Science is also not a unified field. You made a good point. In experience we always see a cause for things. I’m not sure if QM has uncaused phenomena. Radioactive decay is often cited in books as events that are uncaused.
The answer to the last question ought to be obvious to you. “Reason” needs support, grounding. What reasons, or acts for a reason is a mind or a soul. So, you’re right back to “determination-by-something (soul, matter, whatever)”. Even if you say it is a self, a person, or a human being which acts for a reason, that’s a ‘determination-by-human being’. Only by Platonic realism could reasons be construed as independent things, which would suffice to account for an action.
Are they? So what is the argument for which they are the conclusion? It’s clear that any finite set of particular assertions is insufficient to establish a universal—the well-known problem of induction. No matter how many black ravens you see, the next one might be pink; you are not licensed to claim that all ravens are black. So induction is not a logical conclusion—quite the opposite; it’s logically invalid.
So think again. There’s more going on here.
You yourself have answered well what you want to hear:
“But if you are going up the sceptical garden path, then there is not much point in my responding to you, since you are not reading this.
Note the performative contradiction in your response”.
These are your words and they suit you.
What you will. There’s more here than wishful thinking. Cheers.
QM has indeterminism but it isn’t acausal. Norton Dome is both indeterminism and acausal. Has anyone ever encountered an uncaused event? I daresay 99.99% will answer no.
Charles Sanders Peirce (dubbed ‘America’s Aristotle’) proposed a quality of nature he called ‘tychism’ which is something like spontaneous action.
In his theory of tychism, Peirce sought to deny the central position of the doctrine of necessity which maintains that “the state of things existing at any time, together with certain immutable laws, completely determine the state of things at every other time.”[1] One of the principal arguments of the necessitarians is that their position involves a presupposition of all science. Peirce attacks this idea asserting: “To ‘postulate’ a proposition is no more than to hope it is true.”[2] Thus an avenue is opened up allowing the entry of chance as a fundamental and absolute entity.
Peirce does not, of course, assert that there is no law in the universe. On the contrary, he maintains that an absolutely chance world would be a contradiction and thus impossible. Complete lack of order is itself a sort of order. The position he advocates is rather that there are in the universe both regularities and irregularities ~Wikipedia
It doesn’t sound too remote from the paper being discussed here (particularly the quotation footnoted [2])
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Science is deterministic, if you exclude the measurement problem in QM. Science is marvelous as you will know when you turn on the tap in the cold of winter and get hot water. Peirce was impeded as we all are, but that didn’t stop him from making momentous advancements in logic.
Not always:
- Radioactive decay is generally understood as intrinsically probabilistic.
- Genetics deals with predispositions rather than certainties.
- Epidemiology and medicine routinely identify causal factors statistically.
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The problem lies elsewhere, not in the nature of science. At its heart, science is about this happens and so that will happen. When I press “d” on my keyboard “d” usually appears on my screen 
Curious how deeply the fundamentalism of determinism penetrates into scientific myth.
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Yes, Anscombe says that someone might think the following:
Though it was not feasible for us to find the necessary path of the ball because our margins of error are too great, yet there was a necessary path, which could be assigned a sufficient probability for firm acceptance of it by anyone (not one of us) capable of reducing his limits of accuracy in measurement to a sufficiently small compass. . . . From one impact to the next, the path is surely determined, and so the whole path is after all. (96)
“Not one of us” affirms that, for a human, such knowledge is impossible. But as she explains, the limits of human knowledge are only relevant if we want to make a prediction; they say nothing about what is the case.
But I find her next step a bit puzzling, as she argues against this view. She says:
Then “Each stage of the ball’s path is determined” must mean “Upon any impact, there is only one path possible for the ball up to the next impact (and assuming no air currents etc.)”. But what ground could one have for believing this, if one does not believe in some system of which it is a consequence?
