QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

for scientific certainty was the usual reason for a fear of metaphysics, Kant had already noted,
when reacting to Hume’s criticism, that we cannot understand our experiences if we do not have
a wider set of assumptions we can use as a foundation for interpreting them. Metaphysical
presuppositions cannot be evaded when absolutely certain sources of knowledge do not exist. In
the light of the analytical theory of science, these initial metaphysical assumptions need not to
be seen as final truths, only as hypothetical inventions whose employment makes possible the
solution of acute problems.
3.4. The Crisis in the Mechanical and Deterministic Way of Thinking
The core of the conception of reality adopted at the turn of the modern era, i.e. its metaphysical
assumptions or presuppositions, has remained almost unchanged over the last three hundred
years. By the middle of the 1800s, mechanics was widely acknowledged as the most perfect of
the physical sciences, embodying the ideal towards which all other branches of enquiry ought to
aspire. The particle-mechanics depiction of the world has permeated almost the whole of modern
society stamping its presumptions both on everyday life and in the methodology of science.
Typically, the Newtonian model has driven the search for theories and methods of description in
which the investicated phenomena can be reduced to well-defined and measurable objects and
their properties. The most highly-valued knowledge was that which could be expressed by
precise, context-free equations that captured general patterns applicable everywhere in reality. 369
In recent decades, the materialistic and technological character of modern culture has however
been the subject of ever-stronger criticism. Newtonian mechanics, once pre-eminent as the mostuniversal
and perfect science, and its subsequent decline from this position, have provoked
vigorous controversy concerning the adequacy of scientific method as it is traditionally
conceived and practised. 370 Today, many researchers who take a critical standpoint even consider
that the “scientific world-view”, i.e. the governing metahypothesis of the modern era, has been
decisively falsified by its damaging and counterproductive consequences in the empirical world.
Established truths are once again relativised. For example Stephen Toulmin has provocatively
stated that modern science has presented the presuppositions adopted at the turn of the modern
era only as a collection of temporary and speculative half-truths. He concludes that it is no
longer necessary to consider nature as unchanging or matter as clearly inanimate, nor does the
369 Tarnas 1998, 365. Toulmin 1998.
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