~Eagam Khaling~
This paper is an outcome of reaction after reading Professor Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow’s statement that philosophy is dead because it has failed to keep up with modern development in science, particularly physics (maybe the ‘theoretical science’ that he deals with). As a consequence of my daring reaction to such a world-famous scientist and intellectual giant (Stephen Hawking), I have taken the question “Is Philosophy Dead?” as my title of this paper from Hawking and Mlodinow’s statements and answers from Kant’s views as an objective of this paper.
The reason why I am interested to answer from Kantian views is that Kant was the first systematic philosopher of science. His philosophy of science as his lifelong philosophical programme mainly includes pure mathematics and science of nature. His views on the part of theoretical physics are equally important and relevant in the studies of modern physics and philosophy of physics. As per the above-mentioned objective of the paper let us first see what Hawking and Mlodinow have written in the opening page of their book The Grand Design:
We each exist for but a short time, and in that time explore but a small part of the whole universe. But humans are a curious species. We wonder; we seek answers. Living in this vast world that is by turns kind and cruel, and gazing at the immense heavens above, people have always asked a multitude of questions: How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves? How does the universe behave? What is the nature of reality? Where did all this come from? Did the universe need a creator? Most of us do not spend most of our time worrying about these questions, but almost all of us worry about them some of the time.
Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern development in science, particularly physics. (pp.13-4)
We can obviously agree with the above Hawking and Mlodinow’s statements that even today the fundamental questions about the human life, world, universe and reality are equally shared by science and philosophy but the last two statements give rise to a question in our mind—“Is Philosophy Dead?” This question is meaningful (and answerable) only when the question clarifies what one means by the word ‘Philosophy’. If you go through the history of philosophy you will find many definitions of philosophy and philosophers contradicting one another. But one thing is clear that all philosophers have used abstract arguments as their weapon of inquiry. Kant has reminded fellow philosophers that such arguments cannot discover truths about objects, events, etc. for these are met with only in experience. To be more explicit let us take a question in connection to their scientific occupation: what happened before the Big Bang?
If the Big Bang did actually happen it must be considered as caused, for without causality we have no reason to talk of events because no thought becomes possible without ‘cause-effect’ category. The cause-effect relationship enables us to look for causes on which an event takes place. If you regard this relation as a category all changes, successions must be thought as determined by cause-effect. This is the same as we cannot reject causality. If anything happens we are found to ask a question: what caused it? What caused the Big Bang? But if the Big Bang did take place what is the cause? For the Big Bang is postulated, not perceived or experienced. What is postulated is hypothetical. From this hypothetical something, physicists draw conclusions. The conclusions may be perceived (or at least be perceivable). But there might be other postulates which may also lead to the same conclusion. An analogous situation is illustrated by:
If it rains then the ground is wet.
The ground is wet.
Therefore, it rains.
In the above argument, ‘it rains’ is only postulated not perceived or experienced. What is hypothetical cannot be made certain just as the consequent “the ground is wet” might have been caused by ‘somebody’ had sprinkled water on the ground’. This illustrates the situation in which the actual event may have different explanations.
Hawking and Mlodinow are right when they assert that philosophy has failed to keep pace with science. This is in agreement with what Kant said in the Critique of Pure Reason about metaphysics. But Kant understood meta-physicians as trying to understand and know about God, soul and the universe. According to Kant, meta-physicians make numerous assertions about the objects (things) which are not empirical. These assertions are merely conceptual; being not about empirical objects cannot be confirmed. The principles of metaphysics seem to resemble physics. But the principles of physics are intended to apply to the empirical objects of experience. Thus physics becomes representatives of reality but metaphysics is silent about the matter of facts. Physicists make inferences on their observations of objects and events. They do construct a hypothesis on their inferences and observations. The hypotheses are accepted as long as better ones are not discovered. Philosophers deal with concepts which lack empirical intuition and this worsens their position more. According to Kant, philosophy cannot make theories simply because there is no scope for theories. Scientific theories are about objects and experience either confirm or confutes theories. Philosophy cannot be proved or disproved by facts. It is merely conceptual and open to all.
