane does not suffice to explain, for example, the facts of isomerism, we must resort to the stereo-chemical representation of Van't Hoff.

”Must we further recall the kinetic theory of gases, the facts explained by the breaking up of molecules into ions, the hypothesis suggested, for example, by Van der Waals by the view that an atom has an actual bulk?

Must we point to a physical phenomenon of quite a different cla.s.s, for example, to the coloring of the thin film forming the soap-bubbles which W. Thomson has taken as the measure of the size of a molecule?

”Such a resume of results shows plainly that we cannot help the progress of science by blocking the path of theory and looking only at its positive aspects, that is to say, at the collection of facts that it explains. The value of a theory lies rather in the hypothesis which it can suggest, by means of the psychological representation of the symbols.

”We shall not draw from all this the conclusion that the atomic hypothesis ought to correspond to the extremely subtle sensations of a being resembling a perfected man. We shall not even reason about the possibility of those imaginary sensations, in so far as they are conceived simply as an extension of our own. But we shall repeat, in regard to the atomic theory, what an ill.u.s.trious master is said to have remarked as to the unity of matter: if on first examination a fact seems possible which contradicts the atomic view of things, there is a strong probability that such a fact will be disproved by experience.

”Does not such a capacity for adaptation to facts, thus furnis.h.i.+ng a model for them, perhaps denote the _positive_ reality of a theory?”

And the above principles are as true of mathematical concepts as of chemical. Everywhere it is ”capacity of adaptation to facts” that is the criterion of a branch of mathematics, except, of course, that in mathematics the facts are not always physical facts. Mathematics has successfully accomplished a generalization whereby its own methods furnish the material for higher generalizations. The imaginary number and the hyper-dimensional or non-Euclidian geometries may be absurd if measured by the standard of physical reality, but they nevertheless have something real about them in relation to certain mathematical processes on a lower level. There is no philosophic paradox about modern arithmetic or geometry, once it is recognized that they are merely abstractions of genuine features of simpler and more obviously practical manipulations that are clearly derived from the dealing of a human being with genuine realities.

In the light of these considerations, I cannot help feeling that the frequent attempts of mathematicians with a philosophical turn of mind, and philosophers who are dipping into mathematics, to derive geometrical ent.i.ties from psychological considerations are quite mistaken, and are but another example of those traditional presuppositions of psychology which, Professor Dewey has pointed out (_Jour. of Phil., Psy., and Sci.

Meth._, XI, No. 19, p. 508), were ”bequeathed by seventeenth-century philosophy to psychology, instead of originating within psychology” ...

that ”were wished upon it by philosophy when it was as yet too immature to defend itself.”

Henri Poincare (_Science and Hypothesis_, Ch. IV, _The Value of Science_, Ch. IV) and Enriques (_Problems of Science_, Ch. IV, esp.

B--_The Psychological Acquisition of Geometrical Concepts_) furnish two of the most familiar examples of this sort of philosophizing. Each isolates special senses, sight, touch, or motion, and tries to show how a being merely equipped with one or the other of these senses might arrive at geometrical conceptions which differ, of course, from s.p.a.ce as represented by our familiar Euclidian geometry. Then comes the question of fusing these different sorts of experience into a single experience of which geometry may be an intelligible transcription. Enriques finds a parallel between the historical development and the psycho-genetic development of the postulates of geometry (_loc. cit._, p. 214 _seq._).

”The three groups of ideas that are connected with the concepts that serve as the basis for the theory of continuum (_a.n.a.lysis situs_), of metrical, and of projective geometry, may be connected, as to their psychological origin, with three groups of sensations: with the general tactile-muscular sensations, with those of special touch, and of sight, respectively.” Poincare even evokes ancestral experience to make good his case (_Sci. and Hyp._, Ch. V, end). ”It has often been said that if individual experience could not create geometry, the same is not true of ancestral experience. But what does that mean? Is it meant that we could not experimentally demonstrate Euclid's postulate, but that our ancestors have been able to do it? Not in the least. It is meant that by natural selection our mind has _adapted_ itself to the conditions of the external world, that it has adopted the geometry _most advantageous_ to the species: or in other words, the _most convenient_.”

Now undoubtedly there may be a certain modic.u.m of truth in these statements. As implied by the last quotation from Poincare, the modern scientist can hardly doubt that the fact of the adaptation of our thinking to the world we live in is due to the fact that it is in that world that we evolved. As is implied by both writers, if one could limit human contact with the world to a particular form of sense response, thought about that world would take place in different terms from what it now does and would presumably be less efficient. But these admissions do not imply that any light is thrown upon the nature of mathematical ent.i.ties by such abstractions. Russell (_Scientific Method in Philosophy_) is in the curious position of raising arithmetic to a purely logical status, but playing with geometry and sensation after the manner of Poincare, to whom he gives somewhat grudging praise on this account.