Constituents of Matter / 6 / 6.1

6.1 THE STRUCTURE OF MODERN SCIENCE

Modern science, which man has created in order to render his everyday experience with things intelligible to himself and to make the resulting understanding unambiguously transmissible to others, stands twice removed from that experience. The first remove concerns man’s comportment towards the things which surround him and consists in a change-over from taking them as instruments he uses to taking them as objects he merely contemplates; the second remove concerns the structure of the totality of such contemplated objects and consists in man axiomatically asserting what that structure must be.

To see how the change of comportment comes about, consider the things which man encounters in his everyday dealings with the world. He can either make use of them in his projects, or stand back and merely contemplate them, but he can never do both simultaneously. When a thing is caught up in one of man’s daily projects, it appears to him as a participant in that project and thus becomes colored by the purpose of the project: its properties are judged in relation to that purpose, the moment in time assigned to its participation in the project is characterized by the mechanism through which the project is realized, and its spatial features are likewise referred to what happens in the project. For instance, imagine you want to hang a picture on the wall in a place which you cannot access directly, and further imagine that a chair of appropriate height is readily available to help you reach the hanging point. If you were engaged in this picture hanging project, the chair would be made present to you as a thing which you could use to achieve the goal of that project: it is here, now when you are trying to hang the picture, and it is just high enough for you to reach the desired hanging point when standing upon it. The chair is thus the thing you stand on to hang the picture, the moment in time at which you do so is now when you are trying to hang the picture, and the height of it is just what is appropriate for reaching the hanging point. What comes across is therefore the chair as an instrument.

If, on the other hand, you were not engaged in the hanging project but rather were merely looking at the selfsame chair, you would present it to yourself as simply there, something which was thrown down (ob-jaceo) to stand there against you, a wooden thing of such and such a form, texture, color, and dimensions; what was previously a thing colored by the project in which man used it would now become to you an object possessed of certain properties. Moreover, the moment when the object was thus made present to you would no longer be a ‘now when I am hanging the picture on the wall’ but rather would simply be any one ‘now’ from amongst the sequence of identical ‘nows’ counted off an ordinary clock. The height of the chair would similarly no longer be ‘just high enough to reach the hanging point’ but simply so and so many feet off the ground as measured on a yardstick. Personal time thus switches over to physical time and personal dimensions switch over to physical dimensions. This change in comportment from using things to standing them up against man’s inquiry we called objectification.

The contemplated world of objects, unlike the lived-in world of instruments, can be quantified through measurement. Because any moment in time is the same with any other moment, and any location in space is the same with any other location, man can compare the time specification of an event involving a given object with the time specification of a clock, and the space specification of that object with that of a yardstick, and then express the resulting differences numerically. This numerical representation of how objects are seen to behave clearly renders communication amongst men concerning that description unambiguous. However, while this quantified manifold of objects does numerically describes the manner in which the objects therein are seen to behave, it does not tell us why the observed behavior occurred the way that it did; it is a world quantified but not yet understood.

To reach modern science, we must go beyond mere quantification and respond to the clear sense we have that the manifold of objects is a community in which all members are involved with each other, a sense we inherited from our primary use of things as instruments when, by involving them with each other in our projects, we gradually gained a pre-conceptual understanding of the structure of the world represented by that community. However, after Descartes had separated man from the things which he manipulates, what the structure of such a community might be is no longer intelligible to him. Man must therefore axiomatically specify the manner in which members of the community influence each other. The basic idea is to assert how objects would behave if completely isolated from the influence of all other objects in the world and then specify a mechanism that would, under given experiential circumstances, turn that hypothetical behavior into the observed one. Thus, to explain observed mechanical behavior to himself, man assumes that any object would forever move uniformly in a straight line if left totally to itself. Like the parallel-lines-never-meet axiom of Euclidian geometry, this assertion of inertial movement is axiomatic because its veracity could not be observationally ascertained any more than one could verify that two parallel lines would in fact never meet each other as the corresponding Euclidian axiom asserts that it would be the case. Therefore, in light of the axiom, observed mechanical behavior of any object would appear as a deviation from inertial movement. That deviation however demands an explanation. Newton provides it in his second law of mechanics which asserts that any deviation from inertial motion is the result of the influence exerted upon the moving object by all other objects in the world. This mechanism requires in turn an agent which would mediate those influences. Newton conceived of such an agent and called it mechanical force. He specified the form of it in such a way as to correspond to the gravitational context he was considering. Eventually, what was meant by force changed from the familiar action transmitted through physical contact, to action transmitted at a distance, either instantaneously or through a field, to action transmitted at a distance through an exchange of bosons, but the underlying axiomatic structure served by the concept remained unchanged.

This structure was also employed to explain chemical and caloric experience. The corpuscular theory of matter axiomatically asserts that the inside of objects of experience is nothing but an outside and that, therefore, the mechanism which explains observed behavior attributable to their inside, such as chemical and caloric processes, would be mediated by objects extending outside influences upon each other. Here as well, the agents mediating the influence have proliferated in kind from the original molecules and atoms into a growing family of entities, but the underlying axiomatic structure they served continued to govern the relationships between them.

Modern science thus represents the world of daily experience in terms of a collection of two types of objects: objects of experience and objects of explanation. The former are given to us and their behavior can be numerically characterized through ordinary measurement; the latter we give to ourselves in order to explain the behavior of the former. This collection of objects is then axiomatically structured along the proposition that the observed behavior of any object of experience is caused by the influence of all other such objects upon it and that the influence is exercised through a mechanism mediated by an object of explanation.

This axiomatic structure is hardly arbitrary. Just as the parallel-lines-never-meet hypothesis of Euclidian geometry does, the fundamental assertions of modern science appear in each case to be intuitively evident and serve to suggest straightforward mechanisms for connecting all objects to each other in respect with any given experiential setting. We do well to remember, however, that while these mechanisms do therefore appear to be transcriptions of what presents itself to us in reality, they are nevertheless pure creations of the mind. Consequently, just as the underlying structure is hypothetical, the agents which would execute the implied mechanisms of reciprocal influence are likewise hypothetical. These objects of explanation are therefore not like those objects of experience whose behavior they help to explain; they are ontologically different.

Therein lies the distinction between our reading of what science tells us about the world and the conventional reading. On the conventional reading, the world is all there, given to us to observe, and so are the laws that govern their behavior. Science is then the process of discovering those objective laws. On our reading, science is rather the process of explaining the structure of the world. For us, the laws of science are not objective rules which govern the workings of nature but rather mechanisms that we have freely conceived in our minds in order to explain what we observe. Those mechanisms are the conceptual representations of the mechanisms through which man pre-conceptually involves things with each other for the sake of attaining his own goals, and are constructed in such a way as to describe those involvements as interactions between objects of experience mediated by the objects of explanation that we freely create for that purpose.