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Among other things, shows why developing a theory of everything is a task for philosophy, not for any other academic discipline, physics included.
The Structural-Systematic Philosophy (SSP) is a systematic philosophy in progress. Books developing it so far are (in English) STRUCTURE AND BEING (2008), BEING AND GOD (2011), and TOWARD A PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY OF EVERYTHING (TAPTOE; 2014). Podcasts describe the project and present details.
TAPTOE Chapter 1. Preliminaries
Some readers of this sentence, the first in this book, may have been led to do so because they were attracted by the prospect of learning about work toward a philosophical theory of everything. Others may be motivated instead by incredulity: how could there be a philosophical theory of everything, or perhaps even of anything? These are good questions, and this book aims to give them good answers, beginning with the explanations of the subtitle in section 1.1 and title in section 1.2, the latter of which, despite its apparent outrageousness, did not prevent readers of these words from getting to this point.
1.1 An initial clarification of this book's subtitle
For sake of brevity, this book's subtitle speaks of the structural-systematic philosophy (SSP). Clarity is served, however, by speaking as well of the structural-systematic research program in philosophy (SSRPP). This program is undertaken but far from completed in STRUCTURE AND BEING and BEING AND GOD.
STRUCTURE AND BEING, particularly, establishes research program as a research program in philosophy by articulating it in sufficient detail to enable other philosophers, including this book's author, and potentially any of its readers, to contribute to it. As explained below in Chapter 2, STRUCTURE AND BEING presents the abstract theoretical framework for the SSP, the theory to which the SSRPP is devoted, but it does not come close to concretizing that framework in complete detail. It thus opens the way for other philosophers, again including this book's author to contribute to the SSRPP, to the research program, in three distinct ways.
First, others can treat in greater detail subject matters such as ethics and human freedom that STRUCTURE AND BEING treats only relatively briefly. Second, others can investigate subject matters, including, for example, political philosophy and the ontology of time, that STRUCTURE AND BEING does not treat at all. Third, because STRUCTURE AND BEING both explicitly acknowledges that its presentation of the SSP can be improved and explains how it can be improved, others can offer such improvements.
This book, TAPTOE, aims to contribute to the SSP in the first and third of the wayus just identified. It supplements STRUCTURE AND BEING and BEING AND GOD by providing, in Chapters 1 and 2, a clear and concise introduction to this research program and by presenting in Chapters 3 to 6 and 8 alternative accounts and, particularly in the case of human freedom, more extensive accounts than are to be found in either of the first two books. It aims to improve on the concretization of the SSP presented in STRUCTURE AND BEING by introducing, as an alternative to STRUCTURE AND BEING's treatment of the aesthetic world in its section 4.4, a sketch in Chapter 7, of a theory of beauty. That STRUCTURE AND BEING's presentation of the structural-systematic philosophy can be improved on and expanded reveals, to be sure, STRUCTURE AND BEING's self-acknowledged imperfection and incompleteness, but far more importantly, it also reveals the viability and strength of the structural-systematic research program in philosophy to which STRUCTURE AND BEING is devoted.
1.2 An initial clarification of this book's title
For two central reasons, the project indicated by the title of this book, TOWARD A PHILOSOPHICAL OF EVERYTHING, can easily appear early in the 21st century to be at best quixotic. The first reason is that that the term "theory of everything" is commonly associated not with philosophy, but with physics.
The second reason is that even those who consider philosophy to be a discipline that produces theories of whatever quality appear virtually universally to deny that it should or even could undertake the task of producing a theory that is in any reasonable and defensible sense of everything. The purpose of this section is to show that neither of these reasons is a good one for rejecting the project of developing just such a theory.
This section treats, first, the question of the subject matter or matters that do or should qualify as philosophical, because treating that question contributes to clarifying how philosophical theories of everything differ from theories situated in contemporary physics. The section relies on various terms and distinctions that are sufficiently clear for its purposes, but whose adequate explanations are provided only in later sections.
"Philosophy" is a word whose history spans nearly two and a half millennia. Within that period, the word has been used in various different and often contradictory ways, so it is not surprising that it, and with it "philosophical" and so forth, has come to have various distinct meanings, both in ordinary and in academic English and in other languages in which cognates of it appear.
As is hinted at above and clarified below, in this book the word "philosophy" designates a strictly theoretical endeavor, not one that, for example, aims to change anyone's life or make anyone happy, although of course some books called "philosophical" do aim to do those things, and although this book will have effects on its readers' lives.
