2019-02-28, 07:04 PM
Putnam on causation, intentionality, and Aristotle
Quote:...the aim of a causal theory is to explain intentionality or representation in purely physical terms – terms that make no reference to concepts other than those recognized by physical science. Yet given their actual examples, causal theorists in fact help themselves to a “notion of things ‘causing’ other things [which] is not a notion… simply handed to us by physics” (Renewing Philosophy, p. 50) – namely, the everyday notion that presupposes the interest-relative distinction between “the cause” and contributing or background conditions. That is to say, they make reference to ordinary objects – cats, the valves on pressure cookers, and the like – in a way that gives them a causal significance they do not have in the sorts of explanations physics offers. Nor is it easy to see how these theorists can avoid doing this, given that their aim is precisely to explain how we can represent such everyday objects in thought and language. But in doing it they are subtly presupposing the existence of intentionality – the very phenomenon they are supposed to be explaining.
The bottom line, as Putnam puts it in “Is the Causal Structure of the Physical Itself Something Physical?”, is that “Nature, or ’physical reality’ in the post-Newtonian understanding of the physical, has no semantic preferences” (p. 83, emphasis mine). There is nothing in the physical facts so conceived that can determine why any particular causal chain “can be singled out as ‘the’ relation between signs and their referents” (p. 89). On the Aristotelian conception of nature championed by the medieval Scholastics, material substances and processes were inherently “directed towards” certain ends or “final causes” beyond themselves, given their “essences” or “substantial forms.” A kind of meaning was built into the material world from top to bottom. But the early modern philosophers and scientists defined themselves against this essentialist and teleological view of nature, embracing a “mechanistic” picture of the world as devoid of any inherent formal or final causes – a picture contemporary naturalists take for granted.
Yet, as Putnam argues, causal theorists of intentionality, though officially committed to the anti-Scholastic, anti-Aristotelian revolution of the early moderns, are also implicitly beholden to “a notion according to which what is normal, what is an explanation, what is a bringer-about, is all in the essence of things in themselves”; and they are thereby beholden, in effect, to “a medieval notion of causation” (p. 88, emphasis added). For the idea that there is an “intrinsic distinction” between the cause of an event and mere background conditions “has much more to do with medieval (and Aristotelian) notions of ‘efficient causation’ than with post-Newtonian ones” (The Many Faces of Realism, p. 26). It presupposes an “Aristotelian conception of form” – of “self-identifying structures” which objectively demarcate the ordinary objects of our experience from each other in a way they are not demarcated by modern physics (“Aristotle after Wittgenstein,” pp. 68-69). And if we implicitly affirm such notions in the course of giving a causal account of intentionality, “then we abandon materialism without admitting that we are abandoning it” for in that case we “project into physical systems properties… that cannot be properties of matter ‘in itself,’” at least not given the post-Newtonian conception of matter to which materialists are committed (“Causal Structure,” p. 90).