{"id":1725,"date":"2010-03-24T11:22:22","date_gmt":"2010-03-24T15:22:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/?p=1725"},"modified":"2010-03-24T11:22:22","modified_gmt":"2010-03-24T15:22:22","slug":"hypotheses-natura-non-fingo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/2010\/03\/24\/hypotheses-natura-non-fingo\/","title":{"rendered":"Hypotheses Natura Non Fingo"},"content":{"rendered":"

Newton famously wrote [1]<\/a> [2]<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I have not as yet been able to discover the reason for these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I do not feign hypotheses…\u00a0 It is enough that gravity does really exist and acts according to the laws I have explained, and that it abundantly serves to account for all the motions of celestial bodies.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

as a response to those who challenged him to provide causes of gravity.\u00a0 He said, “Hypotheses non fingo<\/a>,” or, “I feign no hypothesis,” or if you will, “I haven’t even a guess.”<\/p>\n

Earlier in a letter he wrote<\/a>:<\/p>\n

That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one another, is to me so great an absurdity that, I believe, no man who has in philosophic matters a competent faculty of thinking could ever fall into it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These passages show that Newton recognized a fundamental causal problem within his theory: that although his mathematics described gravitational physics, it did not provide a causal explanation.\u00a0 It was not until General Relativity 200 years later was this problem solved.<\/p>\n

Recently another major fundamental theory of science has been accused of lacking the proper causal structure:\u00a0 Fodor & Piatelli-Palmarini\u2019s attack on evolution, What Darwin Got Wrong<\/a>.\u00a0 Consider what Fodor says in his recent reply to Block and Kitcher<\/a>,<\/p>\n

A mere chronicle of instances of adaptation would not therefore amount to a theory of adaptation. It would just be \u201cnatural history.\u201d We haven\u2019t the slightest doubt that Darwin thought that he had discovered a theory of adaptation. It was, to be sure, a pretty thin theory, as it would have to be in order to apply to evolving creatures as such, whatever their phenotypes and whatever their ecologies.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He is saying that evolution is a mere chronicle of natural history — not a cause of it — just as Newton’s gravitation described gravity without revealing its causal structure.\u00a0 Later he says,<\/p>\n

[Biologists should] give up on the project of finding a mechanism for evolution and study the fixation of adaptive traits case by case. Since all the evidence suggests that they are extremely heterogeneous, this should keep evolutionary biologists busy well into the indefinite future.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This means that biologists should give up on repairing evolution and just try to explain individual phenomena moving forward, just as physics moved forward even as Newton knew his theory was on metaphysical shaky ground.<\/p>\n

Hence it is Fodor now saying, “Hypotheses non fingo,”\u00a0 because he believes he can describe natural history accurately, but also has no guess as to what caused things to work out the way they did.<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n

In light of this analysis, consider this statement from Block and Kitcher’s counter argument<\/a>:<\/p>\n

After our critique, Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini have apparently decided that the crucial point is the lack of a \u201ctheory\u201d of natural selection. But, as we have noted here, nobody needs a \u201ctheory\u201d of the type they demand.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And this from Sober’s recent review<\/a> [pdf]:<\/p>\n

What is the net gravitational force now acting on the earth?\u00a0 That depends on the mass of the sun, the moon, the stars, and of everything else.\u00a0 It does not follow that there are no laws of gravity, only that the laws need to have numerous placeholders.\u00a0 FP may object to my analogy because it is always the mass of these various objects and their distance from the earth that are relevant to the gravitational force that the earth experiences.\u00a0 My reply is that this makes no difference…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Neither has understood the argument as presented above.\u00a0 If Block and Kitcher had understood, then they would have recognized that yes, for the vast majority of people, the “‘theory’ of the type they demand” is unnecessary, but it is, nevertheless, of critical importance to the likes of Newton and Einstein.\u00a0 If Sober had understood, then he wouldn’t have used the worst possible example to make his point:\u00a0 by saying it is “always the mass of these various objects and their distance from the earth that are relevant,” and not mentioning motion<\/strong>, we know he was only thinking about Newtonian Mechanics.<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n

Should we, with Fodor, believe that we are stuck in a philosophical absurdity?<\/p>\n

No.\u00a0 What I said in my original criticism of Fodor, found in What Fodor Got Wrong<\/a> (18 March 09),\u00a0 still applies.\u00a0 Though the above description of the problem is likely clearer than my analysis based on his claims that Natural Selection is statistical and that the struggle for survival is only a metaphor, the problem of causal structure is the same.\u00a0 My solution focuses on using individual struggles as local interactions of Natural Selection — like a gravitational field in General Relativity — and hence provides the causal structure that Fodor wanted.<\/p>\n

[EDIT 6 April 2010:\u00a0 I’m thinking I gave Fodor too much credit in this post.\u00a0 I now think his arguments amount to saying that for each instance of evolution we have, we are merely relaying natural history, not a causal explanation.\u00a0 The argument I attributed to Fodor above says that evolution by natural selection is<\/strong> natural history.\u00a0 Fodor must be more agnostic about evolution’s ontology because of how he says it is possible to look for some alternative to natural selection in his reply to Block and Kitcher<\/a>.\u00a0 My solution is still viable though:\u00a0 since I provide causal structure, this also provides how to describe evolution in a causal way.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Newton famously wrote [1] [2]: I have not as yet been able to discover the reason for these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I do not feign hypotheses…\u00a0 It is enough that gravity does really exist and acts according to the laws I have explained, and that it abundantly serves to account for all the motions of celestial bodies. as a response to those who challenged him to provide causes of gravity.\u00a0 He said, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7,44,26,27,32,34],"tags":[241,245,74,292,268,270,275,279],"class_list":["post-1725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biology","category-evolution","category-general-relativity","category-philosophy","category-physics","category-relativity","category-science","tag-biology","tag-evolution","tag-fodor","tag-general-relativity","tag-philosophy","tag-physics","tag-relativity","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1725"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1725\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}