The Orders of Nature by Lawrence Cahoone (review)

Every once in a while a book appears that presents in systematic form the current state of human knowledge. The Orders of Nature is such a book. While it includes concise summaries of prominent theories in the natural sciences and to a lesser extent in the social sciences and humanities, it is much more than a general compendium of thought today. Its presentations are organized and interpreted according to the perspective of a naturalistic metaphysics. The result is an unusually impressive achievement worthy of wide dissemination and discussion.

That Lawrence Cahoone authored a synoptic metaphysics is laudable in itself. The preference accorded analysis and logical precision among Anglo-American philosophers during much of the past century marginalized one legitimate function of philosophy, namely, integrating the insights of the various disciplines into a compelling vision of the place and significance of humans in the order of things. Such an ambitious interdisciplinary attempt requires courage in our age of specialization. Cahoone affirms Donald Campbell’s claim that such comprehensive theorizing “may have to be done by marginal scholars who are willing to be incompetent in a number of fields at once” (8). Let it be said that such “incompetence” in many fields is nowhere evident in Cahoone’s book. Still, when many regard work outside one’s discipline as irrelevant, “silence, not condemnation, is the usual response to work that crosses intellectual specializations” (8). Were the comprehensive yet nuanced insights of The Orders of Nature to be ignored, a philosophical treasure chest of orientation and inspiration would be wasted.

Unfortunately, within the confines of a limited review, most of the rich material in this work must be taken for granted and not even described in general terms. Rather I will only sketch the sort of metaphysical naturalism Cahoone employs and indicate how it structures the contents of the book. Along the way, I will raise some questions about the metaphysical categories Cahoone uses and how he understands mind, meaning, and culture. Finally, I will briefly set forth and reflect upon the naturalistic speculations he offers concerning a Ground of Nature and the religious aspects of natural processes.

Cahoone states that his theory of metaphysical naturalism “can be adequately justified only if its evidence can be described independent of itself. Consequently, we need two metaphysical languages: one that labels the evidence and sets out our approach to it in the most neutral way imaginable, then a language that, we conclude, best accounts for that evidence” (5). He relies on the ordinal metaphysics of Justus Buchler as the metalanguage providing the most neutral access to the entities, structures, relations, processes, events, states, and properties that comprise reality. In particular, Cahoone borrows from Buchler the notions of natural complexes (anything that can be discriminated, past, present or future), ontological parity (anything we can discriminate is equally real), and orders of nature in order to set forth a pluralistic background language for his naturalistic metaphysics.

Cahoone does not identify nature with the Whole or Absolute; as an antifoundationalist, he understands entities, structures, events, processes, and the laws of nature to be of equal ontological merit. All the sciences are understood to have robust but fallible significance for his metaphysics of nature, which he believes properly begins at an empirical, local level. Cahoone affirms Buchler, who, following Peirce, regards possibilities “as experience-able, as potentially causal” (24), indeed, as real as actualities. Possibility has limits; traits must be capable of being actualized in order to be possible. In fact, “many systems are defined partly by their possibilities (e.g., a chemical substance by its boiling point, an immature organism by its potential adult form)” (82, see also 235). Laws define possibilities. Universals indicate the possibility that different entities have similar traits.

It strikes me that Buchler’s usage of the term “possibility,” while capable of being appropriately limited within the physical sciences, is discordant in that part of Cahoone’s comprehensive ontology that deals with living beings and especially human behavior. Thus, for instance, it is possible...