The Orders of Nature

Lawrence Cahoone

Description

Winner of the 2015 John N. Findlay Award in Metaphysics presented by the Metaphysical Society of America

Reviving and modernizing the tradition of post Darwinian naturalism, The Orders of Nature draws on philosophy and the natural sciences to present a naturalistic theory of reality. Conceiving of nature as systems, processes, and structures that exhibit diverse properties that can be hierarchically arranged, Lawrence Cahoone sketches a systematic metaphysics based on the following orders of nature: physical, material, biological, mental, and cultural. Using recent work in the science of complexity, hierarchical systems theory, and nonfoundational approaches to metaphysics, Cahoone analyzes these orders with explanations of the underlying science, covering a range of topics that includes general relativity and quantum field theory; chemistry and inorganic complexity; biology and telenomic explanation, or "purpose"; the theory of mind and mental causation as an animal phenomenon; and the human mind's unique cultural abilities. The book concludes with an exploration of what answers such a theory of naturalism can provide to questions about values and God.
Acknowledgments
Introduction

Part I. A Kind of Naturalism

1. From Pluralism to Naturalism
2. A Selective History of Naturalism
3. Reduction, Emergence, and Physicalism
4. Concepts for Pluralistic Nature

Part II. The Orders of Nature

5. The Physical Order
6. The Achievements of Matter
7. The Phenomena of Life
8. Mind and the Hard Problems
9. Meanings of the Cultural Mind
10. The Evolution of Knowledge

Part III. Naturalistic Speculations

11. A Ground of Nature
12. Natural Religion

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Métaphysique
• Metaphysics
• Philosophy
• Philosophy of science
• Physique
• Physical attractiveness

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 29 janvier 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438444178
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

The Orders of Nature
Lawrence Cahoone

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2013 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
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For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cahoone, Lawrence E., 1954–
The orders of nature / Lawrence Cahoone.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4415-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Naturalism. I. Title.
B828.2.C34 2012 146—dc23
2011051054
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

We have a way of discussing the world, when we talk of it at various hierarchies, or levels … at one end we have the fundamental laws of physics … if we go higher up from this, in another level we have properties of substances—like ‘refractive index’ … or ‘surface tension’. … As we go up in this hierarchy of complexity, we get to things like muscle twitch or nerve impulse … Then come things like ‘frog’ … And then … we come to words and concepts like ‘man,’ and ‘history.’ … And going on, we come to things like evil, and beauty, and hope. … Which end is nearer to God … Beauty and hope, or the fundamental laws? … I do not think either end is nearer to God … To stand at either end … hoping that out in that direction is the complete understanding, is a mistake. … The great mass of workers in between, connecting one step to another, are improving all the time our understanding of the world, both from working at the ends and working in the middle, and in that way we are gradually understanding this tremendous world of interconnecting hierarchies.
— Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law

