The Critical Rationalist Vol. 03 No. 01 ISSN: 1393-3809 17-Apr-1998
2 Some Points of Logic
Contents
(1) Ray Percival has asked me to say something in public about his paper `The Metaphysics of Scarcity' (Percival 1996).[1] I do so a shade reluctantly, since his topic is not one that I have ever thought deeply about; but also gladly, since it provides an opportunity to look with care at the subtly misleading logical argument on which he relies. His paper is written in numbered paragraphs, and it is to these that I shall refer in my discussion.
(2) Although there are unclarities, Percival's problem appears to be the problem of explaining how indefinite economic growth is possible, given that most natural resources are, or will become, scarce. By no means does he think that `continued growth in economically useful inventions' (§26) is inevitable, let alone something that can be scientifically predicted; yet he anticipates such growth, and wishes to explain it.
(3) Following Simon (1981), Percival dismisses the view that natural resources are `simply portions of matter/energy just waiting to be discovered' and maintains that all resources `are created by an interaction between the human mind, theories and the physical world' (§2). This is a perplexing overstatement as far as air, water, sunshine, and other necessities of life are concerned; for though, in response to chemical pollution, the water that we now drink in industrialized countries and--to a lesser extent--the air that we breathe are heavily contaminated with theory, it was not always so. Yet it may be admitted that animal (and even vegetable) inventiveness, most of it unconscious, can endow previously useless material substances with vital economic significance. This is one aspect of `active Darwinism' (Popper 1992, pp. vii-ix). But since there is competition within species, not only between species, the ability to colonize new niches does not palliate in the least one aspect of `passive Darwinism', the brutal fact that living organisms are obliged to share a limited budget of physical resources, and that those less lucky in the distribution are eliminated.
(4) Popper often stressed that the possession of objective knowledge, being largely an exercise in exosomatic adaptation, gives mankind a distinct advantage over other species in this struggle: we can sacrifice our theories instead of our skins (Popper 1972, p. 122). Percival's thesis, if I understand him, is that there is a second way in which objective knowledge can relieve the rigours of natural selection. For theoretical knowledge also gives us the means to exploit physical resources in indefinitely many ways, and with increasing efficiency, so that there need be no upper limit to the benefit extractable from a finite bundle of sufficiently varied goods. Land is cited as an exception, for until we give way to those `highly sophisticated, self-reproducing computers' who are doomed to be our descendants (§61), we all need an irreducible volume of space in which to live. But the suggestion is that, in general, the unconfined power of our intellectual resources may more than compensate for physical shortages.
(5) The centre of Percival's argument is a small theorem to the effect that the content of a theory, especially a scientific theory, is actually infinite (§§44-46), and that what we can know of it is potentially infinite. He endorses the conclusion drawn from this theorem both by Popper (1974, section 7), and by Bartley (1990, p. 33) that `our best existing knowledge is unfathomed and unfathomable'. The suggestion is that this inexhaustibility of our objective knowledge can explain the infinite versatility of our invention. Percival writes for instance (§28):
A theory ...can be applied an infinite number of times and in an infinite number of different useful projects because of its universal reference to all space and time and because of its infinitely varied logical and (in the case of scientific theories) information content.
(6) In the next section, an excursion into technical logic, I shall investigate the scope and applicability of the theorem that Percival cites. Those who have no taste for barren subtlety may proceed to section 3. There I contest Percival's explanation of the limitlessness of technological progress, and replace it with an explanation that equally makes appeal to the unfettered power of our intellectual resources but, I think, more accurately locates them. I shall maintain, in brief, that it is not because our theories are so strong, but because they are not so strong, that there is so much room available for so much inventive application.
2 Some Points of Logic
Contents
The Critical Rationalist Vol. 03 No. 01 ISSN: 1393-3809 17-Apr-1998
Copyright © 1998 All Rights Reserved.
TCR Issue Timestamp: Fri Apr 17 07:52:54 GMT 1998