The Meaning of Metaphysics

From: Michael Ragland (ragland37_at_webtv.net)
Date: 08/29/04 

Date: Sun, 29 Aug 2004 04:34:31 +0000 (UTC)

Valetin Turchin©1991

The meaning of metaphysics

A metalanguage is still a language, and a metatheory a theory.
Metamathematics is a branch of mathematics. Is metaphysics a branch of
physics?

`Meta´ in Greek means over, and -- since when you jump over something
you find yourself behind it in space and after in time -- it is also
understood as behind and after. The word `metaphysics´ is said to
originate from the mere fact that the corresponding part of
Aristotle´s work was positioned right after the part called
`physics´. But it is not unlikely that the term won a ready acceptance
as denoting the whole field of knowledge because it conveyed the purpose
of metaphysics, which is to reach beyond the nature (`physics´) as we
perceive it, and to discover the `true nature´ of things, their
ultimate essence and the reason for being. This is somewhat, but not
much, different from the way we understand `meta´ in the 20-th
century.

A metatheory is a theory about another theory, which considered as an
object of knowledge: how true it is, how it comes into being, how it is
used, how it can be improved, etc. A metaphysician, in contrast, would
understand his knowledge as a knowledge about the world, like that of a
physicist (scientist, generally), and not as a knowledge about the
scientific theories (which is the realm of epistemology).

If so, metaphysics should take as honorable a place in physics as
metamathematics in mathematics. But this is very far from being the
case. It would be more accurate to describe the situation as exactly
opposite. Popularly (and primarily by the `working masses´ of
physicists), metaphysics is considered as something opposite to physics,
and utterly useless for it (if not for any reasonable purpose). I will
argue below that this attitude is a hangover from the long outdated
forms of empiricism and positivism. I will argue that metaphysics is
physics.

A detractor of metaphysics would say that its propositions are mostly
unverifiable, if intelligible at all, so it is hardly possible to assign
any meaning to them. Thales taught that everything is water. The
Pythagoreans taught that everything is number. Hegel taught that
everything is a manifestation of the Absolute Spirit. And for
Schopenhauer the world is will and representation. All this has nothing
to do with science.

But Democritus, and then Epicurus and Lucretius taught that the world is
an empty space with atoms moving around in it. In due time this concept
gave birth to classical mechanics and physics, which is, unquestionably,
science. At the time of its origin, however, it was as pure a
metaphysics as it could be. The existence of atoms was no more
verifiable than that of the Absolute Spirit. Physics started as
metaphysics. This is far from an isolated case.

The question of verifiability is a part of our understanding of the
nature of language and truth. What is the meaning of words and other
objects of a language? The naive answer is: those things which the words
denote. This is known as the reflection theory of language. Language,
like a mirror, creates certain images, reflections of the things around
us. With the reflection theory of language we come to what is known as
the correspondence theory of truth: a proposition is true if the
relations between the images of things correspond to the relations
between the things themselves. Falsity is a wrong, distorted reflection.
In particular, to create images which correspond to no real thing in the
world is to be in error.

With this concept of meaning and truth, any expression of our language
which cannot be immediately interpreted in terms of observable facts, is
meaningless and misleading. This viewpoint in its extreme form,
according to which all unobservables must be banned from science, was
developed by the early nineteenth-century positivism (August Comte).
Such a view, however, is unacceptable for science. Even force in
Newton's mechanics becomes suspect in this philosophy, because we can
neither see nor touch it; we only conclude that it exists by observing
the movements of material bodies. Electromagnetic field has still less
of reality. And the situation with the wave function in quantum
mechanics is simply disastrous.

The history of the Western philosophy is, to a considerable extent, the
history of a struggle against the reflection-correspondence theory. We
now consider language as a material to create models of reality.
Language is a system which works as a whole, and should be evaluated as
a whole. The job the language does is organization of our experience,
which includes, in particular, some verifiable predictions about future
events an the results of our actions. For a language to be good at this
job, it is not necessary that every specific part of it should be put in
a direct and simple correspondence with the observable reality.
A proposition is true if, in the framework of the language to which it
belongs, it does not lead to false predictions, but enhances our ability
to produce true predictions. We usually distinguish between factual
statements and theories. If the path from a proposition to verifiable
predictions is short and uncontroversial, we call it a factual
statement. A theory is but only through some intermediate steps, such as
reasoning, computation, the use of other statements. Thus the path from
a theory to predictions may not be unique and often becomes debatable.
Between the extreme cases of statements that are clearly facts and those
which are clearly theories there is a whole spectrum of intermediate
cases.

