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16. Whitehead’s Process Philosophy as Scientific Metaphysics
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199 16 Whitehead’s Process Philosophy as Scientific Metaphysics Franz G. Riffert Why Whitehead and Bunge? This chapter tries to explicate some parallels between analytic philosophy and process philosophy. It is intended to show that process thought and analytical convictions may be quite consonant on a formal-methodological level. But since there is not just one process philosophy and even less one analytic philosophy , we first have to adjust our task, limiting our undertaking to two concrete exponents of these two traditions. Rescher correctly pointed out that under the heading of “process philosophy ” there are “distinct approaches to implementing its pivotal idea of pervasiveness and fundamentality of process, ranging from a materialism of physical processes (as with Boscovitch) to speculative idealism of psychic processes (as in some versions of Indian philosophy)” (IPP 8). Whitehead’s particular process philosophy is used here because he attempted to connect with and build upon scientific results. Prigogine and Stengers, for instance, confess that they are “truly fascinated by his [Whitehead’s] unusual resoluteness to reach comprehensive consistency” (DN 101, my translation). And they go on: “Whitehead ’s cosmology is so far the most ambitious attempt of such a philosophy. Whitehead saw no basic contradiction between science and philosophy. . . . The aim was to formulate a minimum of principles with the help of which, all physical existence—from stone to men—could be characterized” (DN 102, my translation). A similar reaction came even much earlier, in 1951, from the logician and philosopher Bochenski: “His [Whitehead’s] work is the most complete philosophical treatment of the results of (natural) sciences we own” (EPG 106, my translation). Many similar quotations could be added. It is no question that Whitehead is one of the outstanding figures in the fields of logic and meta- 200 Franz G. Riffert physics in the twentieth century. This is the reason why his work will be the exponent of process philosophy for the following comparison. However, not only process philosophy is multifaceted. Even more so is the analytic tradition in philosophy. It has developed into several branches or schools. One can at least distinguish between logical positivism, ordinary language philosophy and critical rationalism. An attempt to compare Whitehead’s metaphysics to the first two mentioned branches of analytic philosophy only can yield an abyss of fundamental differences. Logical positivism, as developed in the Vienna Circle—for instance by Rudolf Carnap (LAW ), Moritz Schlick (MV ), and Alfred J. Ayer (LTL)—in its very essence is of a strict antimetaphysical attitude. The so-called criterion of meaning was formulated as the verification principle: “The meaning of a proposition is the method of its verification” (MV 148). Since metaphysical propositions are not verifiable, they are claimed to be meaningless. Metaphysics , in the eyes of the positivists, was reduced to bare nonsense. That one will not be able to find any substantial positive relations between Whitehead’s thought and the logical positivists’ rejection of any kind of metaphysics whatsoever does, of course, not need any further demonstration. The same also holds for the relationship between Whitehead’s philosophy and the so-called Oxford Model (Strawson, IDM; Tugendhat, VES) within the analytic tradition. Ordinary language philosophy is the attempt to get to truths by the mere analysis of ordinary languages and their (deep) grammatical structures . Whitehead opposes this approach quite openly in the following passage: “There is an insistent presupposition sterilizing philosophic thought. It is the belief, the very natural belief, that mankind has consciously entertained all the fundamental ideas that are applicable to its experience. Further it is held that human language, in single words or in phrases, explicitly express these ideas” (MT 173). Whitehead has called this belief “The Fallacy of the Perfect Dictionary ” (MT 173). He was convinced that pure descriptive analysis of natural languages in the end would be barren. His alternative approach could—according to Strawson (IDM 9)—be termed revisionary or constructive: “Words and phrases must be stretched towards a generality foreign to their ordinary use” (PR 4). This was the revisionary procedure Whitehead used when he states that an actual entity is a “feeling”—a clear and deliberate metaphor. Only by revisionary procedures—just like in sciences—can metaphysicians hope to push the limits of knowledge. (For a detailed discussion on that topic see McHenry, DRT and Haak, DRM.) So here again we arrive at a deep difference: Whitehead ’s process approach and the Oxford Model seem to be incompatible. Any attempt to find parallels between these...