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An Existentialist’s Homework Assignment

Thursday, January 19, 2012

What does Nietzsche mean by the phrase “God is dead” as announced by his character of the “Madman” (PN pp.95-6)? (15 points)

Nietzsche’s madman as described as someone walking through the “market place” with a lantern looking for God is an allusion to Diogenes of Sinope (412-332BC). Diogenes was the founder of the School of Cynicism, and is famous for searching for a virtuous man in the market place, and espousing ascetic ideals. The God that Nietzsche refers to is the Christian notion of God because of the prevalence of this religion during his time (and location). Around this God were built meaning in life, and morality. Influential Christian thinkers espoused the idea that pursuing truth would lead to knowledge of God.

By the phrase that “God is dead”, Nietzsche is saying that “the belief in the Christian God has ceased to be believable” [The Portable Nietzsche, Pg. 447]. This statement is spoken from the madman, who is an allusion to Diogenes – a cynic ascetic who persistently, but without success searched for a virtuous man in the marketplace – who symbolized Christian ideals (he personified the ascetic ideal). The symbolism of the madman suggests that Christian ideals can’t find God anymore.

Recall that with the assumption that God existed, a meaning in life and basis for morality were built. Christian morality gave meaning to the ascetic ideal as a means to purify oneself. However, Christian ideals also led followers to pursue truth – truth and reason being the basis of the development of science. Since science undermines the existence of God, but the pursuit of science led one to search for truth, then one can say that God has thrown man into nihilism – the idea that we can’t find value in morality that does not lie in God. New meaning for asceticism or any actions taken on a moral basis must be found.

What was the cause of God’s “death”? (10 points)

At base, the reason for God’s death is “Christian truthfulness”. Nietzsche is saying that from the quest for truth and ability to reason, a body of science developed that could explain the nature of reality without requiring [the Christian] God as the causa prima/causa efficiens/causa sui: “the belief in the Christian God has ceased to be believable” [The Portable Nietzsche, Pg. 447]. Religion killed the God around which it was built.

Put differently, considering the dominance of Christianity in his time (and location), “God” was posited as an explanatory metaphysical principle – an inference to the best explanation to the nature of reality. With the rise and development of exact sciences that decreasingly required invocations of the “God” concept with increasingly more reasonable explanations for the nature of reality, Nietzsche is saying that the concept of “God” as a necessity for explanation became superfluous (even if it is more accurate to say that the concept of “God” was only becoming decreasingly valuable). “We have killed him–you and I” [The Gay Science (section 125)], and in Nietzsche’s words:

““Christian morality itself, the concept of truthfulness taken more and more strictly, the confessional subtlety of the Christian conscience translated and sublimated into the scientific conscience, into intellectual cleanliness at any price.” … All great things bring about their own destruction through an act of self-overcoming. … After Christian truthfulness has drawn one inference after another, it must end by drawing its most striking inference, its inference against itself.” Genealogy of Morals, Pg. 160-161, #27

Why does Nietzsche say that “We have killed him [God] – you and I” (PN p.95); i.e., how, or in what sense, did “we” do this? (5 points)

Taking “we” as a reference to the European society within which he lived, by “We have killed him—you and I”, Nietzsche is saying that the culture turned in on itself: what drove the culture to search for truth (belief in God) was what eventually led them to the devaluation of the reason (God) that the search was first pursued.

Influential Christian thinkers found that “God” explained the nature of reality. Consider:

“Faith (in God) seeks, and understanding (reason) finds” St. Thomas Aquinas

St. Thomas Aquinas said that God gave us a sense of him, and we use the reason he gave us to find who/what God is – attempt to provide proofs of the existence and nature of God. But Nietzsche is saying that it is this “Christian conscience” (of finding truth to understand God) that “sublimated into the scientific conscience”. It is ironic: in attempting to “find” God, we killed it. (Again, it is still controversial whether the current state of science can disprove the existence of God, let alone the state of science in Nietzsche’s time. We can say with certainty that science calls into doubt the religious view of reality.) In short: we killed God by constructing science, reason, empirical measurement. Reason once led us to the ontotheological idea of God, but now undermines belief in God.

Why does Nietzsche have his Madman announce God’s “death” to atheists (i.e., “to those who do not believe in God”)? (10 points)

Nietzsche announces God’s “death” to atheists to illustrate fully the discord in society: God is abandoned and that is accepted (as there are atheists), but all that had been built around belief in God, all of the consequences of assuming God’s existence are seemingly intact:

“In the main, however, this may be said: the event itself is much too great, too distant, too far from the comprehension of the many even for the tidings of it to be thought of as having arrived yet, not to speak of the nothing that many people might know what has really happened here, and what must collapse now that this belief has been undermined-all that was built upon it, leaned on it, grew into it; for example, our whole European morality…” The Portable Nietzsche, Pg 447.

Through the use of atheists, he is pointing out that time is required before society realizes that their moral centre is gone, and that a new basis for morality and meaning of life is required. In particular, that the hand by which we killed God (i.e. science) cannot replace it as it only provides the answers to “how”, but not “why”. (Although, in Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, game theory as used in a model of explanation for altruistic behaviour at the organism-level seems sufficient to me for understanding why society wouldn’t fall into absolute chaos without a moral compass in God, even if absolute good/evil is still abandoned.) His presumption is that science doesn’t have a say in what is right/wrong, and doesn’t provide an answer to why we exist.

What is the connection between Nietzsche’s idea that “God is dead” and his idea of “nihilism”? (10 points)

Starting from the assumption that God existed, European society built (1) a meaning of life, and (2) morality. Christianity posited a heaven and a hell, and propounded values that gave meaning to (3) Ascetic ideals.

Since science undermines presumption of existence of god, all that relied on that assumption (1, 2, 3 above) is also thrown out. (That is, if they are to be retained, then it would need to be for different reasons, and on a different basis.) If nihilism is Idea that we can’t find value in morality that does not lie in God, then science has thrown society into nihilism. The “highest values” are at once devaluated: god, Truth, Morality, and Divine Justice.

Nietzsche is saying that since it was the concept of God that led to the development of science, then it was God that threw society into nihilism (both active and passive forms).

Twitt

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What demarcates science from non-science?

Thursday, January 19, 2012

(This is a paper I wrote for some class or other several many years ago.  I didn’t like it back then, but thought I’d post it anyway.)

What is the essence of science, and what makes it successful? A survey of 20th century history of the philosophy of science will provide a full array of answers to these questions, spanning the spectrum of antirealist opinions, as well as touching on realist opinions. In Theory and Reality, Peter Godfrey-Smith introduces a framework to tackle these questions that consists of what he calls three “rival” perspectives regarding the “success” of science:

1. An Empiricist Approach. Science is an accumulation of knowledge through experience, and the success of science is from the reliance of our ability to refine our observational tools.
2. Mathematics and Science: Science is successful because of its use of mathematical tools and models to understand the world.
3. Social Structure and science: Science is successful because of its social structure which consists of Scientific Societies, Journals for peer review, and Research Programs.

There is so much strength in each of these positions that in his The Trouble with Physics, Lee Smolin looks to Paul Feyerabend’s anarchic abandon for comfort: that there are no general rules or descriptions and there cannot be any general rules of descriptions that define successful scientific practice. Demarcation between what is scientific and what is not cannot happen. This differentiation between what is and what is not science is considered the Problem of Demarcation. As discussed by Karl Popper, the differentiation is a methodological one. As discussed by Kuhn, science evolves in a cyclic fashion through paradigm shifts, so that any such distinction is vague. For Nancy Cartwright, the practice of science is the development of a patchwork of models – both mathematical and not – that need not correspond to reality. According to Cartwright, in fact the laws of physics are never true except in highly idealized situations that never “exist”. This paper will consider the three ‘essences’ of science propounded by these three philosophers with consideration of 20th century physics for a determination of the accuracy of their accounts for the success of science.