The statement of the truth of a theory has essentially the same meaning
as that of a simple factual statement: we assert that the predictions it
produces will be true. There is no difference of principle: both factual
statements and theories are varieties of models of reality which we use
to produce predictions. A fact may turn out to be an illusion, or
hallucination, or a fraud, or a misconception. On the other hand, a
well-established theory can be taken for a fact. And we should accept
critically both facts and theories, and re-examine them whenever
necessary. The differences between facts and theories are only
quantitative: the length of the path from the statement to verifiable
predictions.

This approach has a double effect on the concept of existence. On the
one hand, theoretical concepts, such as mechanical forces,
electromagnetic and other fields, and wave functions, acquire the same
existential status as the material things we see around us. On the other
hand, quite simple and trustworthy concepts like a heavy mass moving
along a trajectory, and even the material things themselves, the egg we
eat at breakfast, become as unstable and hazy as theoretical concepts.
For to-day's good theory is to-morrow's bad theory. We make and re-make
our theories all the time. Should we do the same with the concept of an
egg?

Certainly not at a breakfast. But in theoretical physics an egg is
something different from what we can eat: a system of elementary
particles. This makes no contradiction. Our language is a multilevel
system. On the lower levels, which are close to our sensual perception,
our notions are almost in one-to-one correspondence with some
conspicuous elements of perception. In our theories we construct higher
levels of language. The concepts of the higher levels do not replace
those of the lower levels, as they should if the elements of the
language reflected things "as they really are", but constitute a new
linguistic reality, a superstructure over the lower levels. We cannot
throw away the concepts of the lower levels even if we wished to,
because then we would have no means to link theories to observable
facts. Predictions produced by the higher levels are formulated in terms
of the lower levels. It is a hierarchical system, where the top cannot
exist without the bottom.

Recall the table describing four types of langage-dependent activities
in our discussion of formalization. Philosophy is characterized by
abstract informal thinking.

The combination of high-level abstract constructs used in philosophy
with a low degree of formalization requires great effort by the
intuition and makes philosophical language the most difficult type of
the four. Philosophy borders with art when it uses artistic images to
stimulate the intuition. It borders with theoretical science when it
develops conceptual frameworks to be used in construction of formal
scientific theories.

Top-level theories of science are not deduced from observable facts;
they are constructed by a creative act, and their usefulness can be
demonstrated only afterwards. Einstein wrote: "Physics is a developing
logical system of thinking whose foundations cannot be obtained by
extraction from past experience according to some inductive methods, but
come only by free fantasy".

This "free fantasy" is the metaphysician's. When Thales said that all is
water, he did not mean that quite literally; he surely was not that
stupid. His `water´ should rather be translated as `fluid´, some
abstract substance which can change its form and is infinitely
divisible. The exact meaning of his teaching is then: it is possible to
create a reasonable model of the world where such a fluid is the
building material. Is not the theory of electromagnetism a refinement of
this idea? As for the Pythagoreans, the translation of the statement
´everything is number´ is that it is possible to have a numerical
model of the Universe and everything in it. Is not the modern physics
such a model?

When we understand language as a hierarchical model of reality, i.e. a
device which produces predictions, and not as a true picture of the
world, the claim made by metaphysics is read differently. To say that
the real nature of the world is such and such means to propose the
construction of a model of the world along such and such lines.
Metaphysics creates a linguistic structure -- call it a logical
structure, or a conceptual framework -- to serve as a basis for further
refinements. Metaphysics is the beginning of physics; it provides
fetuses for future theories. Even though a mature physical theory
fastidiously distinguishes itself from metaphysics by formalizing its
basic notions and introducing verifiable criteria, metaphysics in a very
important sense is physics.

The meaning of metaphysics is in its potential. I can say that Hegel's
Absolute Spirit is meaningless for me, because at the moment I do not
see any way how an exact theory can be constructed on this basis. But I
cannot say that it is meaningless, period. To say that, I would have to
prove that nobody will ever be able to translate this concept into a
valid scientific theory, and I, obviously, cannot do that.
It takes usually quite a time to translate metaphysics into an exact
theory with verifiable predictions. Before this is done, metaphysics is,
like any fetus, highly vulnerable. The task of the metaphysician is hard
indeed: he creates his theory in advance of its confirmation. He works
in the dark. He has to guess, to select, without having a criterion for
selection. Successes on this path are veritable feats of human
creativity.
Copyright© 1991 Principia Cybernetica -

"It's uncertain whether intelligence has any long term survival value.
Bacteria do quite well without it."
 Stephen Hawking

Loading