A Thomistic View of Scientific Knowledge

As I read Gallagher's section on Philosophy of Science with its sharp critique of post-Cartesian and mechanistic modern science/philosophy of science, I had to wonder whether, writing in 1964, he had read Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions which was published in 1962. It seems to me that as he criticizes the "knowledge" gained by science to that time, he is making a case very similar to Kuhn's, at least in terms of his negative comments about modern science. Interestingly, he does not reference Kuhn, and he does not use Kuhn's key term, paradigm shift. Even so, given his conclusions concerning the tentative and unstable nature of the knowledge of science and his call for a return to a classical philosophy of science (Aristotelian and finalistic), it seems he might as well have.

Gallagher begins by setting out the conditions of knowledge for modern science, namely, that "to know nature" is to have "the power to intervene effectively in nature and to wrest its processes to human advantage."¹ He notes that men "began to feel that to know nature and to control it were convergent ideas."² He finds this attitude in Laplace and his "hypothetical mind in possession of information as to the position and velocity every ultimate particle in the universe."³

As modern scientists following Descartes began to take a mechanistic approach to science, they shifted, Gallagher notes, away from qualities and to quantities. This change yielded powerful results. In time, Newton gave the world classical physics and, subsequently, science made many helpful and quick advances. This system, however, was overturned in time by quantum physics. Many of classical science's equations were shown to be close but not quite right.

Later, quantum physics itself ran into its own difficulties. Gallagher cites three of them as evidence of the problem with claiming that modern science and its philosophy of science give real knowledge of the world. First, he discusses Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle--it is not possible to know both the speed and the velocity of an electron at any given moment. This point introduces a limitation to what science can know. As Gallagher points out, it also raises a question about what kind of thing an electron is and whether it is the kind of thing we can know. Second, he mentions the paradox in regard to the nature of light--that it seems to travel in waves, but act like discreet quanta in the photoelectric effect. Here he notes that this is a quandary which causes us to ask again what kind of thing a photon is. Third, he discusses the discreet energy states of atoms and our inability to understand the movement of electrons between rings without passing through intermediate states. Again, this illustration raises the question as to what the real nature of an atom is. In addition to these problems, Gallagher also raises concerns about the participant spectator and theory-ladenness. Now, what is Gallagher's point in all of this?

Gallagher believes this shows the shortcomings of the modern, mechanistic scientific method/philosophy of science, that it calls on scientists to be more philosophical in their approach to science, and that scientists should be more careful in their pronouncements about what they know about the world. He is calling science back to a consideration of "the cognitional value of other aspects of experience." ⁴ 

I agree with Gallagher in this assessment. I think what Kuhn taught us is that, at best, modern science can give us what might be called a "verisimilitude" of reality. This verisimilitude is merely probabilistic and is subject to change as theories change. These shifts indicate the unstable ground of the modern scientific process. There is, however, an alternative, at least, in some ways. We could, instead, adopt an Aristotelian approach to some questions and with it, find some firm ground. Understanding function and telos makes for a great deal of good science. Perhaps, science would do better if rather than eliminating a mechanistic approach, they simply permitted an Aristotelian finalism to be a part of the consideration too.

1. Kenneth T. Gallagher, The Philosophy of Knowledge (New York: Fordham University Press, 1964), 276.

2. Ibid., 277.

3. Ibid., 277.

4. Ibid., 285.