A selection of worlds

What is at issue here can be made clear by considering three competing images of the world in which we find ourselves. The images in question are those of the fundamentalist, the emergentist, and what, for reasons to be explained shortly, we can call the patchwork realist. The fundamentalist holds that there is some finite set of laws (however conceived) which can account for all phenomena, everywhere. A simple illustration of the spirit of fundamentalism can be seen in the wording, especially the first two words, of Newton’s first law of motion, the principle of inertia, which reads, in English, ‘Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it’ (1934: 13). That’s the kind of law fundamentalists like: ones which, supposedly, apply to every entity, event or process of some kind, in Newton’s case to bodies with nonzero masses.4 _{A natural way to understand the view} that physics is complete is to read it as a claim about physical laws. Note the prominent place of laws in Papineau’s formulation quoted near the beginning of Chapter One above (Papineau 1993: 16). In this case the thesis that physics is complete can be seen as a species of fundamentalism which holds either that there is some subset of the fundamental laws which account for all physical effects by reference to only physical factors, or, more simply, that all fundamental laws are physical, and form a causally closed set. This is not the only way to understand the completeness of physics, but it is the way most relevant to the bulk of the argument of the present chapter, so in what follows when I refer to fundamentalism I will have in mind a kind of fundamentalism which also involves commitment to the completeness of physics. Where there is a danger of

2

See the account of Cartwright on Laws in section (3.1) below, Cartwright’s treatment of facticity is criticised in section (5.2). Bhaskar’s philosophy of science is discussed in Chapter Two section (4) above.

3 _{This means that it is not part of my task here to defend realism against, for example, the type of challenge} mounted by van Fraassen (1980).

4

I am not claiming that Newton himself was a fundamentalist in the sense at issue here, merely that his work includes examples of laws of the fundamental type.

ambiguity I will refer to ‘physical fundamentalism’. It is worth noting, though, that physical fundamentalism makes a stronger claim than the completeness thesis, since physics could be regarded as complete without any endorsement of fundamentalism being required for the simple reason that the completeness thesis on its own does not entail any particular commitments about laws. It is a clear enough consequence of this that damage to fundamentalism need not necessarily harm the Completeness Thesis.

As noted in Chapter Three above (section 1), Cartwright describes the world of the fundamentalist as one where all the facts ‘belong to one grand scheme’ and hence where facts ‘legitimately regimented into theoretical schemes’ have a special status, but contends that this doctrine is one ‘we must resist’ and later offers an image of a patchwork world consisting of ‘tens of thousands of patches, cut up in no particularly logical way, exhibiting tens of thousands of different regularities of countless different forms’ (1994: 281, 298). On the view Cartwright is defending there just is no set of fundamental laws of the ‘every body’ type — merely local, even transitory, regions of particular kinds of order. In the essay just quoted Cartwright uses the image of a patchwork of laws, a view she calls ‘nomological pluralism’ (1994: 288). The corresponding ontology is also pluralist, i.e. she urges that the world described by a patchwork of laws should be seen as itself a patchwork. Here Cartwright is following the principle that we ‘best see what nature is like when we look at our knowledge of it’ (1983: 13). Her position is in important ways similar to that of Dupré who, in The Disorder of Things, argues for the need to recognise the ‘underlying ontological complexity of the world’ (1993: 7) and, as noted, dubs his preferred view ‘promiscuous realism’. Although the two positions are similar in some respects, and also related, what is important about Cartwright for my purposes is her account of laws. To make clear that this is largely independent of the considerations arising from Dupré’s assault on unity, I will call Cartwright’s position ‘patchwork realism.’

