Chapter 1 Early Work on the Metaphysics of Science

Abstract

The first phase of my work on the metaphysics of science resulted in an MA thesis that was completed in 1965, and three papers extracted from the thesis published in 1966 and 1968. These papers tackled the problem of how to reconcile the world as depicted by physics with the world of common sense – the world as we experience it. A key idea is that physics is concerned only with a highly specialized aspect of all that there is, the causally efficacious aspect. I argued in one paper that Hume was wrong to deny that necessary connections cannot exist between successive states of affairs. On the contrary, we can interpret physics in such a way that it may, one day, specify what exists at one instant that necessitates what exists subsequently, necessity here having all the force of logical or analytic necessity. Given that physics is concerned only with this highly specialized aspect of everything – the causally efficacious aspect – we should not be surprised that other aspects exist about which physics says nothing. Such aspects exist – the experiential aspects of things, both perceptual features of things external to us, and mental aspects of brain processes going on inside our heads. In order to know about the experiential aspects of things – colours, sounds, smells – we need to have had, at some stage in our lives, experiences of these things. No special sort of experience is required, however, in order to understand physics. This means physics cannot predict the experiential. But physics does not need to predict the experiential in order to carry through its predictive and explanatory tasks. Since physics is specifically designed to avoid referring to the experiential, its failure to do so provides no grounds whatsoever for holding that the experiential does not really exist or, if it does exist, it is inherently inexplicable. All this goes some way towards solving the philosophical part of the mind-body problem.