What Kant has shown in detail in the Critique of Pure Reason is that the formal arguments by themselves cannot deal with ‘objects’ directly. Without experience (which involves sensations and intuition) our contact with ‘reality’ (that is, object) is lost. That is why philosophers and scientists like Immanuel Kant, Albert Einstein, Hermann Weyl, Arthur Eddington and others have agreed that what experience gives us is only the representations of the object. This is so because our consciousness becomes ‘active’ (functional) only through the ‘forms’ of sensibility, namely, space and time.
The very distinction between an object and its representation presupposes that they are distinct. If our consciousness becomes ‘suspended’ under the influence of an unaesthetic, we have no representation of the object (i.e. we become unconscious or insensible of the objects around us). It is, however, absurd to say if we lose consciousness the world ceases to exist. Speculative theories propounded by philosophers and theoretical scientists are removed from the experience. However much you theorize your theories must be in agreement with the verdict of experience. Flight of imagination and speculation must return to the solid ground revealed by sensibility and understanding (and ultimately reason). Theories may be verified (and confined) in time (and Place) but they are ‘never’ logically proved. That is so because such argument consists of the fallacy of affirming the consequence of hypothetical argument form:
p ⊃ q
q
∴ p
This argument form is invalid because ‘p’ is only hypothetical: its truth is not known and hence only assumed. The truth of ‘q’ cannot guarantee the truth of its own premise (ground). Professor F.C.S. Northrop tells us (Einstein’s Conception of Science) that in scientific verification the logic of verification always commits the fallacy of affirming the consequent of hypothetical syllogism. This does not entail that a theory thus verified is only false. It means merely that it cannot be shown to be necessarily true. In this way, Northrop interprets Einstein’s view that verification or confirmation cannot be final. It can be tentatively accepted as—it is true as far as it goes. And this fact leads Einstein to assert that science is never final. The concept of the Big Bang, the concept of ‘Black Whole’ and others may be obsolete worth rejecting when new situations bring before the scientists the new data not commensurate with present day to day concept. Kant makes the situation clearer in his Critique of Pure Reason:
The Modus Tollens of reasoning, which proceeds from consequences to their grounds, is not only quite rigorous but also an extremely easy mode of proof. For, if even a single false consequence can be drawn from a proposition, the proposition is itself false. Instead, then, as in an ostensive proof, of receiving the whole serious of grounds that can led us to the truth of a proposition, by means of a complete insight into its possibility, we require only to show that a single one of the consequences resulting from its opposite is false, in order to prove that this opposite is false, in order to prove that this opposite is itself and that the proposition which we had to prove is therefore true. (A791/B819, p.626)
In the passage just quoted Kant has made absolutely clear why theoretical physics cannot be made logically valid. The hypothesis of a physicist can indeed be confirmed by actual events, facts, etc. but the same cannot be made to certain. This is the reason why Einstein asserted that there is no finality in science. He writes in the Ideas and Opinions:
The belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science. Since, however, sense perception only gives information of this external world or of “physical reality” indirectly, we can only grasp the latter by speculative means. It follows from this that our notions of physical reality can never be final. We must always be ready to change these notions—that is to say, the axiomatic basis of physics—in order to do justice to perceived facts in the most perfect way logically. Actually, a glance at the development of physics shows that it has undergone far-reaching changes in the course of time. (p.266)
We must not forget the fact that the theories, hypothesizes, assumptions about events, facts, objects are human ‘constructions’ or inventions. They may be accepted as ‘true’ as far as they go there is no guarantee that will be true when our experience will present new facts and situation. Let us see what Richard P. Feymen, the winner of the noble prize for physics has to say about the theory of physics in his The Character of Physical Laws,
There is always the possibility of proving any definite theory wrong; but notice that we can never prove it right suppose that you invent a good guess, calculate the consequences and discover every time that the consequences you have calculated agree with experiment. The theory is then right? No, it is simply not proved wrong. In the future, you could compute a wider range of experiments, and you might then discover that the thing is wrong. That is why laws like Newton’s laws for the motion of planets last such a long time. He calculated all kinds of consequences for the system and so on, compared them with the experiment—and it took several hundred years before the slight error of the motion of mercury was observed. During all that time the theory had not been proved wrong and could be taken temporally to be right. But it could never be proved right; because tomorrow’s experiment might succeed in proving wrong what you thought was right. We never are definitely right, we can only be sure we are wrong. However, it is rather remarkable how we can have some ideas which will last so long. (pp. 187-8)
