Philosophy

A New Route to Philosophy

I began my university education pursuing a philosophical quest for understanding – of the world and my role in it –  after waking up from a lifetime of social/intellectual sleepwalking. By the end of my 1st year, I’d filtered out Religion from my study subjects, leaving History of Science and Philosophy. I’d also become disillusioned with academic (analytic) philosophy as a sterile intellectual exercise and decided to attack it – by constructing an argument which had as its premises the foundational principles of academic philosophy itself: I aimed to use the tools of academic philosophy againt itself; my argument would either have to be accepted to the detriment of philosophy, or my argument’s premises could be challenged to the detriment of philosophy. This tactic of using your opponents principles against them in argumentation/debate was developed by the ancient Greek Sophists, at at time when higher education first became a route to political power for those outside the aristocracy (one reason why many MPs take a BA degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at Oxford University).

Logicians developed quantum logic in the face of the struggle applying classical logic to descriptions of quantum mechanical phenomena (specifically, the ‘complementary’ variables of position and momentum) . This logic rejects a simple contrast between ‘true and false’ (a two-valued logic) as traditionally conceived via the Law of Non-Contradiction. If I make any claim, such as “I am in California”, then either that statement is true or its opposite must be (I am NOT in California). They cannot both be true at the same time (by the Law of Non-Contradiction); and there’s no third option, one of the two must be true (by the Law of Excluded middle). (These two laws, along with the Law of Identity form the 3 classical Laws of Thought which underpin rationality and classical logic). Quantum mechanics does not say an electron  is ‘here’, or if not, it must be ‘elsewhere’; instead it applies the mathematics of probabality to assign a probabaility value to an electron’s likely appearance in all possible locations. Quantum logic is therefore usually many-valued; there are as many probabilites of truth as there are probabilities of location –  not simply ‘true’ or ‘false’. Quantum logic’s mathematisation of truth values effectively masks its rejection of the Laws of Non-Contradiction (and Excluded Middle) to accommodate the Copenhagen insistence on ‘complementarity’ – the simultaneous application of contradictory concepts ‘wave’ and ‘particle’ to describe quantum phenomena.

I reasoned that if modern physics showed that classical logic apparently didn’t apply to the sub-empirical (quantum) world, then equally why should it apply to the supra-empirical world of pure thought? Why should academic philosophy’s core theories of truth, themselves grounded in classical logic, not therefore be simply castles built on air –  nonsense on stilts? What if the rise of quantum logic demonstrates the limits of the applicability of classic logic in both directions – below the empirical (micro) and beyond the empirical (metaphysical). This youthful argument was no madder than Everett’s ‘many worlds interpretation’ of quantum mechanics, so I took it one stage further. I saw that the obvvious weak link in the argument was the necessity or otherwise of the rise of quantum logic: If the creation of quantum logic and its rejection of the classical laws of thought were not  necessary consequences of the creation of quantum physics, then I had no argument about the redundancy of classical logic – below or beyond the empirical. So I had to research the conceptual origins of quantum physics to find out if its creation entailed that of quantum logic.

Within a short time researching the history of quantum theory I realised that the creation of quantum logic was not a necessary consequence of the development of quantum physics; it was a further fudge to accommodate that of ‘complementarity’.  This left my initial argument (degree thesis) dead in the water, but this negative result pointed another way forward.  My new undergraduate thesis would focus on the necessity of classical logic in the construction of scientific reality. My overarching idea was that, just as the philosophies of men such as Descartes were like lenses through which we view reality and, hopefully, see more clearly, I would stop scrabbling around in the box of other men’s ideas and build my own ‘lens’. The ‘glass’ is epistemology (the theory of knowledge), the conceptual core of philosophy; but it needs contact with the practice of constructing knowledge – the history of science – to provide the grit with which to polish the lens.  I’d then test this philosophical lens empirically by looking at the ‘fuzzy object’ of quantum wave-particle duality, and see if my new ‘lens’ could resolve it more clearly than has yet been achieved.

So my BA double-dissertation was Classical Logic & Quantum Reality. For the purpose of supervision I had to divide it into  two units: one in history of philosophy (‘The Rise of the Law of Non-Contradiction’); and another in history and philosophy of science (‘The Law of Non-Contradiction and Modern Science’). It presented a fairly extensive and rigorous argument for keeping science a rational enterprise in the face of the sirens of Copenhagen –  of complementarity and quantum logic/s. In writing this thesis, I’d gazed into the paradox of wave-particle duality and its attempted intellectualisation within the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics – and glimpsed something of how the appealing fiction of their construction had been achieved.