Autor: Melchin, R. Kenneth

Buch: History, Ethics and Emegent Probability

Titel: History, Ethics and Emegent Probability

Stichwort: Weltsicht: Aristoteles, Galileo; Unterschied zw. Aristoteles u. Galileo: Abstraktion; Galileo: das Naturgesetz umfasst das Partikuläre und das Allgemeine; deterministisch verstandene Materie

Kurzinhalt: Both types seek understanding of systematic relations, of classical laws, but both conceive the meaning of the term 'law' so as, finally, to preclude statistical knowing as a distinct type of knowing.

Textausschnitt: 2/4 "In an effort to gain some preliminary foothold on this mountainous issue of world views I have summarized, quite briefly, Bernard Lonergan's provocative sketch of four other world views that can be contrasted with emergent probability.1 There is no claim here that this summary represents in any way an adequate account of the thought of any of the great men or women who can be identified with these views. But I think that Lonergan'sketch can help to call attention, again, to the import of notions of randomness and system both for one's anticipations of the structure of reality and for one's view of the status of cognitional operations and objects in relation to this reality." (99)

3/4 The first two of the four world views presented for comparison are the 'Aristotelian' and the 'Galilean' views. Both types seek understanding of systematic relations, of classical laws, but both conceive the meaning of the term 'law' so as, finally, to preclude statistical knowing as a distinct type of knowing. The 'Aristotelian' view regards world process as consisting either of cause and effect or of mere coincidence. The regularities of the heavenly bodies explain the coincidental operations and interactions of terrestrial causes. And thus all relations are finally systematic when understood in terms of the motions of the eternal heavens. The 'Galilean' view, on the other hand, pronounces earthly contingency an illusion by distinguishing merely apparent secondary qualities presented in sense experience from the 'reality' of primary qualities that are grasped in mathematical equations based on this experiential evidence. In this view the acts of scientific understanding expressed in these mathematical equations do not omit or leave behind (as unexplained) the particularity or contingency of concrete times and places (the coincidences that were omitted by the 'Aristotelian' laws but subsequently explained away in terms of the eternal laws of the heavens). Rather, natural laws, in the 'Galilean' view are immediately attached to or embedded in the basic 'prime matter,' the stuff of the universe which is perpetually in motion. Thus the natural laws yield a complete and thorough account of all of reality. (99f; Fs)

4/4 The key difference between these two views lies in the meaning of the term 'abstraction.'2 In the 'Aristotelian' view it is understood that laws grasp and express what is intelligibly similar in two or more cases of an object, an event, or a process. But the law says nothing about the particular locations, the particular magnitudes, the particular times of occurrences of two or more instances of the same class of object, event or process. The law 'abstracts' from what is particular or coincidental about the two instances. And such coincidences are explained as resulting from multiple convergences of other operative laws. The operations of all terrestrial laws could, ultimately, be traced back to their originating cause in the heavenly motions and thus the contingencies that are 'abstracted' from in the natural laws are explained away finally in terms of a first cause. In the 'Galilean' view, however, no such appeal to heavenly first causes can be made and so the particularities of two instances of the same class of object, event or process has to be accounted for. This is done by positing a basic prime matter which takes the 'form' of the intelligibilities expressed in mathematical laws in various different times and places. The laws do not 'abstract' from particular, contingent times and places but constitute the 'form' which prime matter takes on in different times and places. Thus the laws, finally, explain both generalities and particularities in a perfect, classically understood, mechanistically determined universe of basic, prime matter. (100; Fs) (notabene)