Philosophy of Science: Hempel Vs. Essay

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Tollaksen is a researcher concentrating in the field of reverse causality, the idea that both the past and the future affect the present. His results, if fully accepted, defy any sort of reductionist explanation. A necessary reductionist viewpoint -- a reductionist assumption a holist might say -- is the flow of time, and all particles trapped therein, from low entropy to high. Causality is central to reductionism. Yet, in Tollaksen's experiment, by the time the decisions -- the causal phenomena -- are made, the measurements -- the affected phenomena -- are not only already over but all the reduced elements involved with those measurements already dissipated, destroyed, or gone wherever it is photons go when physicists are done with them. Tollaksen's experiment suggests that Pascal's barometer reads 30 inches of mercury not just because of what the atmospheric pressure is (at which it arrived by being what it was) but also because of what the atmospheric pressure will yet be.

Of course, it is impossible to say that reductionism should be discarded. Approach to holistic understanding begins necessarily with reductionist understanding of individual elements. Who could hope to understand the recent recession without knowing about credit swaps? Where would Tollaksen be if he had never been to Physics 101?

Hempel approaches the problem of scientific method correctly by requiring standardized, logical rules to ensure repeatability. Yet this logical approach is not irreconcilable with holism. Holism's detractors might say that holism "threatens to make testing impossible," and certainly it moves science from a realm of simple, laboratory experiments, into a universe of equations with more variables than scientists to solve those variables.

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However, scientific truth is not concerned with its own complexity; just because an equation is difficult, or even impossible to solve, does not mean it is incorrect. Just because simple rules do not fit, does not mean that a set of rules is not definable, however complicated. Some theorists have argued just such a case for the holy grail of the Unified Field Theory. It is believed by some now that the universe, and all its forces and masses, may not be reducible to one or a few simple equations. Those equations, it is argued, may be so complex that without processing power far beyond what humans are capable of today, we will not find them. This idea is even supported by the unexpected complexity -- the messiness -- of modern quantum mechanics; instead of one or a few elementary particles many, widely-varied ones have been found and continue to be searched for.

Holism has become, for modern science, inescapable. While the conduction of experiments under reductionist premises is still possible and necessary, the truth of interactions between integrated systems and their components defy many simple explanations. Holism has been the approach of engineers -- applied scientists -- for centuries now, we only wait for theoretical science to catch up......

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