Karl Popper’s Conjectures and Refutations

In his paper entitled Conjectures and Refutations, Karl Popper propounds his philosophy of science. For Popper, science is progressive through a continuous cycle of conjectures and refutations based on outcomes of crucial experiments, and his demarcating criterion is his principle of falsifiability. In particular, if a conjecture is such that it can be falsified in principle, i.e. that a crucial experiment can be devised where the outcome would decisively show that conjecture to be “true” or “false”, then it is science. In this sense then, Popper’s science is based on methodology. Although, it is questionable as to whether he believed that complete knowledge was attainable. His philosophy only explicitly stated that scientists only gather conjectures with increasing “corroboration”.
On this view, good scientific practice involves the immediate abandon of “falsified” conjectures. From a practical standpoint, this has neither been practiced, nor is it practicable. Taking a look at 20th century physics, one will find a long list of counterexamples:

Feynmann Double-Slit Experiment.

Although Popper eventually said that a scientist need not abandon a conjecture immediately upon evidence against it, he did not have an unambiguous answer as to how long to wait. In the case of the Feynman Double-Slit Experiment for electrons, the outcome of this experiment shows that sometimes the result of what is considered a ‘crucial experiment’ neither decisively corroborates nor refutes a conjecture. In this experiment, an electron gun double-slit experiment was devised to determine the nature of the electron. If an interference pattern was observed on the screen, then the electron must be a wave. If a regular distribution is observed, then it must be a particle. The results of this experiment were such that even when one electron was “shot” at a time, an interference pattern was observed on the screen. This would imply that it is a wave. However, when the set-up is altered to determine which slit the electron is going through, the interference pattern collapses, and a regular distribution is observed, so as to indicate that electrons are particulate. In this case, the crucial experiment as devised by Feynman was not “decisive”. It did not lead to a clear “refutation” of the particle/wave theory of the nature of the electron.

The Bohr Model of the Atom.

The case of the Bohr model of the atom is an example of a model that is still in use because of its usefulness for calculation, but that has been shown to be false. The Bohr model of the atom consists is akin to the planetary model: a nucleus being ‘orbited’ by electron(s). With the knowledge of the wave-nature of the electron, Louis de Broglie developed a model of the atom with the electron as standing waves that surround the nucleus. However, for consideration of phenomena such as of spectral lines, the Bohr model, although not “true”, is more useful for making calculations. Similar to cases like these are Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation: we learned from Einstein that gravity is not a “force” but a result of the curvature of space due to the presence of matter. In spite of this, Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation as a model is more easily applicable for simple calculations.

The Uncertainty Principle.

Mathematically, this states that the product of the uncertainty in location and the uncertainty in momentum of an object must always be greater than or equal to h/2π (where h=Planck’s Constant). The consequences of the statement are profound. They include: (1) that there are limits to our ability to know what is really going on in the world, (2) there is no such thing as a passive observer. But for the sake of this essay, it is important to mention because Popper’s philosophy of science makes no use of the “Principle”. This principle is not falsifiable in principle: no one has yet determined even a thought experiment that could potentially show this to be false. Yet, it is not abandoned as an example of bad science.

Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

In The Structure, Thomas Kuhn argued for a paradigmatic view of science: normal science is characterized by consensus and adherence to a paradigm. Science goes through cycles: chaos, normal science, anomaly, crisis, revolutionary science. His primary example is the development of physics from what he calls the Aristotelian paradigm to that of Newtonian mechanics, and finally to the Einsteinian one: there is incommensurability between paradigms, and each paradigm outlines the central beliefs of the scientific community at that period of time within that particular field (in this case, broadly speaking, physics). This was one of the biggest upsets for philosophers of science because, as Imre Lakatos believed, it reduced the practice of science to non-rational judgements.

His philosophy of science was strict, such that only one paradigm could dominate a field at any given time, and that normal science was characterized by consensus within that field, and particularly that it is this consensus that drives the success of science. What about research programs? Twentieth century physics is filled with competing research programs that have propounded what can be considered successful results.

Here are some examples:

Antimatter: Dirac vs. Feynman.

On the existence of anti-matter, both Dirac and Feynman has mathematically equivalent theories, but different models for understanding. Dirac’s model of antimatter appeals to a visualization of a positron as the anti-electron. Feynman’s model does not appeal to the positron as a separate entity from the electron: he views it as an electron moving backward through time. Since they are mathematically equivalent, it is only the interpretations that differ. Why does this matter? Kuhn argued that development and success within a given paradigm required consensus. Here we see competing camps, with similar success. They need not view the world in the same way to build on their models.

Quantum Theory: Heisenberg vs. Schrödinger.

Similar to the comparison between Dirac and Feynman on antimatter, in the 1920’s, Heisenberg and Schrödinger each developed mathematically equivalent quantum theory models. Unlike the discussion on antimatter, however, the understanding was similar. Divisions between the two camps were ideological. Heisenberg’s Matrix mechanics reduced quantum phenomena to the purely “observable” (i.e. to wavelengths, and intensities of spectral lines). Schrödinger’s Wave mechanics as a description of quantum mechanics appeal to a duality in the nature of the electron. As an illustration, consider Schrödinger’s Cat Paradox, in which he considered the cat 50% alive AND 50% dead at the same time. It is the action of opening the box that collapses the probability wave.

Neglecting the philosophical issues surrounding the rationality of theory choice, we can see that Kuhn’s portrayal of science was far too simple to account for twentieth century physics. Perhaps, at best, it could only best apply to outdated traditions.

Nancy Cartwright’s Do the Laws of Physics Lie?

The current figure in the philosophy of science is Nancy Cartwright, and her view that the laws of physics are never “true”, in the sense that they are only applicable to idealized situations. She makes a distinction between scientific models and scientific theories, and claims that truth lies in a patchwork of scientific modelling. The more true a law becomes, the less explanatory it becomes because of the additional stipulations required to make it so. One of her prime examples is that of Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation which states that the force of gravity exerted between two bodies is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Nancy is at issue with the situations under which such a law is applicable: (1) the masses of the two bodies must be considered point-masses, (2) the law is limited to two bodies. Her question is simply: When does a situation like this ever exist? The more additions made to a law to make it applicable to reality, she says, the more it loses explanatory power. Consider the following models drawn from twentieth century physics:

Spacetime. Discussion on the Special Theory of Relativity introduced the speed of light, c, as a conversion factor for the measure of time: to change the units of the measure of time from seconds to meters. Now with a 4-dimensional model of the universe, visualization becomes impossible. We can devise mnemonic devices to facilitate understanding, set-up comparisons with 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional worlds, but this not the same as “understanding” or “visualizing” time as a fourth dimension. The mathematics of the model work, but conventional understanding is lost.
Wave-particle duality. This is a return to the discussion of quantum mechanics. Schrödinger’s Wave mechanics call for a probabilistic view of electrons and photons. The reality of an electron is every possible situation simultaneously, until the probability cloud is “collapsed”. This is not something that can be visualized, and so not something that is understood in a conventional sense. The implementation of the model is to facilitate computation more than understanding.

