The Scientific Landscape

PROBLEMS

FORCES

«[S]cience itself has produced ontological theories by a process of generalization» as in Lagrangian dynamics, the classical or the quantum theory of fields. «All these theories are generic in the sense that, far from representing narrow species of things, they describe the basic traits of whole genera of things» [MB3 21].
«[S]ome of the theories included in the so-called information sciences and in systems theory are so general, and at the same time so precise, that they qualify as theories in scientific metaphysics. For example a general control (or cybernetic) theory will apply not only to machines ... but also to [higher animals]» [MB3 21].

«[S]cience ... is permeated with ontological ideas ... so much so that some scientific theories are at the same time metaphysical» [MB3 21] «[A]ll science presupposes some metaphysics» [MB3 17]. «[S]cientific research proceeds on a number of metaphysical hypotheses» [MB3 16]: 'The world is composed of things'; 'Things are grouped into systems'; 'Every system ... interacts with other systems in certain respects ...'; 'Every thing abides by laws'; 'There are several kinds of law' (causal, stochastic, etc); ... [MB3 16f]. Some fundamental scientific problems are at the same time metaphysical, eg. 'Is there an ultimate matter?', 'Is the mental a function of the nervous system?' [MB3 19]. «If a scientific theory is axiomatized, some of the following concepts are likely to occur in it in an explicit fashion: part, juxtaposition, property, possibillity, composition, state function, state, event, process, space, time, life, mind, and society. However, the specific axioms of the theory will usually not tell us anything about such fundamental and generic concepts: science just borrows them ... There are such gaps in scientific knowledge ... because these are certain ideas which scientists use freely without bothering to examine, perhaps because they look obvious. The ontological theories that clarify and articulate the general ideas underlying a scientific theory T may be called the ontological background of T.»

Example 1: state. «Every thing is ... in some state or other. This [ontological] hypothesis underlies all science ...» -> more.

Example 2: space and time. «So much are space and time taken for granted in science that most descriptions of things are effected in terms of space or time - i.e. space and time coordinates are used as independent variables. Moreover space and time are usually regarded as external to things and their changes: they are taken to constitute a fixed scenario.
True, on the relativistic theory of gravitiation things influence the structure of spacetime ... But they do not create the basic manifold. ... In sum science tells us what the structure of spacetime is but not what spacetime is.
This procedure, though legitimate in science, is unsatisfactory in philosophy. Here we cannot take space and time for granted because philosophy takes for granted nothing but the existence of the whole universe. ...
Therefore instead of assuming that space and time are absolute (autonomous, self-existing) or even mildly absolute (influenced but not created by the furniture of the world), we should try and construct them out of facts.» [MB3 276f]

-> ontological status of spacetime

«Many philosophers, from Parmenides through Leibniz and Hegel to Gonseth and Scholz, have believed that logic is a sort of universal physics, i.e. the most general theory of being or becoming. ... The rationale for this view is that a tautology of ordinary logic ... is true of anything, i.e. no restrictions are placed on the individual variable or the predicate variable. This is certainly true: logic refers to everything and hold for anything in any respect. It would seem therefore that logic is a soft of minimal ontology ...
However, although logic is indeed indifferent to the kind of referent, it does not describe or represent, let alone explain or predict, any factual iterms. The term "Every organism is either alive or dead" concerns organisms but does not say anything definite about them; hence it is not a biological statement or even an ontological one. Rather, the proposition says something about the particular combination of "or" and "not" [dead = not alive] that occurs in it. Logic is the set of theories describing the properties of logical concepts - the connectives, the quantifiers, and the entailment relation. So much so that none of these concepts has a real counterpart or at least a unique one. Inded, there are neither negative nor alternative things, properties, states, or events. Generalization, whether existential or universal, is strictly a conceptual operation. And the entailment relation has no ontic correlate either, although it has sometimes been likened to the causal relation. Further, if it be admitted that tautologies are analytic, hence a priori, they cannot be also synthetic a priori truths. In sum logic is not ontological» [MB3].