In substance, we can say that armchair thinking cannot determine the universe for all time to come. However, what theoretical physicists are doing must be regarded as ‘reasonable’. But when logicians use words like ‘proof’ they mean ‘demonstration’ but theories never become ‘logical demonstration’. In fact, theorizing is only a procedure of ‘asking nature’ questions. This is the reason why Stephen Hawking had to revisit his former position after thirty years. Theoretical scientist however talented cannot give us final truths. On our onward march reality may comprise from time to time because the universe is too vast and varied and our experience presents us only a fragment of this universe. We never perceive the whole universe (the whole universe is only a postulated ideal whole, not actual or real whole). In relation to the above explanation, we can say that the roles of philosophy in the development of human knowledge together with scientific enterprises as a whole cannot be ignored. Let us be clear in the following from Ajit Kumar Sinha’s view:
In fact, philosophy in the sense of speculative adventure proceeds as well as follows all scientific theories. Sciences originate in the cor-relational level and very soon pass into the speculative stage. If science remained purely on the cor-relational level and was not followed by any speculative adventure there would be hardly any progress in human knowledge. If propositions which are not empirically verified are regarded as meaningless as logical positivists seen to suggest, then what would be the fate of Mendeleev’s speculation concerning the periodic law, Einstein’s theory concerning the curvature of light, Yukawa’s quest about the existence of meson, the speculations of Willen De Sister, Milne, Hayle and others concerning the space-time structure of the universe and so on? The role of philosophy, therefore, cannot be completely ignored in scientific theorizing. (The Calcutta Review, p. 262)
Failing to distinguish between physics and metaphysics, philosophy of science and science and theory and philosophy has troubled many. This kind of trouble creates lots of misunderstandings and contradictions. The development of philosophy depends on the development of science. The speculative science (particularly theoretical physics) and empirical physics have done immense development with the use of highly sophisticated technology. We have a philosophy of physics only because of physics. Philosophy of science develops with the development of science. The fundamental concepts, questions and problems are equally shared by both science and philosophy. This is evident in Hawking and Mlodinow’s The Grand Design.
It is not always important to bring metaphysics on the paths of theoretical physics. It is also not necessary (as Hawking and Mlodinow think) to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going. But their claim that the universe appeared spontaneously and the creation of the whole universe and Big Bang theory are nothing and unreal make them anti-realists. They have meant ‘Spontaneously’ without cause and ‘Nothingness’ not governed by any physical law. This also means the creation of ‘Being’ from ‘Non-being’. If by ‘Nothing’ they mean ‘Non-being’ and mere possibly the ‘Quantum Vacuum’. They cannot explain the quantum vacuum without being philosophical about it. Even Heisenberg had lots of philosophical ideas in his mind while doing quantum physics.
After thoroughly studying the book The Grand Design, it becomes obvious to ask a question—is this book free from philosophy? If ‘No’ then philosophy is not dead is proved by their own writings and if ‘Yes’ then why there are so many resemblances between philosophy and theoretical physics that they deal with. The theoretical physics aims at understanding the already known facts in a new way. This brings the existence of the new hypothesis and theories. Philosophy as a reasoned reflection does not increase our knowledge about objects, events and world but helps to reach to correct explanation, interpretation and understanding of them. Thus, philosophy is neither dead nor the philosophers are the waste of space.
Philosophers like Rene Descartes and David Hume thought philosophy to be progressive like science but their thought has never been realized. Philosophy is not progressive like science. If a person understands philosophy and physics the same thing then a misunderstanding is unavoidable. Philosophers have used the word ‘Philosophy’ in different ways. Philosophers of physics understand philosophy in one way but philosophers and professors of philosophy in colleges and universities understand something different. When words are used in different senses the controversy between the quarreling parties becomes ‘merely verbal’ and it is equivalent to arguing at cross purposes. History shows us that philosophers have used words like ‘Philosophy’, ‘Science’ and the like in different senses without realizing the actual situation.
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Source: Philosophy, Religion & Culture, Edited by Iti Chattopadhyay, Swati Bhattacharya and Banani Barman, Published by Sanskrit Pustak Bhandar, Kolkata, 2017.
Eagam Khaling,
Darjeeling,
734209.
(Source : Writer sent it via ‘Kritisangraha@gmail.com‘ )
