The distinction between primary and secondary properties is an important one, especially as it relates to the scientific worldview. For instance, metaphysical materialism seems to assert that primary qualities are all that “really” exists in the world in the form of matter, an assertion which raises the all too obvious question, “what about secondary properties?” It is the problematic metaphysical nature of secondary qualities with their corresponding qualia which makes property dualism a rather appealing alternative to materialism.
The existence of secondary qualities also raises interesting epistemological issues as well. Since secondary qualities do not “really” exist out in the world, but are instead partially created, presumably, by our perception of primary qualities the idea advocated by Aristotle that our sense are neutral conduits of information simply cannot be true. Our senses are not the passive receptors of information which they seem to be, but rather play a very active role in the construction of the world as we experience it. It can be asked, “what if our minds play just as active a role in constructing our experience as do our senses? What if reason is no more neutral than are our senses?” This will be the question which this post will focus upon.
Of course the first name which comes to mind when one attributes an active role to the mind is Immanuel Kant. Kant’s idealism, which resulted from his attributing timeless and universal categories to the mind, simply did not seem appealing or intuitive. Nevertheless, the skeptical conclusions reached by way of empiricism seemed just as unappealing, they being the very motivation behind Kant’s thinking. The empirical tradition, which took Bacon as a proto-founder of sorts, took an active mind to be an undisciplined one. Remember how Bacon took an active role for the mind to be a problem in his account of the idols of the mind rather than a solution to anything. It is in this context that we a middle ground being paved by Fourier in an attempt to merely describe how the world behaves rather than what it is actually like. This conservative move, too conservative by the accounts which we have considered thus far, is a sign of the growing suspicion of the time that scientific theories are “merely” inventions of the scientists rather than accounts of what reality is really like.
At this point enter William Whewell with his account of scientific knowledge. He argued that science is deductive in its form just as logic is, in that observable phenomena are deduced from the premises of a theory. Thus, the key to scientific knowledge lay in identifying fundamental ideas which can be used as explanatorily fertile premises in such deductive forms. Thus, whereas Kant’s universal categories took the fundamental ideas which underlie and produce our experience of the world to be timeless, Whewell sees our fundamental ideas as being temporary, historical and induced from our experience of the world.
Whewell unique form of induction, which would later be called abduction, differed from that of the Baconian experimental method as well, for Whewell advocated something very different from mere fact gathering and data analysis. He saw the scientist as engaging in a creative endeavor, he saw something in the data which went beyond what was actually in the data. Kepler did not see elliptical orbits in Tycho’s data, but instead saw that an ellipse was the best explanation or assumption to make given the available data. To repeat, elliptical orbits were not in the data, but were something which Kepler actively and creatively imposed upon the data. Such is the nature of all fundamental ideas, ideas which are neither deduced from data, nor are they merely generalizations. Some people simply “get” these fundamental ideas which turn out to be explanatorily fertile, while most people do not. Little could be further from Bacon’s method of mindless fact gathering and experimental elimination.
Naturally, there was bound to be a react to such a borderline-idealist account of scientific knowledge by committed empiricists. John Herschel, for example, drew a distinction between the process of scientific discovery, which may indeed match up with Whewell’s account, and the process of justifying scientific claims. Scientific knowledge was the latter rather than the former and needed no appeal to the active mind. John Stuart Mill also put forth an empirical theory in which induction is the process of identifying the one true pattern which really does hold the data together rather than creating the fundamental idea or assumption which best holds the data together. Both men wanted scientific knowledge to be about nature as it really is independent of what we may or may not think about it, but it’s not clear that their objections and theories conclusively deflate Whewell’s account.
What is perhaps most interesting about Whewell’s theory was not its account of an active mind or the intrinsically historical nature of scientific knowledge, but rather the fact that it was taught outside of the European continent at such an early time. Recall how the importance of history had found a strong voice in Hegel just as the claim that all reasoning is necessarily perspectival within a cultural framework would be put forth by Nietzsche. It would not be until a generation or two later that the English speaking world would take seriously the claim that reason is but the expression of a particular and historically contingent set of values, assumptions, concepts and judgments.
With the emergence of the unconscious mind, thanks in large part to Freud, these ideas would finally find place among the English speaking tradition following three major lines of thought. First, it became clear how our unconscious and thus uncontrolled mind structured the contents of our minds before we even became conscious of such content. Second, C. S. Peirce argued that our ideas are response to the problems which we become conscious of and that those ideas which we take to be “true” are merely those which solve such problems. Finally, Gestalt psychology asserted that both perception and cognition are selective processes and that the criteria of selection came from inside rather than outside the mind. Such findings would all serve to eventually call into question the objective and universally rational nature of science.
