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