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I have deliberately emphasized what is known about the inherent limitations of human knowledge because I want to point out the tentative nature of the conclusions in the second half of this paper, and because determinism is the one fundamental superstitious assumption underlying all human thought and knowledge. Bunge (1959) makes the following statement:
What in contemporary science has taken the commanding place once held by the causal principle is the broader principle of determinacy, or of lawful production. The two components of this principle, under which the general law of causation is subsumed, are the genetic principle (Nothing springs out of nothing or goes into nothing) and the principle of lawfulness (Nothing unconditional, arbitrary, lawless occurs). The principle of determinacy just states that reality is not a chaotic aggregate of isolated, unconditioned, arbitrary events that pop up here and there without connection with anything else; it states that events are produced and conditioned in definite ways, though not necessarily in a causal manner; and it asserts that things, their properties, and the changes of properties exhibit intrinsic patterns (objective laws) that are invariant in some respects. (p. 351)
Without this principle of determinacy, no knowledge of any kind is possible, only chaos. The principle of determinacy is the basic element of meaning, and a statement that does not assert some regularity is meaningless. In contrast, an assertion which is shown to be wrong is meaningful since it asserts the negation of a particular hypothetical regularity. Human beings and human thought are fundamentally deterministic; they embody descriptive or predictive statements about events which can be corroborated or refuted by experiment or by logical rules which also have their roots in the regularity of experience and embody deterministic assumptions. “Logic presents us with a skeletonized type of behavior suitable to be used in the presence of the permanent or the recurrent.” (Bridgman, 1959, p. 89) Deterministic hypotheses are useful, since they can be used to describe or explain a set of events and predict future events, and because they point out the means which we can use to alter future events.
When we think of determinism, we inevitably think of simple causality and we also conceive of some simple causal model, such as the familiar analogy of the mechanical interaction of billiard balls, to help us understand it. Our conception of the ideal interaction of billiard balls is already a significant departure from reality because we deliberately ignore “negligible” variables, such as friction, air resistence, irregularities in the surface of the balls, etc. When we then apply our conception of this simplified model to other events which are incredibly more complex, there is a real danger that our models and concepts may mislead us, even when relevant data and formulas are rigorously defined and objectified. The basic difficulty is that the human mind cannot comprehend the consequences of the simultaneous interaction of more than two or three variables without some kind of crutch. We can easily understand two variables with the help of a line graph, and a three-dimensional model will display three, but in order to comprehend more variables we must rely on laborious mathematical analysis or computer simulation. In order to grasp reality the human mind must isolate a few variables and subject them to causal analysis. One of the reasons for the prodigious advance of scientific knowledge has been the development of rules and techniques for isolating systems, “controlling” variables which cannot be excluded from the system, and developing statistical methods and probabilistic hypotheses which deal with uncontrollable variables. However, complete isolation is an unobtainable ideal, and the causal principle often fails in open systems. Of course we always assume that other unknown causal variables operate when our predictions fail in open systems. The failure of the causal principle in any but artificially isolated systems indicates the limited application of the principle as a description of reality as a whole. Nevertheless, the causal principle is a subset of determinism or lawfulness, and determinism does not necessarily imply simple causation. I quote again from Bunge (1959):
Strict and pure causation works nowhere and never. Causation works approximately in certain processes limited both in space and time--and, even so, only in particular respects. Causal hypotheses are no more (and no less) than rough, approximate, one-sided reconstructions of determination; they are often entirely dispensable, but they are sometimes adequate and indispensable. (p. 337)
... Noncausal types of determination are shown to be somehow linked with causation. The overall trend discernable in recent science in connection with the general problem of determinism is not so much an increasing departure from causality as a progressive diversification of the types of determination, with correlative changes in the meaning and scope of the causal principle. (p. 346)
The causal principle reflects or reconstructs only a few aspects of determination. Reality is much too rich to be compressible once and for all into a framework of categories elaborated during an early stage of rational knowledge which consequently cannot account for the whole variety of types of determination, the number of which is being increased by scientific research and by philosophical reflection upon it. (p. 352)
This does not imply any kind of indeterminism. But it does assert that the causal principle is only one kind of determination, and that it would be reductionistic to use the causal model for the whole of determinism.
Most scientific statements, particularly those that are most thoroughly corroborated, restrict themselves to asserting a determinism which is limited by certain conditions, domains, or applications. Moreover, the theorems of Godel, et. al. have shattered the expectation that eventually consistent and complete deterministic statements might be made about all events. Nevertheless, the success and growth of scientific knowledge suggests that perhaps all events are subject to deterministic laws, and that our basic implicit assumption of universal determinacy could be correct even though we could never prove it. Although it seems likely that our minds are fundamentally incapable of creating more than a first approximation to reality, universal determinism may be the best approximation that we can make.
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