The Vanishing Point: A Left-Hand Path Reading of Philosophy by Denys Spirin - HTML preview

Chapter 12

The substrate of the laws of nature is a pattern of regularity: things behave in specifiable ways which can be expressed as principles that govern the behavior.

The ontologization treats them as real entities in the world, features of reality that the scientist discovers.

Ancient and medieval thought ontologized a weaker version of this rung. The Greek physis names a principle of natural growth and order, not yet separated from the objects. The Stoic Logos is cosmic reason producing regular patterns in the natural world. The medieval framework, under the influence of Christian theology, treated the regularities as commands issued by God at creation, with the natural order maintained by divine concurrence. In each case the regularity is present as an ontological feature, but the conceptual machinery for a distinct level of laws as such has not yet been developed.

The fifth rung proper arrived with the scientific revolution. Descartes distinguished between the laws of nature and the beings they govern, and argued that the laws had been instituted by God at creation and were maintained by his continuing will. Newton treated the laws of motion and gravitation as universal, mathematically expressible, and applicable to every body in the cosmos.

Laplace completed the picture with his famous demon: a sufficient intelligence, given the positions and momenta of every particle and the laws that govern them, could predict the entire future and retrodict the entire past. The fifth rung is now fully installed. Laws are real, deterministic, and the physical world is their theater.

Hume, whose deflation of causation was examined on the first rung, performed the same work on the fifth two hundred years before the analogous initiatives on the other rungs. If causation is a habit of association, laws are regularities of succession — patterns in the sequence of events, not governors standing behind them. The stop was the same: the habits, accepted as psychological bedrock.

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THE VANISHING POINT: A LEFT-HAND PATH READING OF

PHILOSOPHY

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Kant's response to Hume was to relocate the causal structure of experience into the cognitive framework, with its necessity preserved.

Twentieth-and twenty-first-century analytic metaphysics produced a large space of positions on the fifth rung, and it can be surveyed quickly because most of them share a framework.

The neo-Humean tradition, culminating in David Lewis's Humean superve-nience, holds that laws are generalizations that appear in the best overall systematization of the total pattern of events in the world. There are no necessities beyond the patterns, which are the bottom layer. This is a sophisticated deflation of the fifth rung, and it stops at events, accepted as a mosaic of particular facts requiring no further analysis.

The necessitarians (Armstrong, Dretske, Tooley) ontologize the fifth rung by making laws into real relations between universals — which ontologizes the second rung as well. The structural realists (Worrall, Ladyman) go further: objects dissolve into mathematical structure, and the laws are reality. The fifth rung absorbs everything beneath it.

Dispositionalist and powers-based accounts locate the fifth rung in the objects themselves. Particulars have causal powers and dispositions, and laws are the general patterns that emerge from the exercise of these powers. This shifts the ontologization one level down, into the ontology of objects, and still treats the powers as real features of reality.

Constructive empiricism of van Fraassen refuses the whole enterprise. Science aims at empirical adequacy, not truth about unobservable structures. The theoretical framework by which we describe nature is a useful instrument, and there is no need to take a position on whether the laws correspond to anything real beyond the phenomena. It stops at the phenomena themselves, which are accepted as the bedrock on which empirical adequacy is evaluated.

A product of recursive distinction is either ontologized directly (necessitarians, dispositionalists, structural realists) or relocated to another level (Humean mosaics of events, Kantian categories, phenomenal adequacy) — the same pattern as on every preceding rung.

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DENYS SPIRIN

The laws of modern physics are mathematical: Maxwell's equations, the Schrödinger equation, the Einstein field equations, the Standard Model. The claim that these laws govern nature is the statement that mathematical structures hold for physical reality. The fifth rung therefore depends on the fourth.

If mathematical objects are real, the laws are real too; if they are abstractions, the laws are patterns of distinction applied to the empirical material and have whatever stability the combination of recursive distinction and empirical convergence produces.

Mathematical distinctions are what remains when the contingent features of the distinguishing operation are abstracted away. Physical measurements introduce empirical content and the combination yields laws that hold for the empirical material. The strongest argument for scientific realism takes this precision as evidence: if laws were not real, the success of science would be a miracle.

The premise is false. The subject's operations of distinction are structured; empirical material exhibits regularities at the scale at which the subject operates; the combination produces repeatable results. The repeatability belongs to the combination, not to a third layer of mind-independent governors standing behind it.

The fifth rung, like the fourth, does not require belief in a philosophically ro-bust sense to be worked with. A physicist can proceed on realist assumptions and the ontological question does not affect the technical one.