CONCLUSIONES

For Dupré the expectation that science could be unified would ‘require the extremely incautious prediction that we will at some point cease to acquire any new interests’ (1983: 321). I have already noted that this extraordinary claim is not one which I can find any supporter of the unity of science endorsing, or indeed even suggesting. Nonetheless it might seem as though were a completed physical science to be achieved, it would follow in the ways expected by Oppenheim and Putnam that all questions would have been thereby shown to be physical ones, and in principle amenable to physical treatment.81

Rutherford perfectly captured the stupendous arrogance apparently licensed by the foundational position of physics with his claim that ‘All science is either physics or stamp collecting.’ In other words, there is, on the one hand, the proper study of real, fundamental, causal relationships, and then there are a whole range of other ways of describing things, which, in virtue of not being fundamental, ultimately amount to expressions of collector idiosyncrasy and preference. One way of saying what Dupré’s position is about, is that he does not want to allow non-physical enquiries to take on the status of stamp collecting. The arguments above, especially those of section (5) should show fairly clearly how no such consequences follow from the Completeness Thesis in the event that it is true. The discussion of functionalism just offered reinforces the point in the context of a particular body of physicalist theories.82

Although the point may well not stand in need of pressing, I would like to conclude this line of argument by noting that even in mathematics, where there is a widespread consensus that a single unifying theory, namely set theory, has been found which embraces all of mathematics, there is no question at all either that there is no more work to be done, or that significant new relationships between higher level mathematical constructions cannot be found, even though all of them are thought of as in one sense no more than set theoretical entities. Marquis (1998) considers a range of epistemological questions related to the classification of particular mathematical theories and constructs. He notes in ways which are entirely congenial to Dupré’s treatment of other sciences that a major problem for many of these theories is one of classification. He notes that even if from the point of view of set theory all sets are ‘on an equal footing’, it is also the case that ‘from the point of view of particular disciplines, not all sets are equally important and significant: the universe of sets has to be carved in ways which are not set-theoretical in general. The tools required to carve the set-theoretical world vary from one discipline to another’ (1998: 189). In case there be any doubt that the fact of the set-

81

If the succession of reductions required to get from psychology to fundamental physics is achieved, ‘then psychological laws will have, in principle, been reduced to laws of atomic physics, although it would nevertheless be hopelessly impractical to try to derive the behaviour of a single human being directly from his constitution in terms of elementary particles’ (Oppenheim and Putnam: 1958: 7)

82 _{The ‘assumption that every psychological event is a physical event does not guarantee that physics (or, a}

fortiori, any other discipline more general than psychology) can provide an appropriate vocabulary for psychological theories’ (Fodor 1974: 57).

theoretical underpinning licence any general reductionism he is careful to point out that: ‘One thing is clear: these classifications are not reducible to one another in the same way that differential and algebraic considerations are not equivalent in topology. What is still not clear is how these classifications should be related, or whether they should be related at all’ (1998: 190).

Recall that Dupré holds to the view that failures of practical reductionism diminish the plausibility of what he calls ‘theological reductionism’ – the notion that an epistemologically ideal entity could perform the reductions of which we are incapable (1983: 323, 343-345). Dupré maintains that the only plausible support for the notion that theological reduction, or any reduction ‘in principle’ is possible must be that enough successful reductions in fact have been performed, that ‘the evidence for this assumption must be that the behaviour of complex systems can in fact be shown to be derivable from laws governing their constituents’ (1983: 345). But even where we have a full account of the behaviour of the constituents, in the amazingly simple yet endlessly surprising artificial world of the cellular automata, no such derivations are generally possible, and there are good reasons why this is so. Having reason to believe that a given system is causally closed does have some effects: in the Life case, for example, it makes clear that there is no question which needs answering about where spaceships get their patterns of behaviour and interaction from – they do so from their well understood constituents. But the knowledge that Life worlds are causally closed cannot tell us everything they will do, and it cannot permit the real work of classification, analysis and all of the other business of science to be pre- empted. Dupré’s worry about theological reductionism is another red herring – no scientist is condemned to being a mere ‘stamp collector’ in the event that the Completeness Thesis is true.

8.

Conclusion

The simplest way to state the conclusion of the present chapter is to say that although Dupré’s

conclusions are incompatible with the Completeness Thesis, neither his evidence nor his arguments present any significant difficulties whatsoever. More specifically all of the forms of epistemic disorder which he draws our attention to are entirely acceptable from the point of view of the Completeness Thesis. There is just nothing there which decides against the completeness of physics, or which ultimately even allows his position to be distinguished from that of one who endorses completeness, most obviously in the case of functionalism.

This does not, and cannot, show that the Completeness Thesis is true. What it shows, rather, is that no argument from disorder at the top can be relied upon to count against the general thesis that there is order at the bottom. Rather, the effect of this brief discussion has been, I hope, to show that disordered phenomena at non- fundamental scales can be saved by defenders of the Completeness Thesis and promiscuous realists alike, which means that the proper way to proceed is directly to consider the issue of order at the bottom. This is the burden of the argument in the following chapter.

Another important conclusion of all this is that no plausible version of the Completeness Thesis can be associated with a general programme of theoretical reductionism. Even in cases where a micro-reduction is defensible, there is no automatic inference to a manageable theoretical reduction. Not only that, given the degree of autonomy of special enquiries, there is no reason why their implied ontologies should not cross-classify with those of other enquiries. Even while recognising a distinction between fundamental and pragmatic ontologies, we need not take that recognition to justify any commitment to the unity of science on a mid-century model.

Given that I have already offered independent arguments against the plausibility of emergentism, it might seem as though it would be possible to stop here: emergentism poses no significant threat to completeness, and neither does Dupré’s case. Both the argument against emergentism, and that against Dupré, though, rely upon a fairly traditional image of the best way to understand the laws of nature, and especially the laws relating to the action of fundamental physical forces. This understanding has been radically challenged by the work of Cartwright, and unless her arguments can be answered, the arguments of this and the preceding chapter are in serious trouble. It is to the consideration of Cartwright that I now turn.

Chapter Four: Cartwright and Patchwork Realism