The Human Question

Newton's third law (that every action has an equal and opposite reaction), seems to me to describe two aspects of the same whole, for the action and reaction occur during at the same time. Our ability to note how two things are contemporaneously interrelated via this third law totally belies Hume's crude conception of antecedent/consequent events as the only knowledge we can have of causality. (On the other hand, a Humean can object that this law is an example of superimposing a mathematical conception of objects [which involves a kind of simultaneity] onto the data of experience.) If they are simultaneous, however, then why do we call one the "action" and the other the "reaction"? Such language misleads us into imagining that one occurs before the other. The answer might be that in our experience, one of the two things exerting equal and opposite forces usually seems to initiate the process: e.g., when I run on a track, I initiate this process, even thoug

To push is to push toward, to pull is to pull away from. Pushing and pulling are originally given in a cognitive/affective/operational whole. The push and pull of physics is an abstraction from this original giveness.

If Newtonian physics is necessitarian, the it is not the necessity that one finds in the relationship between two sides of an equation expressing a law of nature, for no concrete material thing is entirely determined in its movement by the forces encompassed in a single natural law. Rather, each concrete movement is the result of a composite of forces, each of which is describeable by a law. In this way, each law is an abstraction: none of them describes entirely on its own the process that actually transpires in nature. And in this way, no law on its own says what must happen. Rather, each law tells part of the story of why what does occur happened in the way that it did. That is, laws describe the natural influences on movement rather than necessities of nature. Or rather, the necessity that laws do convey is of how things necessarily influence each other. But since none of these influences excludes other influences, it follows that none of the laws describing any one (or partial)

F=MA expresses a simultaneously changing relationship between different variables. There is a kind of causal relationship between them. An increase in mass causes a decrease in acceleration (where force is constant). But it is not the sort of cause and effect described by Hume. Rather, it is an interrelation between two aspects of the same whole... more like per se causality as described by Aristotle rather than Humean characterization of causality as essentially a relation between antecedent and consequent events. In this way it is ironic that Hume sought to emulate Newton by identifying a psychological analog to universal gravitation.

Infinite regress arguments are all over the place, not just in old fashioned places, like Aquinas's first way. In fact, Galileo's proposal that an already-rolling marble rolling down an infinitely long flat and frictionless plane would continue to do so infinitely... is an infinite regress. But it is by thinking of such infinite regresses that we come up with many novel concepts, insights.

To say that a car is presently going 60mph is usually to say a counterfactual: one who says this means that if it did travel for an hour (even though it hasn't yet done so), then it would have traversed 60 miles. And this counterfactual goes beyond what has been experienced. For the measured speed in question is really the disposition to go 60 miles in an hour. But a disposition as such is beyond the reach of an empiricist. We simply don't sense "60mph": rather, we interpret something as having a disposition to traverse a certain distance. This interpretation, in going beyond experience, is just as metaphysical as causality, for like causality, disposition goes beyond experience in interpreting it.

The conventional story of physics is that natural place was a naive teleological notion that was replaced in classical physics. But aren't the purported examples of movement toward natural place (air going up and water going down, etc.) examples of the tendency to seek equlibrium? And isn't equilibrium a kind of telos in classical physics? Or perhaps not just a telos but the telos?