Nancy Cartwright does not appeal to the establishment of scientific laws as Popper does for the development of science. The success of science is carried out through the ‘patchwork of models.

Conclusion

Lee Smolin’s appeal to Paul Feyerabend’s philosophy that ‘anything goes’ seems like the only answer to the question of the essence of science that can account for the practice of twentieth century physics. But this is hardly satisfying. To say that there is no absolute eternal essence to science leaves the door open to include anything as science. This is crucial because, as Imre Lakatos puts it:

“The problem of demarcation between science and pseudoscience has grave implications also for the institutionalization of criticism. Coopernicus’ theory was banned by the Catholic Church in 1616 because it was said to be pseudoscientific. It was taken off the index in 1820 because by that time the Church deemed that facts had proved it and therefore it became scientific. The Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party in 1949 declared Mendelian genetics pseudoscientific and had its advocates, like Academician Vavilov, killed in concentration camps; … The new liberal Establishment of the West also exercises the right to deny freedom of speech to what it regards as pseudoscience, as we have seen in the case of the debate concerning race and intelligence…The problem of demarcation between science and pseudoscience is not a pseudo-problem of armchair philosophy: it has grave ethical and political implications.”

As regards what makes science successful, this is also constantly changing. Nancy Cartwright has put forward the argument that it is a patchwork of scientific models that comprise successful scientific practice. This account is the best descriptive formulation for current practice in physics. This is not to say that there are not useful normative elements of Popper’s and Kuhn’s philosophies. In spite of Popper’s philosophy’s inadequacy in determining decisive criteria for theory choice, his Conjectures and Refutations still describes a useful methodology to theory choice and research. Thomas Kuhn’s theory advocates the validity of there being a subjective nature to theory choice.

Returning to the three ‘rival’ perspectives introduced by Peter Godfrey-Smith of what science is and what makes it successful, twentieth century physics seems to leave the answer as indeterminate. The role of experimentation in physics has developed so greatly that the image of doing arm-chair physics is incomplete. Mathematics provides models for science, it also serves as tools for science, but it does not explain an idea, and it does not develop experimental techniques. Finally, the social structure of science accounts for all of the actual activity that exists in the formal fields of science. It is hard to imagine these three being rivals because out of all of the examples taken from twentieth century physics, it appears that all three descriptions of the enterprise of science together account for its success.

//

Endnotes

Godfrey-Smith, Peter. 2003. Theory and reality : An introduction to the philosophy of science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pg.8
Smolin, Lee. 2006. The trouble with physics : The rise of string theory, the fall of a science, and what comes next. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. Pg. 290-295
Philosophy of science : The central issues1998. , eds. J. A. Cover, Martin Curd. 1st ed. ed. New York: Norton. Pg. 2-9
Philosophy of science : The central issues1998. , eds. J. A. Cover, Martin Curd. 1st ed. ed. New York: Norton. (Cartwright)
Philosophy of science : The central issues1998. , eds. J. A. Cover, Martin Curd. 1st ed. ed. New York: Norton. Pg. 2-9
Philosophy of science : The central issues1998. , eds. J. A. Cover, Martin Curd. 1st ed. ed. New York: Norton. Pg. 2-9
Philosophy of science : The central issues1998. , eds. J. A. Cover, Martin Curd. 1st ed. ed. New York: Norton. Pg. 10-19
Godfrey-Smith, Peter. 2003. Theory and reality : An introduction to the philosophy of science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pg.8 — Look up lakatos’ comment in godfreysmith’s book about not liking kuhn’s philo.
Godfrey-Smith, Peter. 2003. Theory and reality : An introduction to the philosophy of science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pg.201
Godfrey-Smith, Peter. 2003. Theory and reality : An introduction to the philosophy of science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pg.201
Philosophy of science : The central issues1998. , eds. J. A. Cover, Martin Curd. 1st ed. ed. New York: Norton. Pg. 26

Bibliography

Philosophy of science : The central issues1998. , eds. J. A. Cover, Martin Curd. 1st ed. ed. New York: Norton.
Bowler, Peter J. 2005. Making modern science : A historical survey, ed. Iwan Rhys Morus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Godfrey-Smith, Peter. 2003. Theory and reality : An introduction to the philosophy of science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Greene, B. 2003. The elegant universe : Superstrings, hidden dimensions, and the quest for the ultimate theory. New York: Vintage Books.
Hawking, S. W. 1990. A brief history of time : From the big bang to black holes. New York: Bantam Books.
Lightman, AlanP. 2005. The discoveries : Great breakthroughs in twentieth-century science. 1st. Canadian ed. ed. Toronto: A.A. Knopf Canada.
Smolin, Lee. 2006. The trouble with physics : The rise of string theory, the fall of a science, and what comes next. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.

Twitt

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Existentialism

Saturday, November 12, 2011

Intro

In his Will to Power, and Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche diagnosed the modern problem of nihilism. He proposed the Overman as a response to this problem as a general framework of what a new meaning for life would be. But the Overman is not a full response – It is more of an open call for answers. In the twentieth century, the existentialisms of Sartre and Frankl provide attempts to establish new bases for the meaning of life: one a philosophical perspective, the other a psychological one. In this paper, we will describe Nietzsche’s problem of nihilism, explicate Sartre’s and Frankl’s existentialisms, examine how the existentialisms of Sartre and Frankl are responses to Nietzsche’s articulation of nihilism, and decide if either/both are sufficient.

The Problem of Nihilism as Articulated by Nietzsche

Starting from the assumption that God existed, European society built a meaning of life. Christianity posited a heaven and a hell, and propounded values that gave meaning to life; a Christian God that dictated the nature of good and evil. Since science undermines presumption of existence of god, a meaning of life that was based on God had to also be thrown out. That is, if the meaning of life was to be retained at all, then it would need to be for different reasons, on a different basis. If nihilism is the idea that we can’t find value in morality that does not lie in God, then science has thrown society into nihilism. The “highest values” of Christianity are at once devaluated: god, Truth, Morality, and Divine Justice. Nietzsche is saying that since it was the concept of God that led to the development of science, then it was us that threw ourselves into nihilism. To Nietzsche, society could respond in one of 2 ways: passively or actively. To respond passively meant to ignore the problem, or give up on life in its wake – it is pessimistic, and hedonistic. Active nihilism referred to viewing this epiphany as a challenge: as an opportunity to find new meaning. He advocated the active form of nihilism.[1]
In particular, he put forth The Overman as an answer to the ultimate meaning in life. He considered the current man a ‘bridge’ between beast and Overman.[2] There are four possible interpretations of what Nietzsche meant by “the Overman” for the meaning of life:

1. The Evolutionary Interpretation
The Overman will become both slave and master moralities. He challenges us to live dangerously[3] as the preparatory men paving the way for the Overman. This is a progressive development of a higher type of man.

2. A Higher Type of Human Being
Man must create this higher form of human being; “synthesize” the positive qualities of both the Noble and Slave moralities[4]. In this interpretation, the Overman is one who knows a highly spiritual happiness, not the escapist happiness of the last man. One that is akin to the happiness of the Noble man as a true embracing of life and reality the way it is. This man embraces asceticism, but only the positive qualities: self-observation, self-discipline, self-restraint over instincts, master of oneself, self-conquering, and intelligent, self-reflecting, self-understanding. In particular, to be like the “Roman Caesar” with Christ’s soul – a complete synthesis of positive qualities of Noble and Slave moralities. This is all still ambiguous. Sometimes he says that these are the qualities of the overman; sometimes that this leads to the overman. He also doesn’t fully explain what he means by ‘spiritual’. He says that the overman is ‘spiritual’.

