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With regard to the thoughts recently brought by Judith, I consider it pertinent to copy an
article written by Hilary Lawson. I don’t know how to attach an archive
to the list, so excuse me the length of the post. On Sun, 21 Mar 2004
Tim Gwinn writes about a “…book entitled Closure: A Story of Everything by Hilary Lawson
(Routledge, 2001). After reading this, I find the
ideas presented therein to be very enlightening and persuasive. I also find
that they are consonant with Rosennean complexity in a very deep way, such that
I feel it has opened up and broadened my understanding of complexity and its
pervasiveness greatly.” Stephen Hawking is wrong. By Hilary Lawson The
notion that we might uncover the nature of the world through a combination of
careful observation and logic goes back to the inception of the scientific
project. It was the dream of the Enlightenment and it could even be said that
this vision has defined modern western culture. A motivating and liberating
force, it has given us a sense of progress, a sense that unlike previous
cultures and other societies we are on the road to truth. Nevertheless, it is
profoundly mistaken. In the
closing pages of A Brief History of Time Stephen Hawking took a sideswipe at
contemporary philosophy, arguing that it has been reduced to an analysis of
language. In his haste to dismiss philosophy he allowed himself to misunderstand
not only language but the nature of the world. Hawking makes the simple error
of assuming that the world and our descriptions of it might be one and the
same. In our descriptions of the world we divide it into things: trees and
houses, people and events, stars and planets, atoms and molecules. But the
world is not a thing or a combination of things, for these categories-these
closures, as I call them-are the outcome of our descriptions. Instead, the
world is open and it is we who close it. Through our closures we grasp the
openness of the world as things, and out of these things we build stories and
models through which we are able to intervene. But these stories and models are
not the world, nor could they in principle come close to being the world. The world
does not come pre-packaged and divided into its parts. We are not in a cosmic
supermarket identifying cling-wrapped items of reality. Instead we find
ourselves in openness, and in order to make sense of it, to have some means of
intervening to certain effect, we realise closure. We do not form our closures
in a vacuum. We find ourselves in a network of linguistic closures already
realised and handed down by our culture from generation to generation. As
biological organisms, we are already set up, through evolution, to generate
certain types of sensory closure. These biological and cultural systems of
closure have been adopted because they prove useful, not because they are true. Current
theories of astrophysics, with tales of the big bang, black holes and
antimatter, have the feel of science fiction. And in a sense that is what they
are: the stories of contemporary science. These stories are not unconstrained;
they do not allow anything to be said. For the stories of science have an
internal logic which drives them forward. They are often useful. We live by our
closures. But we should not imagine that we have thereby captured the secrets
of the universe. Nor should we suppose that there are not countless
alternatives, offering other ways of holding the world that may be equally
valid. The
closures of contemporary science appear to be unavoidable because they take
their place in a system of closures that has been built and defended over
centuries. When Hawking describes the universe as a vast array of galaxies
exploding into the emptiness of space propelled by the energy from the original
big bang, it is the outcome of a history of preceding closures which combine to
make it look as if Hawkins’s closure is the only available option. Yet
there are other options, at every level of the account, from the tiniest detail
to the most general theory; options that would grasp openness differently in
some respect, that would draw attention to different patterns and different
connections, and which would as a consequence offer different ways of
intervening and to different purposes. In his
new book, The Universe in a Nutshell, Hawking regards Newton's account of
motion and his theory of gravity as the starting point for the contemporary
scientific account of the universe. Instead, we should regard Newton as the
initiator of a complex and elegant system of closures. Newton's centrality to
science and to our culture obscures the limitations of his theory. We are
dazzled by his importance and his influence and so overlook the mechanism of
his closures. Since
Newton every schoolchild has known that the apple falls from the tree because
of gravity. Yet gravity cannot be detected or identified. We see only its
consequences. Newton replaced one mystery, the falling apple, with a more
profound one, the existence of something that cannot be seen or touched, and
which causes change instantly across any distance. Newton's explanation was no
less mysterious than the explanation that the apple falls to the ground because
God made it do so. We have become so used to the notion of force that it seems