In the time of Aristotle, the fourth century BCE, relatively shortly after the coinage of the term "philosophia" in ancient Greece, all theoretical inquiry could be classified as philosophical inquiry. For this reason there were at that time no restrictions on the subject matter potentially available to philosophical theorization; in a technical term clarified below, the universe of philosophical discourse was unrestricted. This largely continued to be the case until around the 17th century, when what came to be classified as non-philosophical modes of theorization, non-philosophical sciences, began to develop. Their development requires restricting their universes of discourse. Of central importance to the project undertaken in this book is the question of what then happens to philosophy.
In his PHILOSOPHY 1, a guide through the subject, A. C. Grayling answers that question as follows:
"One can see philosophy as having given to birth in the 17th century to natural science, in the 18th century to psychology, and in the 19th to sociology and linguistics, while in the 20th century, it has played a large part in the development of computer science, cognitive science, and research into artificial intelligence. No doubt, this oversimplifies the role of philosophical reflection, but it does not much exaggerate it, because, in effect, philosophy consists in inquiry into anything not yet well-enough understood to constitute a self-standing branch of knowledge. When the right questions and the right methods for answering them have been identified, the field of inquiry in question becomes an independent pursuit."
Grayling is not alone. Indeed, the prominent analytic metaphysician Peter van Inwagen goes so far as to say that "most people who have thought about the matter would take this to be one of the defining characteristics of philosophy."
In considering the position taken by Grayling and van Inwagen, it is important to ask the following question: according to what theory or theoretician is philosophical inquiry not scientific or, more specifically, within the theorization of what universe of discourse could the sentence "Philosophical inquiry is not scientific" emerge? Unquestionably, that sentence, as it is implicitly understood by Grayling and van Inwagen, cannot emerge within any theory having a restricted universe of discourse. Why not? Precisely because its articulation presupposes that the unrestricted of discourse is divided into restricted universes of discourse of two kinds, and that those are the only kinds of universes of discourse that there are: there are the restricted ones that are well-enough understood to be studied by distinct sciences, and there are the restricted ones that are not and, therefore, for now are left to philosophy.
What does this show? Three things. First, that if every theoretical discipline must have a restricted universe of discourse, then no discipline could develop theories about the unrestricted universe of discourse. Second, that one cannot present a theory about how all the restricted universes of discourse of the various restricted inquiries relate to one another and to philosophy's universe, or perhaps universes of discourse, unless one thematizes the unrestricted universe of discourse, and that is precisely what both Grayling and van Inwagen do, albeit, again, only implicitly. Third, that if the subject matter for philosophy is indeed that which has not been claimed by any non-philosophical science, then if the unrestricted universe of discourse is or can or must be a subject matter for theoretical inquiry, it is a subject matter that non-philosophical sciences, which are individuated by their restricted universes of discourse, must leave to philosophy.
As may be evident from the preceding paragraph, the task of developing a philosophical theory of everything begins to come into view if the development of the non-philosophical sciences is taken not to restrict philosophy's universe of discourse, but instead to clarify a universe of discourse that can be a subject matter only for philosophy. Prior to modernity, because philosophy could thematize anything, including any restricted universe of discourse, it was often far from obvious that philosophy could or should thematize everything, understanding "everything" to mean the unrestricted universe of discourse.
In the so-called analytic philosophy predominant at present in much of the world, the situation is yet worse because analytic philosophers tend to adopt the divide-and-conquer strategy that has served particularly the natural sciences so well. They work in the currently recognized areas of specialization in philosophy -- meta-ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and so forth -- making few if any attempts to determine how all of these areas might fit together.
At this point, there's the following footnote:
[The book] Soames 2003 philosophical analysis in the 20th century describes the analytic philosophy of the 30 years preceding his publication as follows:
"Philosophy has become a highly organized discipline done by specialists primarily for other specialists. The number of philosophers has exploded, the volume of publications has swelled, and the subfields of serious philosophical investigation have multiplied. Not only is the broad field of philosophy today, far too vast to be embraced by one mind; something similar is true even of many highly specialized subfields."
Nine years later, [the book] Schwartz 2012, A BRIEF HISTORY OF ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY FROM RUSSELL TO RAWLS, comments as follows:
"The only qualm I have about Soames's statement is his claim that philosophy has become a highly organized discipline. I'm not sure what he means by that, but highly disorganized discipline would seem like a truer description given the rest of what he says."