What do you think she means by “some system” here? Does she mean, in effect, that you have to assume the “system of determinacy” in order to argue for it in any given case? But how strict must the assumption be? Would she reject a formulation that was more like “Since it is overwhelmingly likely that macro physical events are determined (even though we haven’t the knowledge or tools to show how, in many cases), therefore the ball is almost certainly destined for one particular path and no other”?
I think we don’t need the Galton box to put this in question. We can say, if you like, that there is really some indeterminacy there (though I don’t think there is, until we get below the macro level). But consider tossing a ball up in the air. Will a “system of determinacy” assert that the ball will descend? I’d call it overwhelmingly likely, and in fact certain if some easily specifiable (and ascertainable) background conditions are stipulated (ending, perhaps, with “The world doesn’t end while the ball is in the air . . .”) Can’t Anscombe agree, and simply point out that none of this has much to do with causality or necessitation?
The quote is a bit odd - skipping several paragraphs in the ellipsis. But perhaps I can see why that was appropriate - it’s clear she is setting up “the path is surely determined” as her target.
There follows a series of points, targeting different aspects of such determinism. She for instance differentiates the utility of the system - here Newtonian Mechanics - from it being true; the difference between using Newton’s laws to make a calculation, and claiming that they describe how the world is. As a calculating tool, we can use the system to determine the outcome of a collision with a given degree of accuracy; and here we make no commitment to determinism. If instead it is accepted as a true and accurate set of rules for how the world functions, then we are indeed committed to determinism. And in the latter case we have taken a step beyond what is warranted by the system, as taking it to be not only a device for doing calculations, but also a metaphysical reality. Nowadays no physicist would accept Newtonian Physics as the truth about the world; it is a device for calculating outcomes in one class of situations.
So yes, the assumption that the system is determinate is an addition to the system itself - the assumption that the system applied everywhere and anywhere. I take Anscombe as making much the same point as you, that we don’t need a system of determinacy in order to be confident that the ball will fall. High confidence in an outcome and metaphysical necessitation of a unique path are different things.
Good, I hoped I was understanding her correctly. I wonder if we can push it one step further: “We have high confidence not only in the outcome but also in the hypothesis that there is a unique path (or that the tossed ball will descend in just the way that it does) but this is not due to any metaphysical necessitation. If we should ever discover that our hypothesis is indeed correct, that will reveal something about the world and how we use concepts to understand it, not about what must be the case, transcendentally.”
By putting it this way, we allow for the possibility that some form of macro determinism is in play, but we make no commitment to either 1) knowing that it is, or 2) the idea that to be determined is the same thing, conceptually, as to be necessary. I think Anscombe wants to reserve “necessity” for logical talk (@Wosret alluded to this earlier), and that seems a good way to go.
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We should move away from the likes of Peirce here. The pragmatism advocated in the USA leads to the denial of a difference between what is true and what is believed, a view that will not be found in Anscombe and Wittgenstein.
Anscombe is not suggesting that truth is some warranted assertibility, even in some distant limit. A causal claim can be believed, useful, embedded in a working practice, and still simply false. Anscombe is not suggesting that truth is just what it is useful to believe. She is examining how we use “cause” and “determine” and she finds them intersecting but not mutually exhaustive. That the bomb does or does not explode is a truth, not a mere probability or convenient assertion.
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Necessity won’t do for causation. Nor are appeals to “logic” of much help without quite a bit of nuance. If some event B occurs, then it is implied by any event A; if B is true, then A⊃B for any A.
Folk are going to have trouble with that. But that’s what the logic says. If the crow is black, then that Caesar crossed the rubicon implies that the crow is black - as does that Caesar did not cross the rubicon.
This folk notion of causation just doesn’t work. We don’t want to be stuck with that Caesar’s crossing the rubicon caused crows to be black.
It might seem we can move on to modality and necessity and claim that A causes B if and only if in any possible world in which B occurs, it is preceded by A—that, necessarily, A⊃B.