3. A Higher Class/A New Type of Aristocracy
The Overman is a new class/ caste in society,[5] with the ‘Overmen’ at the top because they are suited to be at the top. The mediocre are at the bottom because they do not strive for more. It is important to note that there is ambiguity even in this interpretation with regard to the purpose of the “last man”. In some places he says they’re worthless; in others he indicates that they’re necessary for the Overman to develop[6].

4. A Higher Type of Man, Not Realized
In this interpretation, man is always “overcoming” himself. The Overman is an ideal as yet unattained, but can be through a constant process of self-transcendence, self-overcoming. He can’t say exactly what form the overman takes, but says that if we are going to overcome ourselves, it would involve self-overcoming; otherwise we wallow in the meaningless existence in the face of nihilism. Perhaps he’s vague or conflicted about his accounts precisely because he believes that it is up to us to bring it about.

Sartre`s Existentialism

Sartre provided an answer of sorts to Nietzsche’s modern problem of nihilism with his existentialism. It is based on the idea that “existence precedes essence”[7]: we make our own choices/choose our actions, and this defines who we are, our “essence”. This is all embedded in our particular “facticities” – the contingent facts about our existence that we do not choose. The world that we’re thrown into constrains and opens possibilities for being. Meaning in life is defined by us in on this basis: we do not ask what the meaning of life is, rather it asks us.[8]
Sartre’s existentialism also provides a description of his morality as an analogy between it and art[9]: there is nothing established about it. Each individual case must be considered. What are brought out by our actions are our values[10]. He say that we, as radically free, self-determining beings, make decisions that express our values, where our values are chosen by us. For Sartre, even not-choosing is a choice so that “what is impossible is to not choose.”[11] Insofar as we are free, self-determining freedom thrown into the world, even if we consider objective values it doesn’t always help us. We simply make a decision, and it can be based on something not “rational” – our feelings – because we must decide. This is not to say that morality is something capricious.
For Sartre, the existentialist is opposed to the view that seeks to suppress God “at the least possible expense”[12], and accept a priori the way of life as if God existed. That is, to accept Christian morality a priori in spite of the fact that it was based on a premise that is no longer considered ‘true’: the existence of the Christian God. Sartre wants to say that this doesn’t mean that we choose selfishly: when we choose, we affirm the value that contributed to that choice. Values are subjectively chosen, but have universal applicability. For example, when we choose a over b, then we are affirming that value. In so doing, we are implicitly painting a picture of what humanity should be in our minds. In a choice, there is an implicit universal image of humanity that is being affirmed. Because we can only be who we are in an inter-subjective world, and since I find “others” in this collective being, then I should always take others into consideration in the choices that I make in the world. That is, we should ask “What would happen if everyone did so?” Our choices should reflect the idea of “What if everyone did so?” – Would it make sense? This is not to say that there is a script on how to do this.

Frankl`s Existentialism

Meaning in life, for Frankl is something that is determined by the individual: man is responsible for his being[13]. Life may give us ideas, meaning, fulfilment, and purpose, but meaning in life is determined at each moment. You are responsible for creating meaning in your life. His response is at a practical level. To Sartre’s point that our life is a life-long project, Frankl also sees this as a constant/always changing life-long project of creating yourself. “at any moment, … man must choose what must be the monument of his existence[14]” Frankl says that we need to recognize that we all make mistakes, and that moving on from them is a healthy response; that this way we stay in control of how we respond to life. This is, to Frankl, an empowering thought. He articulates three ways of discovering meaning:
1. Creating a work or doing a deed[15] to make any struggle to reach your goal worthwhile.
2. Experiencing something or encountering someone
3. The attitude we take towards unavoidable suffering: adopting a tragic optimism

Suffering becomes bearable when we find a meaning for it. He describes this as “maintaining a tragic optimism” in the fact of the “tragic triad” of pain, guilt, and death.[16] We can choose to respond to the tragic triad by:
 Turning suffering around into something positive by finding redemptive qualities from it.
 Deriving from guilt a lesson: the opportunity to change oneself for the better
 Deriving from life’s transitoriness an incentive to take responsible action

He sees this as empowering to the individual; as an “aha! experience” in understanding or recognizing the existential vacuum as source of noodynamics[17]. How we choose to perceive a particular situation is like a Gestalt experience: we take responsibility for taking the steps to change the situation. “Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time”[18] is Frankl’s Maxim of Logotherapy. Reflect on your current situation, and shed some insight into a mistake you make now, and make a decision now before we make a bad choice. This is similar to Sartre’s doctrine, in which we have say and create our own lives and well-being where If we recognize opportunities to change ourselves/our lives for the better, then we take responsibility for taking concrete steps to reach that goal, and we create meaning for our lives on that practical level.

Sartre & Frankl: Response to Nietzsche’s Articulation of Modern Nihilism

Nietzsche’s meaning in life is based on his concept of the Overman, and it is an objective ‘super-meaning’ that would apply to everyone. In all four interpretations of it given above, it is found to be either vague or ambiguous. At no point does he unequivocally define the term. The only definitive character that the Overman is given is that he goes beyond ‘good and evil’; that is, his sense of morality is not based on Christian morality. We are even unsure as to whether he means that the Overman is attainable for all humanity (#1 or #2), or a class in society (#3), or an ideal that is sought after (#4). This aside, Nietzsche’s meaning in life is defined as achieving/becoming (depending on your interpretation) the Overman. We know that the Overman ‘goes beyond good and evil’, as just described. Therefore we know that for Nietzsche, part of the meaning in life involves striving to embody a sense of morality that goes beyond good and evil.
Sartre and Frankl want to say that meaning in life is determined only on an individual basis. There is no objective meaning. Both also have a conception of morality that is intertwined with their conceptions of the meaning of life. Both also expound similar views on choice, freedom, self-determination, and responsibility for man:

Choice. The individual has to make the choice[19] at every moment, because what’s not possible is not to choose.[20] Man constantly makes a choice among the massive number of potentialities.

Freedom. For both Sartre and Frankl, we are always free to choose how we respond[21]. Back to Sartre, we can’t choose our “facticity”, our “thrownness” into existence. It defines our potentials, and limits. However, even within our constraints, we have freedom to choose how we respond to life. Sartre’s “Neurotic fatalism” is a concept that denies our freedom – This he refers to as “Bad Faith”. For example, consider someone who has a bad temper: bad faith is blaming a bad temper on our biological constitution. Sartre says that we still have the ability to choose how we respond. It is a freedom to take a stand against the conditions that you’re in.

Self-Determination. For Sartre, man determines himself, as he creates himself. Man is always determining in every moment what his existence will be. This has the consequence that every human being has the ability to change at any instant.[22] Frankl says something like this in his example of Dr. Jay, a satanic figure who chose to become a different person. This is a dramatic example to illustrate his conviction that we choose who we are, and can always choose differently. Man is both potentialities within himself. What he becomes is his decision.[23]

Responsibility. This refers to who and what we are. Without a God, both Frankl and Sartre believe that only we can determine ourselves, and only we can be responsible for who and what we are. For Sartre, who and what we are is our “essence”. We create ourselves: our life is our project, and it is our responsibility to create it. “Thus to life he can only respond by being responsible.”[24]

Nietzsche said that confronting the problem of nihilism actively means that we have to acknowledge these realities described by Sartre and Frankl. That is, that man is a free, self-determining being that is responsible for all of his actions and choices is a direct consequence of there being no God. This is Nietzsche’s “active nihilism”. Sartre’s and Frankl’s existentialist is a man who dares to “live dangerously”, or wind up being a ‘last man’. That is, if there were an omnipotent, omniscient being such as the Christian God who was responsible for everything we do, then free will wouldn’t be possible, nor would we be responsible for our actions. (i.e. there is someone else to blame for all of the pain and suffering we experience – God.)