for Harry and Rose,
my best guess
and in memory of
Sarah Rose Broeder (1995–2011)
and Paul Baeten (1959–2012)
Acknowledgments
The author's Acknowledgements page of most academic books expresses gratitude to helpers while accepting sole responsibility for error. That usually reads like a pleasant expression of humility. But it must be taken especially seriously in the present case. Many have given help without which this project would have been impossible, but because the whole has evolved over the years under multiple influences—not least the author's—each of them would undoubtedly find something in the finished product objectionable.
My undergraduate teacher, the late Bernard Kaplan, set me on this interdisciplinary path long ago—the path of, as donald Campbell called it, “incompetence in many fields at once.” I owe thanks for instruction or critical readings to Andrea Borghini, Gregg diGirolamo, Robert Garvey, Kornath Madhavan, Kenneth Mills, Karen Ober, Florence Shepard, Janine Shertzer, Abner Shimony, John Stachel, Robert Ulanowicz, Bruce Weber, and anonymous readers and editorial board members of SUNY Press. I am grateful for help, comments, and encouragement from members of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, especially John Shook, Paul Thompson, and Kathleen Wallace; the Metaphysical Society of America, particularly Wes deMarco and past president dan dahlstrom; and the Center for Process Studies, especially Philip Clayton, John Cobb, and Brian Henning. The support of the Committee on Faculty Scholarship of the College of the Holy Cross, and the encouragement and leadership of former president Michael McFarland, are much appreciated. The influence of Peter Brecher and of Walter Wright has been formative throughout. I owe special gratitude for multiple readings and/or tutorials, personal and virtual, to Elizabeth Baeten, Tianyu Cao, Robert Cohen, Valerius Geist, Andrew Hwang, Matthew Koss, Joseph Margolis, Robert Neville, Holmes Rolston, Stanley Salthe, Karsten Stueber, and William Wimsatt. My greatest debt is, as always, to my muse Elizabeth Baeten and to our children, Harrison and Isabel Rose.
I thank the publishers and/or authors of the following works for permission to reproduce figures (which I have sometimes modified as noted): Peter Hobson, The Cradle of Thought : Exploring the Origins of Thinking , Pan Macmillan, 2004, p. 107, Figure 2 (my Figure 9.1 ); and William Wimsatt, “The Ontology of Complex Systems: Levels, Perspectives, and Causal Thickets,” Biology and Society: Reflections on Methodology , edited by Mohan Matthen and R. X. Ware, Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Supplementary Vol. 20, 1994:207–74, p. 230 (my Figure 3.2 ). Portions of some of my chapters have appeared earlier in: “Local Naturalism,” Contemporary Pragmatism 6 (2), December 2009; “Reduction, Emergence, and Ordinal Physicalism,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society , vol.44, no.1, Winter 2008; “Arguments From Nothing: God and Quantum Cosmology,” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 44 (4) December 2009; as well as some discussions from my Cultural Revolutions: Reason versus Culture in Philosophy, Politics, and Jihad , Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005.
Introduction
We live in nature. That is surely a plausible truth, even if a partial one that leaves questions unanswered. Whatever else we are, however else we address other features of human existence, part of the truth about us seems to be captured by that claim. Today a considerable number of thinkers, and citizens, accept it as the primary truth. Many contemporary philosophers think of themselves as naturalists. Some in fact think naturalism so obviously valid as not to need philosophical argument.
But this surface complacency hides disagreement. Naturalism is widely understood to say that everything is in or part of nature, that nothing is supra-natural. That would seem to exclude divinity—to naturalism's credit, for some, but to its discredit, for others. Many identify naturalism with physicalism, the claim that everything is physical, a property of the physical, or determined by the physical. Consequently other philosophers have doubted that such a naturalism can give an adequate account of mind, culture, ethics, freedom, or art, that it “reduces” the most complex human features of reality to the most simple. Those are the traditional objections to naturalism. Just as trenchant today is the arguably “postmodern” objection, evident both in European and Anglo-American philosophy, that general or systematic metaphysics is an anachronistic, failed genre. Philosophizing about the world or reality in general, many think, is a mistake. So naturalism as general metaphysics is as illegitimate as any general metaphysics. This view was fueled by twentieth-century philosophical claims that deny we can have any knowledge characterized by certainty, finality, transcendence, a “privileged perspective,” non-trivial self-evident truths, valid first principles, or a view of “the Whole.” Following these claims, some naturalists think naturalism is not metaphysical at all, that nature is what we are left with when we abandon metaphysics. They hold we can endorse a “natural ontological attitude,” accept science as the institution with the most knowledge about things, while dropping any general metaphysical characterization or reading of science's achievements ( Fine 1991 , Rorty 1991 ). So while many assume naturalism, or occasionally employ it, few want to explore the meaning and validity of a systematic naturalism.
There certainly is metaphysics in contemporary philosophy, including mainstream analytic or Anglo-American philosophy. Such work is usually concerned to articulate the necessary and sufficient conditions of features of reality, like possibility or entities or dispositions or individuals. But general or systematic metaphysics is less common. Historically, metaphysics has a set of canonical problems, like the existence of God, whether all is matter or mental or spiritual entities also exist, and how to understand phenomena like possibilities, cultural objects, meanings, universals, etc. A systematic metaphysics tries to inquire into many of these things all at once in a coordinated way. It is this kind of general inquiry that has the worst current reputation, seeming the most obvious suspect for an inquiry still seeking an anachronistic view of the Whole, which is impossible, or a view from “nowhere,” which is inconceivable, or claiming to incorporate its own meta-language—the language in which the basic terms of the theory are defined—which is illogical. Thus a systematic metaphysical naturalism continues to arouse a variety of negative responses: if it's naturalism, it's not metaphysics; if it's systematic metaphysics, it's not naturalism; if it's both, it epitomizes the errors of traditional philosophy exposed by thinkers with names like Nietzsche, Dewey, and Carnap, not to mention Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Quine, Derrida and Rorty.
My disagreement is rooted not in a defense of tradition per se , but in the conviction that the above worries, while partly right, are exaggerated. I think it is possible to perform, and reach conclusions in, systematic or general metaphysics without imagining the achievement of certainty, or imperialistically “grounding” or “founding” other kinds of inquiry, or speaking of the Whole, or Simples, or the Foundational, or other sins of the past from which philosophy since the mid-twentieth century has sought repentance. It is possible to forge a metaphysics that aspires not to finality or the end of inquiry but to an adequate, yet corrigible, set of concepts for further inquiry, always vulnerable to our conceptual criticism and best empirical guesses about the world. And it is possible to formulate a