That gets rid of Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon causing crows to be black, since there are worlds in which crows are black and yet Caesar stayed in Gaul.
In the bomb, decay causes the explosion. In some possible worlds the decay occurs, but is not detected, and the bomb does not explode. Yet we would say that the decay causes the explosion. Here we have an example that does not meet the criteria: Anscombe’s causation without necessitation. Any modal analysis that tries to patch this by finding a more fine-grained sufficient condition (decay-plus-working-counter-plus-intact-wiring-plus…) just chases the indeterminism down the chain without ever catching it, since at bottom the decay event itself is, on the physics, not sufficient for anything.
We can do the same sort of thing with the Galton Board. What we get is a regress, iterations of increasingly larger Galton Boards, such that in some possible world there is a board the initial conditions of which are insufficiently certain to determine the outcome.
This sort of determinism becomes an act of faith.
I had the idea—and please correct me if I’m wrong—that the great strength of modern physics was its ability to represent physical processes mathematically. By identifying the precisely measurable aspects of phenomena, it became possible to express them in mathematical form. Since mathematics is governed by logical necessity, this allowed scientists to derive empirical predictions with remarkable precision. For example, although Newton’s laws are most often associated with the motions of planets, one of the practical motivations behind the development of calculus was better calculation of artillery trajectories.
This doesn’t mean that physical events are themselves bound by logic. Rather, it means that physical processes can often be modelled in ways that allow logical inference to generate reliable predictions. Surely that relationship between mathematical reasoning and empirical observation lies at the heart of the scientific method. Dirac’s prediction of anti-matter is a textbook case.
I take it that Anscombe’s point is not that the two are unrelated, but that logical necessity should not be conflated with physical causation. The success of mathematical physics may tempt us to identify causation with deductive necessity, whereas her point is that causation is a distinct concept, even when our mathematical models describe it with extraordinary accuracy.
Is that close to what Anscombe is getting at?
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More or less. Pretty much. And so on. To get to the silly twenty word limit.
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I’d add one thing here, as concerned with “physical processes”, modern physics focuses on the measurable aspects of activity, motion. The measurability of the static aspects was already dealt with by ancient physics, and Euclidean geometry. The static was understood under the category of being, and the changing was designated as becoming. Plato and Aristotle demonstrated an incompatibility between the two. Logic, with its application of necessity was applicable to the static world of being, while it had failings in the world of change, becoming. This was brought to Plato’s attention by Zeno.
Newton, with his laws of motion, attempted to provide a bridge between the two. The first law characterizes the realm of being, and the second describes what is required to produce change within that realm of being, force. I propose that the second law is the basis for the modern concept of causation. Force is what produces change, as cause. The third law describes the effect of an application of force, and we are back to the realm of being, in the posterior, after the cause of change. So two unchanging things, each in its own logical world of being, when on a collision course, will collide, then continue, each in a changed logical world of being. The “force” of the collision is the cause of change.
According to what I describe above, logical necessity applies to the before and after of change, Newton’s first and third laws. The concept of causation is related to the second law, and the application of force. This amounts to the difference between logical necessity and causation. The determinist understanding is that every aspect of reality can be understood by the first law, making all instances of causation (application of force) determinable as collisions of past instances of being with logical necessity. This allows that the logical necessity of the past (prior) is extended to produce the logical necessity of the future (posterior).
But the concept of causation and “force” remain vague because the incompatibility between being and becoming, demonstrated by the ancient philosophers persists. Newton’s proposed bridge only provides a relation between the being of the past, with the being of the future, allowing for prediction by bridging the force of the present in that way. It bridges becoming rather that establishing a direct relation to it. In this way it obscures the very real lack of necessity inherent within that force, which is demonstrated by the need for the use of probability mathematics. This is evidence that whatever it is which is referred to by 'cause", and “force” does not obtain the degree of necessity required by logic. The lack of necessity is just written off by assumptions, entropy for example, or by Anscombe as “assuming no air currents etc.”.