What has been said here does not exhaust the options, though. An important intermediate position on these questions is emergentism, discussed in Chapter Two above, and which (in some versions of that doctrine) sees a hierarchy of kinds of law, typically starting with physical laws as a foundation and including, for example, biological laws for those material entities which are alive, psychological laws for those living beings which are conscious, socio-economic laws for those conscious beings which associate and exchange in certain ways, and so-on. There are many examples of emergentist theories but for my purposes here I only need to note that at least some emergentists fall, in a sense, between physical fundamentalism and promiscuous realism. The type of emergentist (‘strong’ rather than ‘weak’5) I am thinking of here would hold that physical laws are indeed generally applicable in some sense, but also that they fail completely to fix the likelihood even of certain physical outcomes which are rather co-determined by both physical and non-physical laws. As we saw Bhaskar, for example, holds that some basic physical laws such as that of the conservation of mass-energy can

be held to be true, but argues that such laws do not by themselves decide what will happen, only place restrictions on what can happen (1977: 109).6

The in-between quality of emergentism can be seen from the ways in which it might appear offensive to either physical fundamentalists or promiscuous realists. From the perspective of the committed physical fundamentalist, emergentism seems like an unacceptable compromise position, raising too many difficult questions about the status of the ‘emergent’ laws, the empirical content of the claim that there even are such laws, and the proper account of the conditions under which they might be expected to arise. From the point of view of the fundamentalist who thinks that physics is complete, emergent laws are unnecessary, and also undesirable since they suggest the overdetermination of at least some physical effects.7

On the other hand a serious patchwork realist is likely to regard emergentism as similarly obnoxious for conceding too much to the fundamentalist, and creating a position amounting to a kind of hierarchical fundamentalism. Cartwright, for example, protests against the emergentist that the view that macro-properties ‘come out of nowhere’ falls afoul of the fact that there is ‘nothing of the newly landed about these properties’ (1994: 290). She is willing to grant that her position has at least some common ground with emergentism:

Reductionism has long been out of fashion in biology, and now emergentism is again a real possibility. But the long-debated relations between biology and physics are not good paradigms for the kind of anti-fundamentalism I urge. Biologists used to talk about how new laws emerge with the appearance of ‘life’; nowadays they talk, not about life, but about levels of complexity and organization. Still, in both cases the relation in question is that between larger, richly endowed, complex systems, on the one hand, and fundamental laws on the other: it is the possibility of ‘downwards reduction’ that is at stake (1994: 281).

She also, though, makes clear that she wishes to go beyond the simple rejection of downwards reduction typical of emergentism, and assault the possibility of ‘cross-wise reduction’ (1994: 281) in a way which directly undermines the defensibility of the view that there even are nomological or ontological foundations of a sort congenial to either physical fundamentalism or emergentism. And emergentists of the sort at issue here, just like promiscuous realists, would deny that physics is complete, and hence have common foes in physical fundamentalism and the completeness thesis.

The point of this brief survey, getting these three ontological options on the table, is to make clear what at least one of the issues hanging on the status of fundamental laws is. If such laws are philosophically

6

Bhaskar’s emergentism is discussed in Chapter Two above, especially section (5). 7

For example Kim (1992) who, as usual, takes the Completeness Thesis as a premise and hence regards emergentism as a species of supervenience, prone to the danger of epiphenomenalism (the diagnosis of which occupies much of Kim’s recent work). The notion of strong emergence plays no significant role in Kim’s account.

respectable then we seem to have a choice between emergentism and physical fundamentalism, perhaps even in the extreme form of the completeness of physics. If, though, fundamental laws lack the required support then, to the extent that we are realists, we had better be patchwork realists.

In the terms adopted in Chapter Three above, what Cartwright calls fundamentalism is a version of the ‘order at the bottom’ ideal. As also noted in that chapter, there are at least two likely lines of attack against the fuller ‘order at the top: order at the bottom’ expectation: the use of disorder at the top to try and block any inference to order at the bottom, and direct attack on order at the bottom. Order at the top is not essential to the Completeness Thesis, and is in any event implausible. (Dupré is correct about at least the latter point.) The separation of order at the top from completeness was the burden of argument of Chapter Three. Although, as we will see, some relaxation of and modification to the order at the bottom ideal is called for, my principal task here is to defend the plausibility of order at the bottom against Cartwright, who mounts a direct assault on it. The position I defend here is not full blown fundamentalism – Cartwright has successfully created a view which no-one in their right mind would endorse there, and I for one am uncertain whether any historical individual in the history of the philosophy of science is a fundamentalist of the sort Cartwright sets out to refute. Rather I defend what I call moderate fundamentalism, which involves salvaging a reasonable measure of truth for fundamental laws, but steers clear of the excesses of the facticity view. The distinction between moderate fundamentalism and the extremist version become clear in what follows.