to us now to be almost mundane in character. Yet Newton's theory, which
proposed that the world is awash with undetectable and mysterious forces, is
bizarre. There is evidence that Newton himself was concerned about the
essentially mystical core to his theory (as Einstein would later be about his). There
is also, throughout Newton's theory, a circularity: for the most part, the
apple does not fall at all but remains on the tree. Newton has therefore to
propose that another force is acting to keep the apple on the tree, a force
precisely equal and opposite to that of gravity. And like gravity, this force
is also undetectable. Force is Newton's explanation for change, but to any
counter-example we choose to offer, Newton simply proposes a new force that is
equally unidentifiable or provable. This circularity might appear a weakness,
but the great strength of his theory was precisely that it could not be
disproved. It is a circularity which ensures a solid core from which to build a
system of closures. Where the theory proved useful, it could be applied. And
where it was not, a complex amalgam of other forces could be envisaged to
explain its failure. So gradually the web of explanation and closure grew. Over
time, Newton's framework enabled others to extend and develop the system of
closure until today we have the vast network of closures that make up the
contemporary scientific account of the universe. Yet at its heart, the
Newtonian system and its framework of forces remains as mysterious as when it
was first proposed, and its seeming explanations are the circular outcome of a
series of responses to previous failures of the system. Prior
to Newton and Copernicus, the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic system proposed that
the behaviour of the stars and planets was to be explained by the movements of
vast celestial spheres. This system in the context of Newton's framework and
our current perspective is wholely preposterous. Yet for centuries it was
capable of predicting the movements of the stars and planets to a remarkable
level of precision. It was used by sailors to navigate across oceans and was
even able to predict irregular events such as eclipses. The success of a system
of closure is not due therefore to its having accurately described the world. Its
success is due instead to its ability to enable to us to intervene in what we
take to be reality. Closures are not powerful because they are true. We hold
closures as true because we believe them to be powerful. Thirteen
years on from A Brief History of Time, Hawking has to admit, in The Universe in
a Nutshell, that the goal of a theory of everything is no closer to being
achieved. In fact, the structure of the new book is itself illustration of the
failure of the grand project. For instead of a single unified account which
gradually unfolds throughout the book, we have a series of piecemeal glimpses
at aspects of contemporary physics. No doubt this structure was selected partly
because of the demands of popular science, to make the book both different and
accessible. But there is a deeper reason too. The attempt to describe
contemporary physics as a single story makes the gaps and weaknesses more
apparent. Piecemeal glimpses allow failures of the closure to be covered up and
questions to be left unanswered. Moreover, there are signs that Hawking himself is beginning to become aware of the
limitations of his own account. He now describes himself as a positivist, in
the sense that we can only have evidence for choosing one model over another,
rather than evidence for the model being reality. If Hawking took a further
step and recognised that different models are not simply different accounts of
the same reality but provide themselves different realities, he would have come
closer to understanding the nature of the human predicament and the nature of
the scientific closure that he is himself propounding. If we
are to make progress in understanding the nature of ourselves and the world we
need a theory of closure. Without such a theory we are at risk of mistaking the
mechanisms of closure for the mechanisms of reality. Such a theory will need to
provide a detailed explanation of how it is that even though closure has
nothing in common with openness it is still capable of enabling precise and
effective intervention. It will also have to address the question of how it is
that a theory of closure is itself possible. A
century ago Lord Kelvin declared, "There is nothing new to be discovered
in physics now. All that remains is more and more measurement." Those like
Stephen Hawking today who suppose that we are on the verge of finding the
ultimate theory will be similarly embarrassed. If instead science gave up its
metaphysical pretentions and stopped supposing that it was uncovering the
essential character of the world, it would be stronger not weaker. It would be
in a better position to entertain new theories, and new closures, which might
enable more effective intervention in what we take to be reality. Just as
science demonstrated the limitations of the closures of the church, so now we
must come to terms with the limitations of the closures of science. We must see
them for what they are: ways of holding the openness that is the world. |