The Daily Insult

Anything approaching a fully satisfactory explanation of the phenomena of knowledge requires the co-operative efforts of all those who believe that there is a world of real existence independent of human minds and that this real existence can be truly known as it really is.

— Francis Parker, “Realistic Epistemology”

In this section, I shall post brief discussions of errors in logic in commercials, news items, fiction — errors that just vex me. I just need a place to get this stuff out of my system. [Note: “Daily” in this context should not lead the reader to expect that I will be posting something every day.]

July 28, 2018

In 1927, about a month before Charles Lindbergh flew The Spirit of St. Louis from New York to Paris, Werner Heisenberg was riding in a taxicab in Berlin with the son of the German ambassador to Denmark. The previous year he had published his famous uncertainty paper. He told the ambassador’s son, “I think I have refuted the law of causality.”

I am not about to contest the validity of Heisenberg’s equation (ΔpΔq ≥ h). But I look both at the equation and at Heisenberg’s taxicab claim. And I reflect on some elementary principles of logic.

In particular, I recall that no term can appear in a logical conclusion that does not appear somewhere in the premises. And we can be sure that the term “law of causality” does not occur anywhere in Heisenberg’s premises or the argument that produces the conclusion ΔpΔq ≥ h.

And it certainly does not occur in the equation itself.

So where does Heisenberg’s taxicab conclusion come from?

It comes from — and can only come from — an interpretation of the meaning of the equation.

Let us ask, How is an interpretation arrived at? What is the discipline that deals with causality and that interprets mathematical results and, for that matter, the experimental results of physics? It is philosophy. Philosophy is not science. And science is not philosophy. So let us ask further, What philosophy stands behind Heisenberg’s conclusion?

While he never came out and stated what his philosophical orientation was, it is clear from other remarks he made that it was Positivism.

This is not the place to take on the shortcomings of Positivism, logical, atomist, or any other. But the relevance of mentioning Positivism is this: Positivism, after all its gyrations and contortions, had already rejected the law of causality. Positivism recognizes no necessary connections between any empirical events; none of its categories includes causality and none of its principles is capable of deriving a necessary connection between empirical events, which is to say, is capable of deriving a single instance of any event that has a cause.

That, in turn, tells us that Werner Heisenberg would not have found the law in causality in any equation whatever. His equation did not refute the law of causality. He had already rejected it.

I do not mean, by that, that Heisenberg had already explicitly rejected the law of causality. What I am saying is that Positivism was the dominant philosophy in Central Europe. It was everywhere in the air. Every educated man in Central Europe had been exposed to its premises and to its assertions. One does not fault a talented, accomplished physicist for not having spent time studying the refutations or failings of the philosophy whose very air he was breathing.

But he was making the same category mistake that he would have been making had he said that mathematics or experimental or theoretical physics had proven the existence of God. Science does not deal in causality. Science deals in sequence and prediction, and David Hume was right when he argued that neither sequence nor prediction can establish a causal connection, or even prove that one exists.

That causality is not established by science is suggested most readily by the fact that men were talking about causation for centuries before the scientific method had taken its place in the councils of those who know. The ideas and concepts that led them to talk about it were not those of lab experiments, but of ordinary experience and thought and reflection.

“The Law of Causality” said Ayn Rand, “is the Law of Identity applied to action.” “What a thing is determines what it can do and, under certain circumstances, what it will do.” To say that the Law of Causality does not apply to subatomic particles is to say that the Law of Identity does not apply to them.

It must be allowed that subatomic particles are very strange things. But to say that the Law of Causality does not apply to them is to say that they are not really anything in particular, that they have no identity, and that any one of them could just as easily become a bowl of soup as pass through a slit and strike a screen on the other side. Or even turn into Heisenberg.

Let us go further: if the Law of Identity does not apply to subatomic particles, then the Law of Contradiction also does not apply to them. And in that case we may say that the Law of Causality in fact does apply to subatomic particles, and we need not be disquieted by anything Heisenberg had to say on the subject.

Thus, whether subatomic particles have an identity or not, the Law of Causality applies to them. And Heisenberg both has and has not refuted it.

There was a tendency among some of the early quantum physicists (Max Born among them, I believe) to urge that “the time is not ripe” for interpreting the mathematics, the theoretical findings, or the experimental results of quantum physics. This tendency did not survive, because man wants to understand. And he will resort to the only discipline available that makes real understanding possible: philosophy. If his philosophy is not up to the task, his understanding will be defective and lead him into contradiction and intellectual chaos. If it is robust, it may lead him to grasp yet one more particle (may we say “subparticle”?) of the fabric of reality.

It is the job of philosophers, and of intellectuals generally, to make distinctions and to apply them. That applies no less to physicists than to any other. And the distinction here that must be made is that between their findings and the meaning of their findings. And for the latter, they will require a disciplined philosophy, and a science sufficiently disciplined to know its place in the scheme of knowledge. .

* * *