While it is important to highlight the delay between human sense-making and the need for action, it is important not to exaggerate it. Even where we are spectators of the world in which we are immersed, we are necessarily engaged spectators. The objects revealed to us are “affordances” – to use a term introduced by the psychologist J. J. Gibson: “The affordances of the environment are what it offers the [human] animal, what it provides or furnishes for good or ill”.10 Affordances are occasions for action: objects as manipulanda that are understood as having to be negotiated in the context of an ongoing or envisaged action. Our relationship to the natural and human world that surrounds us is influenced by our needs and our sense of possible or meaningful transactions. Our actions may act on, and to some degree “cash out”, much of the sense we make of things. Aesthesis and kinesis are inseparable.
This may have two consequences: our sense-making may be lived out in goal-related behaviour; and the latter may deepen and extend that sense that is made. We may see a mutual ratcheting of sense-directed behaviour and of behaviour-driven realization, elaboration, of sense. One mode of sense-making that straddles action and understanding – making things that “work”, that do things that we cannot do unaided or wish to outsource according to principles we understand – entrains and develops many modes of discovery and realization and may in turn become a platform for further sense-making. The paths to sense-making are many and various.
The delay between sense-making and action, and between the emergence of a hiatus in sense and its being filled, is an extension of what is seen in everyday, pre- or extra-scientific engagement with the world – namely an uncoupling of behaviour that makes agency different from mere reaction to stimuli. “Figuring out” is often general rather than tethered to a particular obstacle to the flow of action or understanding. The contrast with animals that may seem to solve a particular problem but do not generalize the solution to neighbouring problems could not be more striking.11 This uncoupling is a feature of a creature – a human being – who faces the world rather than being immersed in it, albeit as a distinct part. Our face is often a collective face, equipped with a gaze that is informed by the cumulative understanding of contemporaries and ancestors. We are creatures who operate through things that are the case. We shall examine this in Chapter 6.
While the sense-making of the higher, more general kind may be remote from meaning-led immediacies of everyday activity, the divorce is not complete. And certainly not in the first instance. We have already mentioned how seeing an item as “a cup” stabilizes its sense and gives the latter a reality that is out there and available, even if not being consumed in actions or subsumed into a continuum of familiarity. Even so, the classification of distinct items and events and situations and states of affairs together is the basis for seeing patterns in the world. A pattern connects, even unifies, items that are at the same time experienced as distinct; similarity is highlighted at the expense of difference. The patterns can be tested for the scope of their generality, and as they are modified, so they may have greater scope. Patterns justify expectations, enabling us to anticipate what is going to happen and the outcome of those happenings we are responsible for.
Of course, patterns are not always, or even generally, self-declaring. As I look around me now, I see states of affairs unfolding. They do not exemplify patterns without assistance from me: something has to be picked out as an instance, connected with other instances, and these connected instances have to be linked with past connections through personal or shared memory or available reports.
In the case of natural science, the patterns may be suggested in the first instance by direct perceptions. In post-Galilean science, they more typically emerge from measurements made under controlled conditions carried out in conformity with agreed standards, with postulated patterns being upheld by confirmed predictions. At the highest level, measurements may be crucial tests of theories and a huge burden of proof rest on a single observation. The iconic example is the observation of the bending of light during a total eclipse, made by members of an expedition that had crossed half the world, in support of a theory that encompassed all of physical space, time and matter – the general theory of relativity.
This illustrates two further important aspects of the cognitive development presupposed in science. Firstly, much of what is hypothesized is beyond the scope of sense experience. The “universe” of science is largely a construct of the mind that can be experienced only indirectly or piecemeal. Secondly, our scientific inquiries are often driven by new kinds of surprise generated by assumptions that our pre-scientific ancestors would not have entertained. The anomalous perihelion of Mercury, already referred to, would not have troubled Neolithic man, though the puzzle it presented provided a crucial test of general relativity. Advancing technology generates new items that demand explanation. This may have begun some while back in the history of Homo faber. Before the agricultural revolution, the failure of certain plants to flourish would not have seemed like a puzzle to be addressed any more than it was an urgent problem to be solved. After the agricultural revolution, it was an important source of surprise; indeed, of shock.
Sense-making does not of course follow a straight path, as if experiences were premises and laws were conclusions, and there were a direct and inevitable route from scattered inquiries to a coherent system of understanding. There are false starts, digressions into the Wunderkammer of collections and whimsies, with classifications and lexicons and cabinets full of imaginary beings. There are striking examples, such as phlogiston and caloric: long journeys into sidings, broken toys in what will prove to have been incubators of future, more powerful theories. There are equally false endings, the most spectacular of which was the completeness of physics at the end of the nineteenth century. And there is the motive force of metaphors, images, analogies, isomorphisms, and echoes that may be fruitful or pave a road to a wilderness of confusion.
