Whose Laws? Whose Nature?

Since this is my first blog post, I will explain the purposes and aims of this blog. This blog takes its title from a line in Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logio-Philosophicus, which reads "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." The Tractatus was an effort to examine the relationship between language and reality, and therefore the limits of philosophy and science, and in this work he concludes that much of what we say or wish to say cannot be said fully and objectively given the limits of language. Under this umbrella of the unsayable he includes metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics. Unlike the logical positivists who were influenced by the Tractatus, he did not think that only that which can be said is meaningful or objectively real; in fact, he thought that many of the most important and real things in the world could not be examined or stated fully by language, and so they must be shown rather than said. The title of this blog is "one can speak": in other words, I am flipping Wittgenstein's famous maxim on its head. Although I consider Wittgenstein to be absolutely brilliant, I also think that we can do metaphysics; we just have to be very careful with our language. This blog will examine metaphysical, ethical, and aesthetic ideas (among others), but will seek to do so in a succinct, clear, and careful manner, because, as Wittgenstein observed, many philosophical problems are the result of becoming bewitched by language. Nowhere is this bewitchment by language seen more clearly than in modern popular science. Philistinism towards philosophy, of which most contemporary scientists (barring the religious ones) are guilty, was not seen in earlier (and far superior) modern scientists such as Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Einstein, and Planck. The value of philosophy in the scientific realm is that it can define the scope and limits of science, and "clean up" the language that scientists use. Wittgenstein postulated that often times philosophical problems arise when we divorce words from their everyday context and use them in a foreign "language game." I think a clear example of this is seen in the talk of so-called "laws of nature." In this example, the word "law" is divorced from a legalistic context and is situated in the realm of physics. Now, what scientists refer to as laws of nature can be called "laws" in an analogous way, but not in an equivocal way. The problem arises when we start to think of the term "law" of nature in an equivocal way, in much the same way that popular understanding of theology can be obscured by understanding terms as equivocal, rather than analogous. The problem that arises in the case of "laws of nature" is that the term "law" makes these observations seem like independent, subsistent entities which have causal influence, or as ultimate explanations (which they are not). The reason why this misunderstanding arises is because the word "law," in ordinary usage, is an independent, subsistent entity that has causal influence, albeit a constructed one. In the realm of science, however, what scientists call laws of nature are really just descriptions and abstractions (often mathematical ones) of how things tend to behave given their natures (or substantial forms). That is why laws of nature cannot in principle be some sort of explanation, since they are merely descriptions and abstractions of concrete reality, and so the reality of laws of nature presupposes the existence of concrete reality. The nature of concrete reality can only be experienced; it cannot be entirely described mathematically, since we live in a world of objects and not of equations. This essentially entails that the purely quantitative, predictive models of physics cannot in principle explain deeper reality, and so this makes the quest for a "theory of everything" in physics a complete non-starter, especially considering the implications of Gödel's incompleteness theorems and the Duhem-Quine thesis (more on these in a later post). The obsessive quest of physicists to explain everything could be avoided if they would have paid more attention to Wittgenstein and other philosophers (more on them later) who have shown the limits of science and the limits of materialism. The consequence of all of this is that in order to examine the deeper nature of things, we need to enter the realm of pure mind and pure being; and here, at stage left, enters metaphysics.