For the Greeks, the heavens became the paradigm of perfection and orderly repetitive motions without change. The sublunary Situated beneath the moon world was the realm of change and decay. When, two thousand years later, Isaac Newton discovered apparently perfectly accurate dynamical laws of motion for the planets, he seemed to confirm a deterministic universe. But as Newton knew, and as Peirce and later Karl Popper were to argue, we never had observational evidence to support the presumed perfection. The physical laws had become a dogma of determinism.
The Ten Dogmas of Determinism
Philosophy today has become hopelessly dogmatic.
These were all reactions by modern thinkers against the orthodoxy of tradition.
- It is as dogmatic as the Renaissance and Enlightenment found the Scholastics and their reliance on established Truths.
- It is as dogmatic as Kant found his predecessors Leibniz and Wolff with their complete confidence in the explanatory power of Reason.
- It is as dogmatic as Quine found empirical language philosophy with its use of analytic and synthetic distinctions.
Information philosophers too must waken philosophy from its "dogmatic slumbers." This will require both a modern rethinking of what we can know and a frank post-modern recognition of the tentative and relative foundations of that knowledge.
As with Kant, our method is critical. We must put limits on these dogmas to make room forfreedom and creativity, God and values, and knowledge of the external world.
Limits will make room for the only kinds of constructed knowledge that is possible to man - by nature, by convention, and by abstraction.
The ten dogmas of determinism are:
- Natural knowledge arises from theories that correspond to the world as tested in experiments by a community of skeptical inquirers.
- Conventional knowledge is that agreed upon by a community of interpreters.
- Abstract knowledge is the set of axiomatic ideas (universals) that form the core tools of critical logical thinking grounded in information theory.
- Analysis - from Pythagoras, Plato, Euclid, Archimedes, and Galileo comes the powerful train of thought that everything can be explained by analytical mathematical functions. Newton's mathematical laws of motion for celestial bodies was the crowning achievement for analysis. For William Blake, breaking things into their component parts to analyze their workings was "murder to dissect."
- Being - from Parmenides and Plato to Heidegger and Sartre, all Becoming and Time has been seen as a corrupt this-worldly illusion, preventing us from seeing the Great Chain of Being. All events are extratemporal and simultaneous in the eyes of God. Aquinas' totem simul.
- Causality - Aristotle and the great Scholastic thinkers imagined a causal chain from the First Cause to the present moment. Although David Hume said we could not prove causality from mere appearances of Regularity, he nevertheless believed deeply in Necessity.
- Certainty - Descartes' quest for an undeniable fact on which he could erect the Truth of Philosophy and the Christian Religion.
- Physical - The first great determinism was that of the earliest physicists and philosophers Leucippus and Democritus. For them there was nothing but atoms moving through a void. Later the Stoic physicists based physical determinism on the Laws of Nature or the Laws of God, since they identified Nature with God.
- Logic - Logical determinism is the simple idea that events in the future must be as true or false today as they will be after they happen. Aristotle doubted this in his famous discussion of the Sea Battle.
- Mechanism - If classical mechanics could explain the motions of the heavens as the result of natural laws, the same laws might explain human beings, including the individual mind and society. Enlightenment philosophers wrote of "Man as Machine." Planetary motions and mental processes were compared to mechanical clockworks.
- Necessity - Necessity is often opposed to chance. In a necessary world there is no chance. Everything that happens is necessitated. Nothing is contingent. From Leucippus to the Stoics, Leibniz, and Spinoza
- Reason - The idea that the universe must be rational - because its designer was rational, because thought would not be possible without reason, because natural laws must be rational, etc. - convinced many thinkers that reason allows only one future, and only one possible choice for the rational will.
- Truth - The idea that one man, one religion, or one state possesses the One Truth has been one of the most destructive ideas in the history of thought.
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