At the heart of sophisticated sense-making are the facts. We may think of facts as frozen fragments of made sense. Unlike experiences, they do not have visual appearances, and are not audible or tangible, and cannot be tasted or smelt. Connected with this is that they belong to no individual. They are part of the cognitive commons that each of us has access to and they feed into and prompt shared, collaborative inquiry. As the number of collaborators, the informal and formal teams, separate and intersecting, increases so the rate of acquisition of stored or frozen sense accelerates. Instruments, institutions, dogmas, vested interests, take understanding even further from the sense experience of individuals.
Because observations increasingly generate facts that are pure quantities, science at the highest (or the most abstract) level, finds a world that is a “system of magnitudes” and the answers to its questions are numerical. What is “out there” is reduced to the values of variables that are in themselves lacking in everyday meaning (“2 cms/sec” has no stand-alone significance) or qualitative content (“2 cms” and “1 sec” are colourless, silent, tasteless, weightless, etc.). The laws connecting variables in turn express the connections between inputs and outputs of defined systems, or states of affairs (highly defined to make sure they are identical in salient ways) at time t with the same states of affairs at time t + 1.12
The patterns evident even in elementary scientific laws – such as Charles’s law which states that when the pressure of a dry gas is held constant, its volume will be proportional to its temperature – go far beyond those directly available even to the most intelligent gaze observing how gases expand when they are warmed up. The laws themselves do not capture the stuff of stuff: no gas merely has, or is separable from, its temperature or volume; and volume and temperature are not stand-alone properties, such that the gas could have the one without the other, or indeed without many others.
In being used to calculate expectations or to design artefacts that link visible means with visible ends, patterns captured in physical laws connect with, but stand out from, t
he background of the general taken-for-granted. In virtue of their very generality – a law of motion may apply equally to a person tripping over a stone and a rotating planet, to what is happening this morning and what happened 1 billion years ago – they are viewless. No-one can directly sense F = ma; and E = mc2 or the Schrödinger wave equation are even more remote from the experiences that ultimately triggered the sense-making that led up to them.
The widening gap between everyday sense-making and a mode of understanding that applies to the whole of physical reality highlights something that bears reiteration. It is that the kind of sense-making evident in disciplinary inquiry is not made to be consumed on the spot. That is why F = ma – unlike “This creature looks like it is going to bite” – can be of equal use at any spot. The former may be banked until a time when it is needed. Making sense of an object next to my hand, or of a sound from a hidden source, or of a predator coming towards me, is rooted to the circumstances of an occurrence. It does not travel. If, when we want to understand why a crash occurred, we invoke one or other of the laws of motion, or when we are trying to design a gadget we think of Ohm’s law, there is a clear separation between the sense-making and that which is made sense of. This is one of the glories of the generality of conscious experience extended further to an indefinite range of instances, some of which may not be envisaged when the law was first promulgated by the scientist who discovered it or was taken up by the community of scientists and technicians who use it.
Although (as we shall discuss in Chapter 7) the laws of nature are intrinsically senseless, they carry an aura of sense because they lie behind (or seem to lie behind) the predictability of the world. Our knowledge of them enables general trends to be connected with our ends, transforming the character of our surroundings into a realm of ingredients, handles and machinery. The laws extend our ability to suborn the material world to our ends, making it a partner of ever more complex aims. By a process of projection, the natural world may seem increasingly to be tinctured with telos – to have an order for which, since we can exploit it, we might be grateful. At the same time, however, as the laws become increasingly general and extricated from the particular settings where we make everyday, moment-to-moment, sense of the world, so they seem drained of sense. “This is like that” or “This is essentially the same as that” effaces difference and singularity. Laws and equations and fundamental elements such as atoms are faceless – one of the reasons why the more comprehensive our theories of the universe, the less meaningful the latter seems. The journey to fundamental reality becomes a journey away from meaning. And away from change: very general laws such as the conservation of mass, of energy, or of mass-energy, imply that nothing in the end truly changes.
Laws are one expression of patterns and of order – they are the patterns of the unfolding of patterns. An ordered world, regulated by the shaping force of necessity as defined by natural laws, is more mind portable.13 A succession of instances that is entirely random is difficult to hold in one’s mind but an ordered series is susceptible to algorithmic compression, to be capturable in a simple formula, and lies within our mind’s capacity to contain. Such items are more easily collected because they appear to be packaged in their own principles of collection – so they can be (to speak etymologically) “con-ligo”, bound and read together.
Thus, dots arranged in a circle or in a square can be recalled more easily than the same number of dots randomly scattered on a surface. It is for this reason, spatially ordered items can seem to make more sense – or to be more sense-complete – than items that lack such spatial order. And the same applies to temporal order: repeated successions of events appeared more imbued with sense than patternless ones. Fulfilled expectations carry their charge of rightness. Eventually, as David Hume pointed out, regular associations between classes of event – such that As are always followed by Bs – will give a sense of inevitability to the point where the connection between As and Bs is taken to be necessary and we imagine that As ordain Bs. The patterns in space and time give a sense of coherence: in virtue of holding together, they are more mind-friendly. Hence, they “make sense”.
