The Language of Nature: An Essay in the Philosophy of Science [Hardcover ed.] 071670904X, 9780716709046

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DAVID HAWKINS, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, was born in El Paso, Texas, in 1913. He studied first at Stanford University and then at the University of California at Berkeley, where he received his Ph.D. degree in 1940. He then taught for several years at those two institu• tions. From 1943 to 1946 he was associated with the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratories, first as an administrative as­ sistant and then as Historian. After teaching for a year at George Washington University, he joined the faculty of the University of Colorado in 1947. On leave of absence from 1962 to 1964, he was Director of the Elementary Science Study of Educational Services Incorporated of Watertown, Massachusetts. He has now returned to his professorship at the University of Colorado, where he is also Director of the Elementary Science Advisory Center.

THE LANGUAGE OF NATURE An Essay in the Philosophy of Science

DAVID HAWKINS Illustrated by Evan L. Gillespie

Anchor Books Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York l'!{,'f

was originally published in a hardbound edition by W. H. Freeman and Company, San Francisco and Lon­ don, in 1964. The Anchor Books edition is published by arrangement with W. H. Freeman and Company

PREFACE

Anchor Books edition: 1967

The philosophy of science has been mainly concerned with I wo sorts of topics. '111e first includes the logic and mcthodol11gy of science, its inductive procedures and its deductive or­ ,::111ization. 111e second includes the meaning of generic con­ cepts in science, such as space, time, law, causality, chance, :111d teleology. These topics arc discussed in the present book, :incl in that sense it is an essay in the philosophy of science. llnt the book has another purpose-one that leads further into I lie content of science and not just to its methods or its con­ rcptual skeleton. '111is purpose is to show that the content of positive knowledge reacts upon the ways of thought from which tliat knowledge evolved and even, inevitably, upon the philosopher's conception of his problems. TI1is has not been the most popular opinion. According to I hat opinion, philosophy and science are different disciplines, :ind to soften or obliterate the difference is to invite vague :ind untested claims in the name of science, or else to call by the name of philosophy a recitation of scientific fact that misses the whole point of a truly philosophic inquiry. In this book I take no interest in obliterating the distinction, or even in softening it. But, however sharply philosophy and science be distinguished, the distinction itself implies no mutual ir­ relevance. The purpose of the book-to put it in another way -is to establish such relevance over a wide range of philo­ sophical and scientific subjects. The immediate occasion for writing this book has been the interest shown in the philosophy of science by a rapidly en­ larging group of students, including graduate students and npper-level undergraduates. 111cse are sometimes philosophy students with a strong interest in the sciences, but more often they arc students bent upon careers in science whose general

THE LANGUAGE OF NATURE

Copyright © 1964 by W. H. Freeman and Company The publisher reserves all rights to reproduce this book, in whole or in part, with the exception of the right to use short quotations for review of the book Printed in the United States of America

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PREFACE

intellectual interests send them to philosophy. Their scientific background is better than one could have expected, even a decade ago. The old academic positivism, which saw virtue in narrowness and avoided the general and speculative ques­ tions, is gone or nearly gone. Much of this concern for philos­ ophy is connected with new developments in science: with cosmology, for example, or biophysics, or the theory of auto­ mata, or Gi:idel's theorem. Relativity is still a live topic, and so is the principle of indetem1inacy, but newer topics have come to join them. Even older topics are still alive: the foundations of mechanics, for example; the relation of chance, determinism, and free will; the mind-body problem; the reality of atoms; and the nature of space and time. For such students, as for myself, philosophy and science are not unrelated interests. These students need to be in­ volved in the traditions of philosophy, of course. I hope to interest them in that pursuit, but not as my primary obliga­ tion-as though to civilize barbarians. The traditions are ir­ replaceable, but they are of no value at all except to those who ask philosophical questions independently of them. To meet these interests in philosophy arising from con­ temporary science, and to be orderly about it, I have followed a pattern of topics from mathematics, physics, biology, psy­ chology, and the social sciences. One novelty, in subject mat­ ter, is the attention paid to thermodynamics and information theory. These subjects have been little discussed by philoso­ phers; but they provide, in my opinion, an absolutely indis­ pensable bridge from the viewpoint of the physical to that of the biological and anthropological sciences, and in partic­ ular to the long-debated topic of teleology. There is a chapter on the nature of chance and probability, and a derivative chapter on inductive procedure in relation to information theory. There is also a chapter on philosophical ethics, which provides, I think, a second indispensable bridge. In this chap­ ter I am not concerned with the debate over the possibility or desirability of scientific objectivity in the social sciences, for I accept both without argument; I am concerned, rather,

PREFACE

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11ilh the essential peculiarities of human affairs considered as :,< icntific subject matter. Both science and philosophy are full of technicalities, and " hook of such wide scope would be unendurable if it did 1101 avoid most of these, or paraphrase them in simpler terms. 11111 some technical topics I have been unwilling to set aside, l