QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

and philosophers, signified the antithesis of all metaphysical speculation. It can be seen as the
final attempt to hold on to way of thinking which aims to factual certainty. Even though
authentic Cartesian certainty and trust in human reason had little by little lost its credibility, so
that by the 1900s, belief in the reliability of reason had largely been abandoned, factual certainty
was and still is believed to exist. It is to be presumed that, in spite of post-modern philosophy,
the mechanistic-deterministic way of thinking, in accordance with technological applications
based on natural science, still offers a common man the most credible portrayal of the world –
even though the its reductionist programme ran into serious difficulties at the beginning of the
twentieth century. 350
Positivists believed that science is able to produce results without recourse to metaphysics as it
investigates how phenomena occurred instead of asking why they occur. The trend can to some
extent be taken as a continuation of traditional empiricism and the tradition of Enlightenment.
Auguste Comte (1798-1857), the founder of Positivism, wanted to demonstrate that human
thought traversed three main phases which he called the Theological, the Metaphysical and the
Positive. It was his firm belief that in the Positive phase, all problems could be resolved via the
scientific method. Scientific knowledge could be gained simply by inferring facts from objective
data. Psychology had to be reduced to physiology and sociology, since objective science could
not be founded on internal subjective observations. 351 In describing phenomena, Positivists
attempted to avoid all forms of abstract speculation. In principle, all questions which could not
be answered by empirically-observed facts were classified as being meaningless. To the
Positivists, even such metaphysical terms as causality and substance represented Primitivist
thinking. 352
During the 1800s, philosophy of science was engaged in a heated debate between Realists and
Antirealists about the justification for atomic theory. As atoms could not be observed, the
Instrumentalists did not believe in their real existence. According to methodological
instrumentalism, theories and theoretical terms did not refer to reality that is not observable by
the senses, they were just logical and conceptual instruments for parsing our experiences and
350 Trusted 1991, 131. This will be further discussed in Chapter 4.
351 Aspelin 1995, 479-481. Comte also criticized introspection because it often destroys the phenomena one is
trying to observe. David Bohm later used the same example when arguing for the usefulness of quantum mechanics
in consciousness studies.
352 Trusted 1991, 133-137. The philosopher John Stuart Mill, who was influential in the first half of the 19th
century, abandoned the problem concerning the foundation of reality to metaphysicians when he defined it as a
'permanent possibility of sensation'. Positivists went even further in diminishing the constructive role of science and
Mill criticized Comte that he did not differentiate empirical generalisations from fundamental natural laws such as
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