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methodological openness, models, equations, naturalism as dreaming, closed system, agency as model of causality equations

Natural science involves equations and models. Equations involve an apparent completeness that imitates the completeness of mathematics: 2+2=4 doesn't seem to need any clarification. There doesn't seem to be some new truth that will undermine it either: in fact it really seems necessarily true. Models, however, are analogies with the sort of causal relations that we find in the prescientific lifeworld. And in that life world, human agency is, as it were, the prime instance of causality. Billiard balls are not.  But inasmuch as the models used in science are parasitic of human agency(albeit in a good way), they include some characteristics that look quite different from equations. They don't even seem to have the sort of clarity that equations at least seem to have. And they involve dependence on other, unmentioned factors, a dependence that can be forgotten when staring at equations. And of course, they involve striving, purpose, satisfaction. Such characteristics are indispensable to scientific models: we say, for example, that atoms "try" to fill their outermost shell. Such characteristics, inasmuch as they involve incompleteness and striving, also involve an openness to more. And (making a logical leap--but I hope not an altogether ungraceful one) so should the scientist: he should never think his theory is a complete explanation anymore than he might think that this or that human being is complete. Nor should metascientific statements suggest that nature is a closed system. One who issues such a statement is focusing on the mathematical side of the study of nature. He is, as it were, squinting his eyes a certain way so that he does see some features of nature while leaving out others. And the one who is so thoroughly leaves out some factors that he is convinced of naturalism might be described as dreaming, for his eyes seem closed.

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