Back to the main text:
As a consequence, the SSP's subject matter, the unrestricted universe of discourse, cannot come into the view of these analytic philosophers because the unrestricted university discourse includes everything in at least some significant sense of "everything," a philosophical theory whose subject matter is the unrestricted university of discourse is a philosophical theory of everything. To leave open the possibility that philosophical theories may have restricted universes of discourse, as currently most do, the SSRPP designates the philosophy whose subject matter is the unrestricted universal discourse "systematic philosophy."
Given the preceding account, it is easy to explain, indeed it may well already be obvious, why no theory presented by contemporary physics could be a theory of everything of the sort that a philosophical theory of everything would be. Contemporary physics has, as its subject matter, a restricted universe of discourse. This point is clearly articulated by the prominent mathematical physicist Roger Penrose:
"The terminology 'theory of everything' has always worried me. There is a certain physicist's arrogance about it that suggests that knowing all the physical laws would tell us everything about the world, at least in principle. Does a physical theory of everything including include a theory of consciousness? Does it include a theory of morality or of human behavior or of aesthetics? Even if our idea of science could be expanded to incorporate these things, would we still think of it as physics or would it even be reduceable to physics?"
"Our idea of science" is considered just below, but even without such consideration, it is fully clear that physics, as it is now, cannot develop theories about all the subject matters Penrose lists or indeed about many others.
The philosophical theory of everything to which this book aims to contribute, on the other hand, must include theories of consciousness, of morality, of some aspects of human behavior, and of aesthetics, as well as, in a sense or manner explained below, everything else. It is important to emphasize at the outset, however, that although this philosophical theory of everything is holistic in the sense of being comprehensive, it is not imperialistic in that it no way aims to replace any of the non-philosophical sciences. So it leaves the study of biology to biologists, the study of physics to physicists, and so forth, but it of course can also consider their work, even though it doesn't do, for example, experiments in physics or in biology.
As for "our idea of science:" as suggested by the clarification above of what the word "philosophy" means in this book and as explained in greater detail below in section 2.5, ordinary language does not determine how the SSP uses words that it draws from that language. According to the SSP, theoretical inquiry within any current academic discipline can be scientific. Whether any such specific inquiry qualifies as scientific is determined not by its subject matter, but instead, again relying on a term clarified below, by the quality of the theoretical framework that inquiry relies on. The SSP, reliant as it is on a clearly articulated theoretical framework, classifies itself as a science, and indeed, because of the comprehensiveness of its subject matter, as the universal science.
One additional aspect of the Grayling passage quoted above can now be fruitfully considered. Each science -- each non-philosophical science, in the terminology of the SSP -- is, according to Grayling, a self-standing branch of knowledge, an independent pursuit. What might be meant here by "self-standing" or "independent" and what, by "knowledge"? Presumably, a science is a branch of knowledge only if, one way or another, it presents linguistic accounts, theories, that are true in some sense of "true." But how is it that there can be linguistic accounts that are true? How is it that languages can articulate the subject matters of the relevant theories, and what is the appropriate sense of "true"?
The non-philosophical sciences presuppose, generally implicitly, one or another answer to each of these questions, and to many more, but cannot raise these questions. The same is true of the current sub-disciplines in philosophy, precisely because the questions cannot be raised within the restricted universes of discourse of those sciences. As a consequence, those sciences are not self-standing or independent, at least in that they depend on what they presuppose but cannot investigate. What they presuppose but cannot investigate must, however, be investigated by systematic philosophy.
An additional point important to this section begins by noting that there is a phrase at least roughly synonymous with "theory of everything" as that phrase is used to name a theory within the science of physics. The second phrase is "final theory," as used, for example, in Steven Weinberg's book DREAMS OF A FINAL THEORY. The SSP, if completed, would be a philosophical theory of everything, but would not in any way be a final theory. As explained more fully below and in various places in STRUCTURE AND BEING, the structural-systematic philosophy aims to be the best currently available systematic philosophy, hence the best currently available philosophical theory of everything. If it succeeds in being the best currently available systematic philosophy, then it is, by its own self-assessment, better than is any available alternative. But it is not closer to some hypothesized final systematic philosophy, because it denies the intelligibility of the notion of a final systematic philosophy. More about this in section 2.3. In addition, even if it is the best currently available systematic philosophy, the SSP explicitly acknowledges that it may someday be supplanted by a superior theory, and it indicates how that supplanting would be accomplished. This is explained in STRUCTURE AND BEING 6.44 to 6.46.