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Tim Gwinn wrote: I
re-read p. 10 and I see nothing to change my mind. On the contrary, even section
3G is entitled "Entailment in the Ambience: Causality". That to
me says it all. And, later in that section:
"In this way, entailment relations between phenomena are subsumed under the
general framework of causality."[LI p.57, ital. orig.],
Also from page 57:
Robert Rosen wrote: "As philosophers have pointed
out for millennia, all we perceive directly are our selves, together with
sensations and impressions that we normally interpret as coming from "outside"
(i.e., from the ambience), and that we merely impute, as properties and
predicates, to things in that ambience. The things themselves, the noumena, as
Kant calls them, are inherently unknowable except through the perceptions the
elicit in us; what we perceive as phenomena, which are to an equally unknowable
extent corrupted by our perceptual apparatus itself (which of course also
sits partly in the ambience).
We can simplify things somewhat if we ask the more
restricted question: is there any kind of entailment at the level of phenomena?
Or, stated otherwise: does it appear to us that a phenomenon can entail another?
The problem is still difficult, because entailment at this level is a relation
between phenomena (just as inferential entailment is a relation between
propositions), and we usually do not directly perceive relations. Indeed, a
relation between phenomena depends on a double imputation: the first from
sensation to phenomena, the second from phenomena to relations between them,
Thus, if our knowledge of phenomena is already once removed from the ambience,
any talk of entailment, or any other kind of relation between phenomena, is
twice removed. On top of all of this is a further problem, that what we perceive
is only a sample of what we could perceive and the problems of induction arising
therefrom; see section 2C above.
It goes without saying that most of us can adduce
the most compelling, convincing subjective evidence for believing that, and
acting as if, there are indeed entailment relations between phenomena. But the
question is rife for rampant skepticism; despite the combined efforts of
countless philosophers, there is no way to entail the existence of such
relations from anything else (i.e., from anything in the internal world of the
self, or anything that the self draws from, or imputes to, the ambience). To
such a skeptic, indeed, there is little to distinguish science from paranoia
(which is basically a search for, or a belief in, entailments that are in some
sense not there).
[In my copy of Life, Itself, I wrote a comment in the book, at
this point, long ago. It reads: "Funny, Dad!"]
Nevertheless, it is hard to believe, for instance,
that we could use natural language, in its semantic role of bringing external
referents inside, if there were not a great many phenomenal entailments;
semantic language by its very nature impute hordes of entailments to the
ambience, without going really dramatically astray. For this, and similar
(albeit subjective) reasons, we will suppose that relations of entailment do
indeed exist between phenomena; the question then becomes not whether, but when,
such relations hold.
It was, of course, Aristotle who associated the
notion of entailment between phenomena with the question "why?" and answered it
with a "because". Indeed, the pair consisting of the question "why A?" and the
answer "because B" precisely asserts an entailment of A by B, and hence, an
explanation of B in terms of A. In this way, entailment relations between
phenomena are subsumed under the general framework of causality. To the extent
that science is the study of entailment relations between phenomena, Aristotle
correctly identified science with the study of "the why of things" and
scientific explanation with the elucidation of causal
sequences.
Historically, Aristotle elaborated his view of the
causal categories in terms of human artifacts (i.e., statues, goblets, houses)
rather than in terms of animate or inanimate nature or in terms of formalisms.
Nevertheless, as we have seen, his analysis holds good wherever there are
relations of entailment of any kind, even in the world of formal systems, where
entailment means inference. Accordingly, his analysis also applies to the world
of natural systems that populate the ambience; as we shall see abundantly later,
it permeates the whole of contemporary science, though in such a shrunken and
distorted form that it takes a special effort of retrieval to make it
manifest.
We shall thus accept this view, that entailment
relations can exist between phenomena and that their study comprises
causality; hence science and causality are to that extent
synonymous."
As I said before; causality is how science gets at entailment
relations. It is our only avenue for learning about them. Until some phenomenon
is generated by them, how can we possibly even perceive them? Thus causality
("what happens") is what we study. But we study it to learn about the underlying
entailments. Do you see?
Judith
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