At the heart of sense-making at the scientific and the immediately pre-scientific level is the notion of material necessity: “this happened because of that”. “Becausation” is a very busy junction at which many modes of understanding intersect. There is the (much contested)14 notion of cause, most typically understood as a preceding event that brings about its successor, having itself been brought about by its predecessor. The putative link between causes and effects is the motor that connects one event with another such that the former may even be seen as sufficient reason for the latter, in virtue of the former’s power. This is the guarantor of the coherence of the world.
At its very basic level, the causal relationship is the transmission of energy preserved through time, as when one object bumps into another and donates some of its inertial energy to it. This kind of causation is part of fundamental common sense and it is experienced directly in agency, when we initiate one event to bring about another, either directly or indirectly, in the push-pull realm of mechanics.
Singular “becausation” straddles the border between explanation and mere description. For the invocation of a cause to count as an adequate explanation, something has to be postulated to account for its causal efficacy. I have already referred to “powers” and “energy”. These are very general terms that connect singular causes with general principles. Individual causes instantiate general causal laws, if their circumstances of operation are such as to provide no hindrance. The effect becomes a quasi-rational consequence: such “becausation” sidles up to “because” understood as a reason. It does not quite qualify as a full-blown reason such as the goal-directed motivation associated with a voluntary action or the logic-based passage of a conclusion proceeding inescapably from premises. A material cause is remote from anything like “reasonableness”. We shall return to this in a moment.
The ascent to generality – from observed singular causes to inferred causal laws to the grand laws painstakingly uncovered, tested and revised by science – is fraught with risks. These hazards are evident long before we reach the Humean limits to induction, according to which even the assumption that the sun will rise tomorrow may turn out to be just that. If A caused B is based on the observation that A is “constantly conjoined” with B (to use Hume’s term) then we need something more than observation to underpin the conclusion that A will inevitably be followed by B, and to justify the move from the correlation between A and B to the notion that A will mandate B. The inference has had a difficult time since it was challenged by Hume. The causal laws that are intuited as underwriting individual causal connections will seem to become more robust as they are linked with other laws of increasing generality. Ultimately, explanations of particular events are connected with general explanations of all events. A pattern seen to link As with Bs seems to be less of a human imposition if it is discovered to be a (relatively) local expression of more general patterns.
The reliability of a pattern is not, of course, a measure of the extent to which it makes sense, as will have been evident from our discussion of natural laws such as those of mechanics. Untutored intuition might anticipate that, for example, the inverse square law of gravitational attraction should be an inverse cube law, given that the space through which it operates is three-dimensional. So the inverse square law seems more a raw fact of physical reality rather than something that makes satisfying sense. While a higher-order law may seem to offer an explanation of a lower-order one, the higher-order law is in truth simply a wider statement as to how things are. Eventually, ascent to higher generality reaches an explanatory ceiling – studded with contingent physical constants – marking a terminus to sense-making. The dynamic of explanation – “becausation”, “this because of that” – halts at the stasis of description.
The ultimate blankness of “this is how things are” is concealed be
cause of the profusion of quasi-explanatory connections between lower and higher levels en route to the highest-level laws. The law-like behaviour we see in everyday life based on direct, untutored observations, seem to have what we might call a self-explanatory force. This is different from the Humean translation of constant conjunction into necessary connection. Essentially, it is the feeling that as things generally are, so they ought to be: the principle of precedence expressed in the most general and intransigent habits of nature, seems to be sense enough, at least to occasion no surprise. If the sun rises in the morning, there is no explanatory work to be done. There is nothing surprising, no “What the heck is going on?”. Only if it does not rise in the morning is there something to explain. “This is how things are” consequently seems like explanation enough most of the time: this is the order of things; this is how things are when nature is not out of joint.
The cognitive glory of humanity lies not only in seeing patterns in the order of things but also in refusing to take the surface order of things, the utterly ordinary, as not requiring explanation; seeing the sunrise as a cognitive challenge as acute as an eclipse, and as a prompt for general, and generalizing, inquiry. Treating common sense, the sense of “of course”, with disrespect is the start of the long journey culminating in contemporary science. In their latest iteration, the laws of nature, empty of human meaning, on the one hand, and of phenomenal qualities on the other, are ultimately non-explanations, as is betrayed by the seemingly arbitrary physical constants that lie at their heart. In the ascent to a comprehensible universe, the very taste of sense seems to be lost. The other side of this is breaking down the barrier between nature and the laws of nature. Matter in the general theory of relativity melts into the structure of space-time; and the universe of quantum mechanics is a wave-function defined mathematically.
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