ARNOLD BRECHT'S POLITICAL THEORY REVISITED Political ...

170 THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER
of the order of nature. 28 We are left to wonder why it is that our
employment or following of the order of logic in our thinking or
reasoning about our perceptions of the order of nature proves to be
so compatible, useful and necessary.
In the course of his elaboration of the problem of causality, Brecht
vaguely and fleetingly alludes to an aspect of a most fundamental
epistemological problem and disposes of it by fiat, 29 but with
devastating implications for the common sense realism of his Scientific
Method. The problem is . that of explaining our apparent (to
common sense) capacity to perceive and distinguish "wholes" or the
variety of things or beings and their constellations in "events," etc.,
in what would otherwise be, according to William James, a booming,buzzing
confusion. Brecht simply offers a common modern opinion
on this matter, as though it were the only opinion or the only
defensible one. He tells us that:
A special difficulty in the conception that one event is caused by another arises
from the fact that, even apart from atoms and happenings within them, events
cannot be neatly separated into "units" that follow each other like the units of
an alphabet, distinctly identifiable as separate. Every detail of what occurs is so
inseparably intertwined with what had occurred before and will occur after,
and even with what occurs simultaneously, that any lumping together of occurrences
into bigger units called "events" is utterly arbitrary, except where we do
so for some special purpose, as for example a scientific one; then it may be a
reasonable,. and even the best possible, procedure in the pursuit of this particular
purpose. Apart from such purposive human selections, the apparently
separate and independent events are, to use John Dewey's words, "integral constituents
of one and the same continuous occurrence." It follows that we cannot
label clusters of minute events "the cause" or "the effect," except for our convenience
in the pursuit of some inquiry or the like (78f.).
The problem of accounting for the "wholes" and the ordering or articulation
of our perceptions of things is a particularly acute one for
modern philosophy, including modern "scientific" philosophy such
28. Thus, he tells us that "when nature behaves in line with our [scientific] expectations,
it is not because she performs logically, but because to that extent the general
laws describe the behavior of nature correctly" (67).
29. In his earlier discussion of description, he had identified this problem somewhat
more clearly, although not enough so to make it coherent to anyone not already
familiar with the issue. He concluded there that "Scientific Method, as here
understood, does not claim to have a ready answer to these questions" (39). Brecht
makes no explicit connection between these two separate discussions. See above.
p. 162