GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

248
ETHICS
for this reason, some physicists show an increasing disposition
to dispense with the notion of determinism
in fields in which its efficacy has hitherto been unquestion-
ingly postulated.
(2) and (3) Criticism of the Arguments for Determinism
Based upon a Consideration of the Mind-Body Problem
the Conclusion^ of the Special Sciences
The Necessary Assumptions of Science. The
arguments for determinism based upon conclusions
derived from a consideration of the relations between the
mind and the body, also involve certain metaphysical
assumptions, though these are less easy to detect than the
to the nature of causation which
assumption in regard
underlies the mechanist view of the universe.
Of these assumptions two are important. There is the
assumption, first, that all things may be adequately re*
garded as the sum total of their constituent parts and a
nothing more than this sum total. There is the assumption,
secondly, of the universal validity of what, in a previous
chapter, I have called the mode of explanation in terms
of 1
origins. The first of these assumptions has, by implication,
been rejected in Chapter II,* where I pointed out
various senses in which some wholes may be regarded as
being more than the sums of their parts* The second assumption
implicitly denies the efficacy of teleological
modes of explanation.
Both assumptions are necessary assumptions of scientific
method* That this is so may be seen by reflecting on the
function of science. The function of science is to classify
and predict In order that it may effectively perform this
function, it must take the objects with which it deals to
pieces in order to find out what are their component parts.
Observing that the pieces into which it has broken up some
initially unknown thing which happens to be under in*
veitigajtion are of the same kind as the pieces of some
other thing whose behaviour it already knows, science
*See Chapter I, pp. 98-29. *See Chapter II, pp. 50-54.