Both of their outlooks regarding meaning in life are individual – they require that each person determine for his/herself a meaning in every moment. In this sense, neither Sartre nor Frankl address Nietzsche’s question of the meaning of life. They both answer the question: why do we do something in particular in a given instant? And Nietzsche wants to know why it is that we live and continue living? In Frankl’s words:

“The super-meaning – This ultimate meaning necessarily exceeds and surpasses the finite intellectual capacities of man; in logotherapy, we speak in this context of a super-meaning. What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms.”[25]

Nietzsche wanted man to find a super-meaning to life. However, if one lives by Sartre’s or Frankl’s interpretations of morality, then one begins to “goes beyond good and evil” and “live dangerously” in Nietzsche’s senses of the words. For example, consider Albert Camus’ Meursault, the protagonist in The Outsider, as an expression of Sartre’s existentialism. His actions and words brought to life those of a free, self-determining being responsible for his actions. Was there ever a better illustration of the empowerment endowed to one who so clearly accepted the truth of there being no God? He accepted life’s challenge, and in being Sartre’s existentialist, for Nietzsche he was able to go “beyond good and evil”. Recall his words to the priest at the end of his life, in jail awaiting executive for committing an act he knew he very well could have not done:

“He seemed so certain of everything, didn’t he? And yet none of his certainties was worth one hair of a woman’s head. He couldn’t even be sure he was alive because he was living like a dead man. I might seem to be empty-handed. But I was sure of myself, sure of everything, surer than he was, sure of my life and sure of the death that was coming to me. Yes, that was all I had. But at least it was a truth which I had hold of just as it had hold of me. I’d been right, I was still right, I was always right. I’d lived in a certain way and I could just as well have lived in a different way. I’d done this and I hadn’t done that. I hadn’t done one thing whereas I had done another. So what? It was as if I’d been waiting all along for this very moment and for the early dawn when I’d be justified. Nothing, nothing mattered and I knew very well why.”[26]

In an indirect and unintentional way then, such as Frankl’s paradoxical intention[27] whereby one achieves a particular outcome by not striving for it, through living the life prescribed by Frankl’s and Sartre’s moralities, as illustrated by Camus through Meursault, one finds oneself “paradoxically” (in Frankl’s sense) “becoming” (in Nietzsche’s) the Overman in a combination of the 3rd and 4th interpretation(s) as described above. Well, this works if we, say, assume that “becoming” the Overman would undoubtedly include adopting his sense of morality.

Concluding Words

We looked at the path laid out by Nietzsche for a meaning in life, how it involved a basis in morality and an attitude towards life, and the question that arises from modern nihilism – i.e. what is the meaning of life? We looked at Sartre’s and Frankl’s existentialisms and saw how similar they are, and how they serve as responses to Nietzsche’s question. We found what may not be satisfying – that through Frankl’s paradoxical intention, by living the life of Sartre’s existentialist, one can be characterized as one who ‘goes beyond good and evil’, which happens to be the morality that was prescribed by Nietzsche to be inherent in the Overman. However, I am assuming that in adopting certain characteristics of Nietzsche`s Overman that it necessarily means that one is on track to become the Overman. This isn’t necessarily true. Then again, nor is the fact that the Overman, in all of its vagueness (and/or ambiguity, depending on your interpretation of it) provides the meaning of life. But it is believable. Then again, the question posed was whether Sartre’s and/or Frankl’s existentialisms respond to Nietzsche’s question. And that, I hope, has been answered.

Bibliography

Camus, Albert. 1961. The outsider. Harmondsworth [England]: Penguin Books.
Frankl, Viktor Emil. 1984. Man’s search for meaning. Rev. and updated. — ed. New York: Washington Squares Press.
Kaufmann, Walter Arnold. 1975. Existentialism from dostoevsky to sartre,. rev. and expanded. — ed. New York: New American Library.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. 1989. On the genealogy of morals, eds. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Walter Arnold Kaufmann. Vintage Books ed. ed. New York: Vintage Books.
———. 1982. The portable nietzsche, ed. Walter Arnold Kaufmann. New York: Penguin Books.
———. 1968. The will to power, eds. Northrop Frye, Walter Arnold Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books.

________________________________________
[1]Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche.On the genealogy of morals, eds. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Walter Arnold Kaufmann. Vintage Books ed. ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1989) Pg. 160

[2] ———. The portable nietzsche, ed. Walter Arnold Kaufmann. (New York: Penguin Books, 1982) Pg 124

[3] ———. The portable nietzsche, ed. Walter Arnold Kaufmann. (New York: Penguin Books, 1982) Pg 124

[4] Walter Arnold Kaufmann, Existentialism from dostoevsky to sartre, (New York: New American Library, 1975) Pg. 463

[5]———. The portable nietzsche, ed. Walter Arnold Kaufmann. (New York: Penguin Books, 1982) Pg 645

[6] ———. The portable nietzsche, ed. Walter Arnold Kaufmann. (New York: Penguin Books, 1982)
Pg. 463-464

[7] Walter Arnold Kaufmann, Existentialism from dostoevsky to sartre, (New York: New American Library, 1975) Pg.
Pg. 353

[8] Walter Arnold Kaufmann, Existentialism from dostoevsky to sartre, (New York: New American Library, 1975) Pg.
363

[9] Walter Arnold Kaufmann, Existentialism from dostoevsky to sartre, (New York: New American Library, 1975) Pg.363-364

[10] Walter Arnold Kaufmann, Existentialism from dostoevsky to sartre, (New York: New American Library, 1975) Pg.354

[11] Walter Arnold Kaufmann, Existentialism from dostoevsky to sartre, (New York: New American Library, 1975) Pg.
363

[12]Walter Arnold Kaufmann, Existentialism from dostoevsky to sartre, (New York: New American Library, 1975) Pg.352

[13] Viktor Frankl. Man’s search for meaning. Rev. and updated. — ed. (New York: Washington Squares Press, 1984)
Pg. 133

[14]Viktor Frankl. Man’s search for meaning. Rev. and updated. — ed. (New York: Washington Squares Press, 1984)
Pg. 131-132

[15]Viktor Frankl. Man’s search for meaning. Rev. and updated. — ed. (New York: Washington Squares Press, 1984) Pg. 97

[16]Viktor Frankl. Man’s search for meaning. Rev. and updated. — ed. (New York: Washington Squares Press, 1984)
Pg. 161

[17]Viktor Frankl. Man’s search for meaning. Rev. and updated. — ed. (New York: Washington Squares Press, 1984)
Pg. 169
[18] Viktor Frankl. Man’s search for meaning. Rev. and updated. — ed. (New York: Washington Squares Press, 1984)
Pg. 131-132

[19] Viktor Frankl. Man’s search for meaning. Rev. and updated. — ed. (New York: Washington Squares Press, 1984)
Pg. 128

[20] Walter Arnold Kaufmann, Existentialism from dostoevsky to sartre, (New York: New American Library, 1975) Pg. 143
[21]Viktor Frankl. Man’s search for meaning. Rev. and updated. — ed. (New York: Washington Squares Press, 1984)
Pg 153

[22] Walter Arnold Kaufmann, Existentialism from dostoevsky to sartre, (New York: New American Library, 1975) Pg.154
[23] Viktor Frankl. Man’s search for meaning. Rev. and updated. — ed. (New York: Washington Squares Press, 1984)
Pg. 157

[24] Walter Arnold Kaufmann, Existentialism from dostoevsky to sartre, (New York: New American Library, 1975) Pg. 131

[25] Viktor Frankl. Man’s search for meaning. Rev. and updated. — ed. (New York: Washington Squares Press, 1984) Pg. 141

[26] Albert Camus. The outsider. (Penguin Books, 1961) Pg. 115

[27] Viktor Frankl. Man’s search for meaning. Rev. and updated. — ed. (New York: Washington Squares Press, 1984) Pg. 150

Twitt

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Description of the P=NP Problem

Thursday, October 14, 2010

This problem has to do with whether a certain class of hard-to-solve problems, designated NP-Complete, can be reduced to fast-to-solve problems, designated P.   Both NP-Complete and P problems belong to NP, a set of problems for which any given solution can be verified quickly.

