The Mechanist Objection

The chapter from today's point of view is quite cliched.

In what sense is efficient and mechanical causality more intelligible than final causality?

Thus an underlying assumption of natural science is that rather than intelligibility, science ought content itself with formulating laws, and laws and accurate in so far as they help in predicting and controlling nature. If we extend a bit the thesis then we have behaviorists. As Jaynes had pointed out, behaviorists do not actually believe that there's no content in consciousness, it is only that talking about it is vain, as what is positively verifiable only manifest in behavior. The Chinese room argument has its analogy in natural science.

A quote from Newton when he reproached recent philosophers who denied his theory of a gravitational force that doesn't agree with the strictly mechanical physics of the Cartesians, according to whom all luminous phenomena ought to be caused and propagated by pressure and movement:

The consideration of such a cause out of natural philosophy, feigning hypotheses for explaining all things mechanically, and referring other causes to metaphysics; whereas the main business of natural philosophy is to argue from phenomena without feigning hypotheses, and to deduce causes from effects, till we come to the very first cause, which certainly is not mechanical.

Comments#

Finality and Locality#

In natural science, and in particular in physics, where the mechanist still somehow prevail, the notion of locality is closely related to the rejection of finality. cf. van Fraassen, Law and Symmetry; there what is argued is that cause-and-effect, being local, is not really the modern physics' way of viewing the physical reality. Even in Lagrangian mechanics there's a (geometrically) global aspect.