Skip to main content

Necessity and classical physics

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) of these influences conveys what necessarily results from all of these influences. In this way, none of these laws excludes other influences upon what actually happens.
If we combine the above point about openness to other influences w/ Polyani's stratified notion of human action in "Emergence," in The Tacit Dimension, then we perhaps find a way out of determinism.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Dembski's "specified compexity" semiotics and teleology (both ad intra and ad extra)

Integral to Dembski's idea of specified complexity (SC) is the notion that something extrinsic to evolution is the source of the specification in how it develops. He compares SC to the message sent by space aliens in the movie "Contact." In that movie, earthbound scientists determine that radio waves originating in from somewhere in our galaxy are actually a signal being sent by space aliens. The scientists determine that these waves are a signal is the fact that they indicate prime numbers in a way that a random occurrence would not. What is interesting to me is the fact that Dembski relies upon an analogy with a sign rather than a machine. Like a machine, signs are produced by an intelligent being for the sake of something beyond themselves. Machines, if you will, have a meaning. Signs, if you will, produce knowledge. But the meaning/knowledge is in both cases something other than the machine/sign itself. Both signs and machines are purposeful or teleological

continuing the discussion with Tim in a new post

Hi Tim, I am posting my reply here, because the great blogmeister won't let me put it all in a comment. Me thinks I get your point: is it that we can name and chimps can't, so therefore we are of greater value than chimps? Naming is something above and beyond what a chimp can do, right? In other words, you are illustrating the point I am making (if I catch your drift). My argument is only a sketch, but I think adding the ability to name names, as it were, is still not enough to make the argument seem cogent. For one can still ask why we prefer being able to name over other skills had by animals but not by humans. The objector would demand a more convincing reason. The answer I have in mind is, to put it briefly, that there is something infinite about human beings in comparison with the subhuman. That "something" has to do with our ability to think of the meaning of the cosmos. Whereas one might say"He's got the whole world in His han

particular/universal event/rule

While listening to a recorded lecture on Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism, it occurred to me that every rule is in a way, a fact about the world. Think about baseball: from the p.o.v. of an individual player, a baseball rule is not a thing but a guide for acting and interpreting the actions of others.  But this rule, like the action it guides, is part of a concrete individual --i.e., part of an institution that has come into existence at a particular place and time, has endured and  may eventually go out of existence.  The baseball rule, as a feature of that individual, is likewise individual.  The term "baseball rule," on the one hand, links us to a unique cultural event; it can, on the other hand, name a certain type of being.  In this way, it transgresses the boundary between proper and common noun. If there were no such overlap, then we might be tempted to divide our ontology between a bunch of facts "out there" and a bunch of common nouns "in here.&qu