The time it takes to find a solution for a problem varies for reasons beside the fact that they are dealing with differently sized inputs.  The set of P problems are known to be solved within a time proportional to the size the input; this makes them ‘fast-to-solve’. On the other hand, NP-Complete are characterized by the fact that the fastest known solutions to them take time proportional to an exponential function. In solving them, we usually can’t be more clever than by checking every possible solution in sequence. Thus the time required to solve these problem increases very quickly as the size of the input grows.  It grows so quickly, in fact, that solving a problem with a moderately large input can take the billions of years, using any amount of computing power available today.

A property of NP-Complete problems is that all problems within the set can be transformed to all the other problems within the set, making the problems in NP-Complete essentially reworded versions of each other. Thus if we could find a way to solve one problem quickly (i.e. reduce it to a P problem), we can solve them all quickly (and show P=NP).

A reason for the belief that P ≠ NP is that after 30 years of research, no one has been able to find a polynomial-time algorithm for any of more than 3000 important known NP-complete problems.

//

The purpose of the assignment was to explain the problem in general terms and explain its importance for the general public.

After receiving a poor grade on this, I followed up with the following email:

“Hi,

I know my explanation for the belief that P doesn’t equal NP is terse and I know I could have elaborated more but I think that ultimately, it really is the only answer. To take one example, consider cryptography. Billions of dollars worth of assets are protected by encryption protocols that are in essence NP-Complete problems. Because P!=NP is not proven, inductive reasoning (i.e. no known solutions to NP-Complete problems exist) and intuition (it doesn’t ‘feel’ like there will be solution) are the only reasons why so much trust is placed on those protocols. Further, NP-Complete problems are found across the entire spectrum of math and science. The fact that so many smart people from disparate fields of study (NP-Complete problems are found in physics, chemistry, biology, cryptography, mathematics, computer science) could not find one solution since the problem was formulated three decades ago is what ultimately lets a multi-national bank trust its assets to some encryption method.”

…to which he retorted that I should have included these points in the first place.

In my defense, there was a cap based on word count, and I made cuts where I felt appropriate.  I guess I was wrong.

Twitt

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The Problem Of Induction

Sunday, June 27, 2010

The problem of induction was introduced by David Hume (1711-1776) and started with the question of whether or not induction is justified. This is a genuine concern since predictions about the unobserved/future that are derived from experience are made through inductive inference, and are not deductively closed arguments (i.e. not a priori knowledge).

To illustrate the problem, let us begin with the following example:

In my experience, all F’s are G’s, and no cases of F’s have been found to not be G’s.

I arrive at the general statement that “All F’s are G’s” through inductive reasoning.

Is this generalization “justified”?  It is immediately clear that the generalization does not necessarily follow from the premise, since it is not arrived at deductively (that is, it is not entailed).  So it appears that we take a leap from premise to generalization when we reason inductively.

Upon careful examination of the above example, the generalization can be justified by the apparent “Uniformity of Nature”, as discussed by Bertrand Russell in The Problems of Philosophy, Chapter VI.  ”The belief in the uniformity of nature is the belief that everything that has happened or will happen is an instance of some general law to which there are no exceptions.”  Herein lays the problem: uniformity of nature is a premise that can only be arrived at inductively, so it cannot be used to justify inductive reasoning.  It is a circular argument.

//

P. F. Srawson attacks this problem from a linguistic standpoint, claiming that the question of whether or not induction is justified is nonsensical.  He says that it is “the absurd wish that induction should be shown to be some sort of deduction.”  His argument is illustrated as follows:

To be rational is to use induction and deduction.

Deductive and inductive reasoning are mutually exclusive.

The word “deductive” describes closed arguments that lead to a priori knowledge.

Deductive propositions are therefore either valid, or invalid on the basis of being either justified or not justified.

The word “inductive” describes the reasoning that leads to degrees of belief that are supported by experience.

So, questions such as “Is there reason in believing in deductive arguments?” and “Are inductive arguments justified?” have no meaning for Strawson.

//

Karl Popper attempts to show that “the belief that we use induction is simply a mistake. [...] The whole apparatus of induction becomes unnecessary once we admit the [...] conjectural character of human knowledge.”  He discards induction with his notions of the following:

1. Although we cannot employ induction to acquire a necessary truth, we can necessarily conclude the falsity of a generalization with falsifying evidence, and this is purely deductive.

2. Laws arrived at inductively were based on “unconscious, inborn expectations” or “scanty material, i.e. the few observed instances upon which the law may be based.”

He proposes that conjectures (hypotheses) are arrived at arbitrarily, either through myths, or inborn expectations, and that testing (trying to find refutations) is how one arrived at conjectures with (degrees of) corroboration, as opposed to inductive inferences with (degrees of) probability.  So, he discards induction, but only to appeal to it in different terms.

//

Neither attack of the problem is satisfying.  No one said it better than Russell when he said that “we must either accept the inductive principle on the ground of its intrinsic evidence, or forgo all justification of our expectations about the future.”  And all the while philosophers who attack this problem tragically become Kierkegaard’s Knights of Infinite Resignation: afraid and too calculating to take the leap that they miss the point.

___________________

Postscript:

This was my first assignment after returning to school after an extensive hiatus . This means it was written around.  It’s just a short little ditty, and I stumbled upon it while going through my old class notes.  I was awarded a 90%, and a comment regarding my criticism of criticisms on the problem of induction.  I don’t think the T.A. who marked it appreciated that I called people in his profession Kierkegaard’s Knights of Infinite Resignation. I was hoping he’d get a kick out of it.

Twitt

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The Indispensability Argument

Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Colyvan described the Indispensability argument as “the best argument for Platonism.”  Its basic structure, as per Colyvan:

    We ought to have ontological commitment to all the entities that are indispensable to our best scientific theories.  (Confirmational Holism)
    We ought to have ontological commitment to only the entities that are indispensable to our best scientific theories.  (Naturalism)

———————————————————————————————————–

    (Premise1) We ought to have ontological commitment to all and only the entities that are indispensable to our best scientific theories.
    (Premise2) Mathematical entities are indispensable to our best scientific theories.
    ———————————————————————————————————–
    (Conclusion) We ought to have ontological commitment to mathematical entities.

