Real Natures and Familiar Objects by Crawford L. Elder

Author:Crawford L. Elder [Elder, Crawford L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2011-02-17T05:00:00+00:00

Mental versus Physical Causation

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In defense of our intuitions about agglomerated causes, I want to argue that this general claim is false.

For starters, then, note that in actual scientific practice, not just any conjunction of known laws is regarded as being a law in its own right. We may know of lawlike generalizations governing the evaporation of fluids, and of lawlike generalizations such as Boyle’s law, and may wonder whether there are yet other, deeper laws that explain why both sets of lawlike generalizations hold. But in actual practice we would not consider such a demand for unification met by new laws that merely conjoined the generalizations we already know of. Such conjunctions would not be regarded as new laws at all. We would consider the two sets of generalizations to be explained and united by new laws only if we managed to enunciate laws that enabled predictions we were not before in a position to make, or enabled explanations of seemingly disparate phenomena we were not before able to formulate, or both. It cost real work, and conferred real benefits, to reduce the simple thermodynam-ics of gases to kinetic theory about molecules and statistical mechanics. This is not to deny that something like a conjunction of two known laws may sometimes amount to a lawlike generalization in its own right. If values of the antecedent in law L sum together with values of the 1

antecedent in law L in distinctive and repeating ways—

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as when gravity and electromagnetism combine to shape the trajectory of an ion on the surface of the sun—then we will judge there to be a separate law governing conjunctions of values for antecedents in each of the original laws. But we will judge this precisely because the new law enables new predictions. What is sought in scientific practice when we look for a unification of cognitive science with neurobiology, or of string theory with the rest of physics, 100

Chapter 4

is not just a conjunction of lawlike generalizations already known.

Even so it is fair to ask whether and why we should be less than willing generally to allow conjunctions of known laws to count as laws in their own right—just as it was fair to ask why we should count invariance as evidence of causal sufficiency. Might there be philosophical reasons for holding that all conjunctions of laws of nature themselves are after all laws of nature? Or even for holding that all logical consequences of laws of nature are themselves laws of nature?

To these questions, I maintain that the answer is No. But the details of the answer depend on the particular view one elects of the laws of nature.

On the “metaphysical” view, to use Barry Loewer’s name for it (Loewer 1996), the laws of nature are ways the objects of the world are bound to interact with one another. (To put it metaphorically, they are ways the interactions of the world’s objects are “constrained” or “governed” by the natures of those objects.) On this picture, what

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