«Anyone who deals with the semantics of natural language and, therefore, with the explanation of the relation between language and the world, is driven to ask questions which lead him into the field of ontology or metaphysics. In order to analyse the information carried by linguistic utterances the inquirer has to discover what the expressions they contain refer to. For this purpose, he needs a theory of the world and, particularly, of what basic categories of entities there are, what fundamental properties the entities have and how they are related. Strictly speaking, the task is to find out which ontology underlies natural language and should be characterized for an accout of its meaning structure. In contrast to certain philosphical efforts, the requisite ontological theory [for linguists] cannot simply be one that obeys revisonary principles of parsimony or structural elegance. Indeed, considerations which are essentially directed to explain away objects of ordinary experience and through in terms of "less controversail entities" miss the mark of such a theory. Rather ... it has to describe adequately the ontology of the common-sense world, i.e. the world coinciding with our common conceptual scheme. So, to develop a formal theory of ontology included implicitly in natural language means, in essence, to reconstruct the ontological knowledge resulting from the way we conceptualize the world in everyday life.» [OntDom 785f]

«Formal ontology has been recently defined as "the systematic, formal, axiomatic development of the logic of all forms and modes of being" ... In practice, formal ontology can be intended as the theory of a priori distinctions:

• among the entities of the world (physical objects, events, regions, quantities of matter ...);
• among the meta-level categories used to model the world (concepts, properties, qualities, states, roles, parts ...).

«All information processing systems may be regarded, at least to a first approximation, as automata: nervous systems, servomechanisms, computers, TV networks, and so on. Therefore the referent of automata theory is ... the entire genus of information processing systems, whether physical, chemical, living or social. And because the theory is concerned with certain traits of concrete systems, it is not a formal theory but a factual one. Indeed it provides an exact and simple (hence also superficial) model of a system interacting with its environment regardless of any specific features of interest to the special sciences - such as the kinds of material it is built from and the way it is energized. For this reason automata theory belongs not only in advanced technology but also in ontology» [MB4 264].

Computational Systems «On the assumption that nothing causal interferes with its physical operation, the execution of software by hardware has the effect of creating a system whose behavior conforms to special normative constraints defined by these properties. Indeed, that is precisely what we should expect of a computational system that has been designed to fulfil the requirements of an automatic formal system or a physical symbol system. Computational systems thus appear to be properly envisioned as syntax-processing or mark-manipulating systems, which conform to the restrictions imposed upon semantic engines or physical symbol systems. They have the ability to execute algorithms encoded into the form of programs by means of a prgraooming language that enables them to function properly. They thus appear to be normatively-directed, problem-solving, syntax-processing causal systems» [Fetzer:161, underlineing added]

«In fact, the Church-Turing thesis has been so successful, that it is now almost moot. In the early twentieth century, mathematicians often used the informal phrase effectively computable, so it was important to find a good formalization of the concept. Modern mathematicians instead use the well-defined term Turing computable (or computable for short). Since the undefined terminology has faded from use, the question of how to define it is now less important» [w].
Ontological possibilities [w]:

1. The universe is a TM (strong Church-Turing thesis).
2. The universe is a hypercomputer, but hypercomputable physical events cannot be harnessed for constructing a programmable hypercomputer.
3. Hypercomputers are constructible, we just haven't figured out how to do it.

• information theory: qubits instead of bits: «The quantum resource, independently from its actual hardware implementation, is treated as a collection of identical elementary units termed qubits; a qubit is an abstract quantum system whose state space is the set of the normalised vectors of the two dimensional Hilbert space C², and can encode as much information as a point on the surface of a unit sphere (the Bloch sphere). Due to the structure of the quantum state space, a qubit can encode a superposition of the two boolean digits and is thus more powerful than a classical bit, though the state can not be read out directly.» [Toward an architecture for quantum programming]
• computer science: different "effective" computation primitives: «It is well known that the no-cloning theorem excludes the possibility of replicating the state of a generic quantum system. Since the call-by-value paradigm is based on the copy primitive, this means that quantum programming can not use call-by-value; therefore a mechanism for addressing parts of already allocated quantum data must be supplied by the [programming] language.» [Toward an architecture for quantum programming]