Field objects to Premise2.  His argument has two parts.  The first is that mathematical theories don’t have to be true to be useful, they need only be conservative. Conservatism refers to this result: if A is a consequence of T (a scientific theory) + M (Mathematics), then A would be a consequence of T alone (Brown, pg58).  Mathematics is a useful tool, but it is not indispensable.  The second part of Field’s program is to demonstrate that our best scientific theories can be suitably nominalised. By nominalising a portion of Newtonian gravitational theory, he attempts to show that there is no need to assert the existence of mathematical entities in a scientific theory. This is not trivial example – the hope is this example can represent the greater case of all scientific theories.

Field’s objection does strike the Indispensability argument with a good blow.  However, as noted by Brown (pg. 59), “the notion of logical consequence that is needed is that of second-order logic” which is not recursively axiomatizable.  This means that the notion of consequence is not “nominalistically acceptable” since it involves being true in all models.  Also, if Maddy’s program pans out, then Field’s objection is irrelevant.

Twitt

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Ontology of the Atom

Monday, December 14, 2009

Realism vs. Anti-Realism and Models of The Atom

Introduction

Did physicists believe in the reality of their atomic models? To answer this question, one has to look first at what it means to say that one ‘believes in the reality’ of something, and then also understand what is meant by a scientific ‘model’.  (From this point forward, I will refer scientific realism and scientific anti-realism as “realism” and “anti-realism”, respectively.)  “Discerning the aims of physical theory has been an important goal since the Greeks, with realist rather than positivist or instrumentalist views dominating at one time or another.”[i] “For nearly all practicing scientists—not all, to be sure—realism is an unequivocal commitment, rarely reflected upon very deeply.  Science, according to this view, is not merely another cultural activity, not simply fashion or metaphor, not simply an alternative way of viewing the world.  The success of science, its efficacy, its law-giving character—indeed the “progress” of science—clearly distinguishes it from other, no less important, areas of human inquiry.”[ii] The realist makes two claims:

  1. “Scientists ought to seek to formulate true theories that depict the structure of the universe…[and oppose] instrumentalists…who sought to restrict science to the “saving of appearances”.[iii]

and

  1. “The record of progress indicates that the universe has a structure (largely) independent of human theorizing and that our theories have provided an increasingly more accurate picture of that structure.”[iv]

There are other forms of realism, such as Entity Realism as propounded by Ian Hacking, and Structural Realism by John Worral, that are weaker versions of the realist position.  They don’t require that all of scientific practice aims for and attains truth and knowledge of reality in itself, and that the development is science is progressive.  They just pick out parts that could be so – such as putative entities, and structures.  Anti-realism can take many forms, but at the very least an anti-realist “seek(s) to uncouple the notions of predictive success and truth.”[v] Instrumentalism is a form of anti-realism that says that “scientific theories are calculating devices that facilitate the organization and prediction of statements about observations. [...] Theories are merely “useful” or “not useful”.”[vi] Bas Van Fraassen is a Constructive Empiricist which is a form of Instrumentalism, and he maintains that the goal of science is to “formulate empirically adequate theories… [not to] … establish the truth of claims about theoretical entities.”[vii] Models can be both realist and anti-realist.  They “have two main functions in physics: they may be proposed either as putatively true representations of the physical characteristics of the objects treated by some theory, or as purely imaginary devices, heuristic fictions (a formal model).”[viii] In either case, whether proposed as putatively true or as a heuristic device, models are suggestive.

In the case of the atom, there was a full range of ontologies that were adopted by practicing physicists.  Developments in the nineteenth century culminated in the development of electromagnetic field theory with Maxwell, and statistical mechanics with Boltzmann.  These two physicists were realists – they believed that their models of the atoms mapped onto reality.  They did have opposition among their contemporaries, such as anti-realist Ernst Mach.  Mach was an anti-realist about unobservable entities.  He had a positivistic approach to the science, and since physical theory during their time did not require the existence of the atom, he did not adopt belief in it.  As regards twentieth century physics, following the Quantum Revolution, there were two main interpretations of Quantum Mechanics that provided models for interpretation of the mathematics, and consequently the atom.  However, following the Solvay Congress in October 1927, the Copenhagen Interpretation as given by Bohr and Heisenberg came to dominate as the most accepted one.[ix] In my paper, I will argue that the question of the ontological status of the atom changed from “does it exist at all (Maxwell/Boltzmann)?”  to a question of “given the atom, what is its nature?” (Bohr/Heisenberg).  Particularly, that there was a shift after 1905 from realist to antirealist attitudes towards the ontological status of the atom.

Nineteenth Century Atomism

Positivist thought “began to be felt at the end of the nineteenth century, promoted by Comte, the Vienna Circle, and the scientist-philosopher-historians such as Pierre Duhem and Ernst Mach.”[x] And this made sense because “before atomic theory became firmly established, and when physics could study only macroscopic phenomena, mechanical models and speculative hypotheses about underlying structure could be counterproductive.  A theory might fail because of such a model, while a macroscopic model only had to describe or reproduce the phenomena.”[xi] “In a loose sense, the distinction between dynamists and mechanists was one between positivists and realists, even though the ideas are not equivalent.  A positivist essentially sees the aim of physical theory as economically summarizing empirical results: as the Greeks saw it, “saving the appearances.”  No mechanical hypotheses are introduced that are not justified by what is observable.  The realist, of course sees the entities introduced to explain the experimental results as objectively real.  The mechanist, in trying to explain the properties of matter on the basis of the nature of its smallest parts, often has recourse to entities that are not accessible to observation.  In some cases entities may ultimately be observed and become part of the empirical world; in others they may disappear from the literature or survive only as heuristic elements.  In some cases, of course, the entities are not intended to be real and serve only as analogy, as an aid in reasoning.  This is sometimes the case in Maxwell’s use of models, which included elements that he never claims to exist fully.  Yet this is no doubt of Maxwell’s commitment to the reality of the molecular vortices on which much of theory of electromagnetism was based.”[xii]

James Clerk Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann were realists.  They “did believe in the [realty of their atomic] model(s), particularly in [...] the molecular vortical model.”[xiii] Their collaboration led to the development of a model of the atom where “the particularly simple properties of a molecular model, according to which the molecules are point masses (thus not hard sphere) which interact with a repulsive force inversely proportional to the fifth power of their distance.”[xiv] Their model was visualizable, and was explainable within the current paradigm.  With a visualizable model, they were able to use of analogy to guide their investigations.  “The role of analogy in nineteenth-century physics [...]was used deliberately and self-consciously by some of the most important scientific figures of the time, especially [...] Maxwell.  Indeed, Maxwell not only used a method of physical analogy with great success but also speculated extensively about it, especially the question of whether analogies in the natural world or the human mind. [...] Maxwell employed mechanical models to whose reality he was committed in differing degrees at different times.”[xv] As for Boltzmann’s commitment to his atomic model, in a letter, he wrote: “The realist compares the assertion that he could never imagine how the mental could be represented by the material let alone by the interaction of atoms with the opinion of an uneducated person who says that the Sun could not be 93 million miles from the Earth, since he cannot imagine it.  Just as the ideology is a world picture only for some but not for humanity as a whole, so I think that if we include animals and even the Universe the realist mode of expression is more appropriate.”[xvi]

Twentieth Century

Philosophical positivism was evident in the late nineteenth century practice of physics in the opinions of such physicist/philosophers such as Ernst Mach, and his rejection of atomism.  However, it was the operationalist character of quantum ontology of Neils Bohr’s in the twentieth century that also reflects philosophical positivism.[xvii] An operationalist says that “it is the operations by which values are assigned that give empirical significance to a scientific concept.”[xviii] “Though they were verbally opposed to several theses of the positivism of the philosophers [in the Vienna Circle], the physicists of the Copenhagen School, for their part, built up a quantum mechanics in which certain lines of reasoning when followed closely suggested … rather similar views.”[xix] And although it was not the only interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, following the Solvay Congress of 1927, the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics was the dominant one.

