Selected Lecture Notes on Necessity, Probability, and Nature.1
[Conclusion of Lecture 2:]
. . .
[Space for the Sophists is . . .]
Place—the topoi of arguments from which conceptions of entities and motions constructed.
Particularized to local motion, space is distance, calculated or measured. Empty in the sense of being nothing, while the entity is being. Finite and measurable.
This treatment of nature in terms of individual experiences involves a mode of thought which we shall call discrimination. Motion [is] experienced motion or measured motion and the arguments by which its characteristics can be separated from the experience. Space is empty in the sense that it marks the distance between the beginning and the end of a motion and is in all respects nothing or non-being. Finite and boundable.
The differences between the four kinds of motion sketched clearly from the characteristics of the space involved. Analytical process could have been reversed—if we began with the four spaces, the differences of the kinds of motion would be clarified.
The emergence of the philosophic problems begins to be more apparent when on[e] examines more fully what is involved in the four modes of thought briefly sketched and illustrated—assimilation, resolution, construction, and discrimination.
If our assumption is correct that everyone has an expressed or unrecognized philosophy by which he organizes, we have a natural tendency to take each of these terms in one sense and therefore to miss the issues which are raised by the other senses that are employed in opposed statements.
Thus if we are giv[en] to thinking that only bodies move and that therefore motion means local motion, we should be disposed to say that we employ all four modes of thought in our analysis—we construct composite bodies but we discriminate what [we] shall take as simple bodies, or atoms or subatomic particles in that construction; we assimilate them into organisms which have interrelated motion which determine each other; and we resolve problems presented at each level.
We propose to raise four questions in our search for philosophic problems—what we are talking about; what we can say about that subject or the facts that we can establish as authenticated; how we shall go about finding and certifying our facts; and what assumptions we make in such processes of inquiry and proof.
Apparent in our examples of motion and space that the four modes of thought involve talking about [are] four different subject matters. Proceed therefore to differentiate them relative to these subject matters to correct the distortion or limitation involved in defining them with respect to one preferred subject matter.
1. Assimilation involves more than the assimilation of bodies. What is involved, in knowing even bodies, is more than objects known, there is also the knowledge he seeks and the symbolic relations it involves, and the knower who seeks and psychological processes and accumulations he employs. The mode of assimilation seeks to assimilate these. The universe is the basic consideration involved in any analysis—it is and it is intelligent (as a condition to being intelligible) and it is symbolic. This the reason for the Platonic Ideas which are the cause of being and of intelligibility of all things; and it is the basis for distinguishing “natural” symbolic relations from “arbitrary” or “conventional” symbols.
For Plato the universe is based on the model of an intelligent animal, and its processes are therefore intelligent. Dialectic and mathematics penetrate to this nature and that is the basis for calling reason the “natural” method; below this level “opinion” or the sham arts may lead one astray by intruding personal or subjective orientations—but in the same region of the indeterminate dialectic will supply means by which to calculate probability and necessity.
Similar device in other forms of dialectic. Hegel—Phenomenology of Spirit and Logic—the history of any situation or institution and the logic of our analysis of it involve basically the same processes.
Dialectical materialism—distinction of science from ideology. Two sciences—the science of nature and the science of the history of society. But latter is basic to former.
These are all devices by which the processes of our intelligence are able to approximate to the processes of the universe or its historical development.
2. Resolution involves more than the statement of problems and inquiry for their solution. It involves also the problem of the relation of object, known, knower and knowledge.
For Aristotle four separate problems must be stated
(1) Theoretic sciences deal with natural motions of objects. As individuals they are experienced empirically, but the mind of the knower is able to arrive at inductive and abstract definitions which are pertinent to the thing but do not exist in it prior to the activity of the mind. Important that what is in the mind is in some sense in nature prior to us and prior in nature.
(2) Practical sciences—concerned not with natures but with habits or institutions, which like natural motions realize material potentialities. But they have different determinants of motion and different kinds of definition.
(3) Productive sciences—concerned with artificial objects—made by man—seek different kinds of definitions.
(4) Instrumental arts or faculties, like logic, dialectic and rhetoric[,] cause scientific knowledge or opinion or persuasion.
Motion in strict sense studied only in the theoretic sciences. Three kinds of necessity—absolute (in metaphysics) and two kinds of hypothetical necessity—physics (if a result[,] antecedents necessary—but not the reverse) and mathematical (if antecedents, the result necessary but not the contrary).
What we are talking about is not an intelligent reality, but one which is intelligible as a result of the operation of human intelligence.
3. Construction involves more than the process of making wholes out of parts. It involves also the process of insuring that the constructions we present as scientific are not distorted by intrusions of the knower and his faculties, knowledge and its processes, or the known projected in sense experience as such.
The object of scientific knowledge is bodies in motion. The knower can be an object of scientific knowledge if his processes are treated in terms of atoms in motion and this separates rational from sensitive or empirical knowledge—both of which can be known, but only the former produces scientific knowledge.
Arbitrary and verbal symbols to be avoided in science and in the canonic which is its method.
All motions and exchanges of motions are necessary. Chance due only to ignorance.
4. Discrimination involves more than distinguishing something from something else. It involves also the distinction of discriminat[ing] the frames of reference which are integral parts of any experience and the arguments which are expression conditioned by those frames of reference.
What we are talking about therefore is experience—there is no objective reality apart from it—and experience is therefore an amalgam of knower, known and knowledge. It can produce science—but not in the sense of certainty or objective rationality. Only probability is possible, there is no necessity.
Four different conceptions therefore of the subject matter of the natural sciences—or four ideas of nature—it is reason for Plato, an internal principle of motion for Aristotle, bodies in motion for Democritus, and nothing (in a sense which suggests the creative nothing—L’Etre et le néant of the existentialists today).
Proceed next time to seek the terms by which to further discriminate the operations of these four modes of thought, the ways in which they may be recognized, and the fashions in which they are related to each other.