I do have to say that I'm impressed with your ability to critique essays before you read them. That must save you a lot of time. I dug out my copy of "The Impasse of Planck's Epistemology" last night; maybe you would be generous enough to point out the errors, so that I, a mere postal worker, might learn at your feet? You know Planck, of Planck's Constant and Black-Body Radiation; he was the first to enunciate the notion of the "quantum of action" as a universal and real feature of the physical world. But of course you know all this.
At the age of 65, in 1923, Planck delivered a lecture to the Berlin Academy of Sciences, entitled "Causation and Free Will." Now, Planck was very much like Maurice in his view of causation, and he was troubled by the implications of his discovery of quanta. He was not trained as a philosopher, and for him there could only be two philosophical explanations of reality: either abstract rationalism or empiricism. An impasse was in sight when he gave a survey of the problem of causality in these two schools of thought, which for him represented ALL of philosophy. He never considered a third school, that of philosophical realism, which is in fact demanded by Planck's own insistence that by causality he meant causality in the REAL world, not an abstracted world or one defined by idealist philosophy, like in Kant's cosmology, which prevailed prior to Einstein. (I'm sure all this is old hat to an educated guy like you, Joe G., but we poor civil servants need to go over some of this basic stuff.)
The business of reality rested, in Planck's eyes, entirely with physics. This view was intimated by the fact that what Planck asked from philosophy was not a proof of causality, but whether causality could be scientifically ascertained in all circumstances and on all levels. What Planck wanted to secure was a narrow aspect of causality implied by a specific type of physics whose exclusive validity was being threatened not only by statistical mechanics, but even more by considerations inspired by the emission and propogation of electromagnetic radiation in the form of quanta.
Planck's attachment to that specific sense of cauality (strict predictability of future events, in each and every case, by the methods of mathematical physics; hi, Maurice), was hardly an invitation to philosophy. That he couldn't see philosophy as the source for the answer to the question of causality could be gathered from his conclusion that causality was not a necessary element of human thought. (Ooops. Maurice is more consistent than Max.) Planck reached that conclusion on the ground that the human mind could imagine all sorts of contradictory and non-causal situations, non-sequiturs, and sheer fantasies. It escaped Planck that if this proved anything, it proved that the mind is more than a mere logic machine, and that this fact alone secured the possibility that he himself could take a look at the question of causality, a look which itself was not a predetermined series of reasonings, and was therefore a meaningful topic to consider. |