As stated, Bohr was a positivist.  He took an instrumentalist’s viewed toward his atomic model.  He was “extremely cautious.  He believe(d) that the models of atomic structure have some realistic significance, but he is acutely conscious of the negative analogy of the models; indeed he doubts whether a complete, realistic model of atomic processes is obtainable. [...] His own anti-realism was inspired by his commitment to Machian positivism. [...] Models help us to construct theories which enable us to explain and predict the course of our sensory experience.  Highly successful models may owe their success to the fact that they faithfully represent at least some aspects of the real entites which lie beneath the appearances.  … We ought not to put too much  faith in the realistic performance of models.”[xx] In a letter to Hoffding, he very tellingly wrote:

“The question of the role of analogy in scientific investigations which you stressed is undoubtedly an essential feature of every study in the natural sciences, even if it does not always stand out.  It is often quite possible to make use of a picture of a geometrical or arithmetical sort which covers the problem in question in such a clear way that the considerations almost acquire a purely logical character.  In general, and particularly in some new fields of research, one must however constantly keep in mind the obvious or possible inadequacy of the picture, and , so long as the analogies make a strong showing, be content if the usefulness or rather fruitfulness in the area they are used is beyond doubt.  Such a state of affairs holds not least from the standpoint of the present atomic theory.  Here we are in the peculiar situation that we have gained some information about the structure of the atom which may safely be considered just as certain as any of the facts of natural science.  On the other hand we meet with difficulties of such a profound nature that we cannot see any way of solving them; in my personal opinion these difficulties are of such a kind that they scarcely allow us any hope of carrying through in the atomic realm a description in time and space of the kind that matches our ordinary sense impressions.  In these circumstances one must naturally bear in mind that one is operating with analogies, and the point, that the areas of use of these analogies in the individual case are restricted, is of decisive importance for progress.”[xxi]

He wrote this during the decline of his original atomic model, which was already being found to be flawed.

Bohr and Heisenberg’s model Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics depicted the atom as no longer visualizable.  In this interpretation, there is no quantum world that exists independently of our observation.  The observer and observed are inseparable, and that to make a measurement is to define the operation performed in making that measurement.  All that is knowable is what you observe, and what you observe is affected by your action of making the observation.  In adopting instrumentalist views toward their atomic model, they acknowledged the failures of using a model for visualization.  This sort of limitation of a model is analogous to the failures of using a tesseract or hypercube as a 3-dimensional representation of a 4-dimensional object.  Where some useful inferences can be drawn, there may also be ones that fail simply because the model failed.

Concluding Remarks

Nineteenth century and twentieth century physics had entirely different climates.    We’ve looked at nineteenth century realists, and twentieth century instrumentalists, but “there is no single scientific method that [was] applicable in all fields and at all times or to both theorists and experimentalists”[xxii] There were nineteenth century anti-atomists such as Pierre Duhem and Ernst Mach and twentieth century realists such as Einstein.  But there was definite change in attitude with the Quantum Revolution.  Older texts wrote of the way that “independent reality refuses to tell us what it is – or what it is like – it at least condescends to let us know, to some extent, what it is not.  It does not conform to the classical schemes of mechanics, of atomistic materialism, or of objectivist realism – in short, to any variant of ‘near realism’.[xxiii] And textbooks on twentieth century physics stress that “most [scientists] assign a more modest goal to physics, and to knowledge in general.  Science, they say, (and ordinary knowledge as well) is indissolubly linked with human experience.  Once and for all it must therefore give up the unattainable goal of describing whatever some thinkers may mean when they speak of ‘reality in itself’ or ‘reality as it really is’.  The task of science can only be a description of the phenomena, that is, of things, events and so on, as they are organised by human collective experience.”[xxiv]

It was the kinetic theory of gases that changed the ontological status of the physical atom from speculation to reality, and “the understanding of atomic and molecular spectra achieved by the 1860’s and 1870’s, which made possible the use of spectroscopy in chemical analysis, went far toward bridging the gap between the two manifestations of the microscopic structure of matter.  The final resolution came only with a detailed theory of atomic structure, which had to wait for…the quantum revolution.”[xxv]

“But for the most part, the nineteenth century ended the [...] debates about the microscopic structure of matter and provided convincing proof of the reality of the atoms. [...] Models of the internal structure of the atom were being seriously proposed. [...] Some would say that the final blow to the opponents of atomism was Einstein’s 1905 paper on Brownian motion, which showed that it was due to the motion of molecules.”[xxvi] “It is not too much to say that the great revolution in twentieth-century physics—the quantum theory—owes its birth to atomism, not merely in the strict historical sense but because the nineteenth-century success of the corpuscular theory prepared the way for the discontinuities and quantization that lie at the heart of quantum theory.”[xxvii] In this way, we can say that the realist attitudes of Maxwell and Boltzmann paved the way for the instrumentalism of Bohr and Heisenberg that were to come.

Bibliography

Bowler, Peter J. 2005. Making modern science : A historical survey, ed. Iwan Rhys Morus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Buchwald, J. Z. A Brief History of Electric and Magnetic Science (unpublished)

Cassidy, David C. 2008. Beyond uncertainty : Heisenberg, quantum physics, and the bomb. New York: Bellevue Literary Press.

Cercignani, Carlo. 1998. Ludwig boltzmann : The man who trusted atoms. New York: Oxford University Press.

Espagnat, Bernard d. 1989. Reality and the physicist : Knowledge, duration, and the quantum world. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Great experiments in physics : Firsthand accounts from galileo to einstein(1987). In Shamos M. H. (Ed.), . New York: Dover Publications.

Kevles, D. J. (1978). The physicists : The history of a scientific community in modern america. New York: Knopf.

Kragh, H. (1999). Quantum generations : A history of physics in the twentieth century. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Losee, John. 1980. A historical introduction to the philosophy of science. 2d ed. — ed. London: Oxford University Press.

Murdoch, Dugald. 1987. Niels bohr’s philosophy of physics. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Purrington, R. D. (1997). Physics in the nineteenth century. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Wilson, David. 1983. Rutherford, simple genius. London: Hodder and Stoughton.

[i] Purrington, Pg. 19

[ii] Purrington, Pg xi

[iii] Losee. Pg. 253

[iv] Losee. Pg. 253

[v] Losee, Pg. 254

[vi] Losee, Pg. 257

[vii] Losee, Pg. 257

[viii] Murdock, Pg. 74

[ix] Kragh, pg.212-215

[x]Purrington, g. 7

[xi] Purrington, Pg. 21

[xii] Purrington, Pg. 22

[xiii] Purrington, Pg. 67

[xiv] Cercignani, Pg. 199

[xv] Purrington, Pg. 28

[xvi] Cercignani, pg 174

[xvii]Purrington, g. 7

[xviii] Losee, Pg. 160

[xix] D’Espagnat, Pg. 200

[xx] Murdoch, pg 76-77

[xxi] Murdoch, pg 76

[xxii] Purrington, Pg xii

[xxiii] D’Espagnat, Pg. 208

[xxiv] D’Espagnat, Pg. 232

[xxv] Purrington, pg. 131

[xxvi] Purrington, pg. 131

[xxvii] Purrington, Pg. 131

Twitt

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