Japanese Studies in the Philosophy of Science

213 Pages·1998·5.51 MB·English

by  Nobushige Sawada (auth.)

JAPANESE STUDIES
IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
BOSTON STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
Editor
ROBERT S. COHEN, Boston University
Editorial Advisory Board
THOMAS F. GLICK, Boston University
ADOLF GRUNBAUM, University of Pittsburgh
SYLVAN S. SCHWEBER, Brandeis University
JOHN J. STACHEL, Boston University
MARX W. WARTOFSKY (Editor and Advisor 1960-1997) t
VOLUME 45
JAPANESE STUDIES
IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF
SCIENCE
Edited by
FRANCIS GEN-ICHIRO NAGASAKA
Nanzan University, Nagoya
Co-edited by
ROBERT S. COHEN
Boston University, Center for Philosophy and History of Science
SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.
Iibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-94-010-6176-6 ISBN 978-94-011-5175-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-011-5175-7
Printed on acid-free paper
AlI Rights Reserved
@ 1998 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1998
No part of this publication may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE / Robert S. Cohen Vll
FRANCIS G. NAGASAKA / Introduction: A Short History of
Japanese Philosophy of Science xiii
1. NOBUSHIGE SAWADA / The Mind as Human Jobs
2. WATARU KURODA / Other Minds 7
3. HIDEKICHI NAKAMURA / On the Individuation of Events 21
4. HYAKUDAI SAKAMOTO / Mind, Privacy and Causality 33
5. SHOZO OHMORI / Double Look: Science Superposed on a
Perceptual World 69
6. NATUHIKO YOSIDA / Scientific Laws as Tools for Taxonomy 89
7. SATOSI WATANABE / Causality and Temporal Irreversibility 101
8. AKIRA OIDE / The Structure of Statistical Inference 117
9. HIROSHI KUROSAKI / On Inference in Science 143
10. M.M. YANASE / Comment on the Machida-Namiki-Araki Theory 153
11. SHUNTARO ITO / Who Are Precursors of Gali1eo in His Pisan
Dynamics? - A Criticism of Professor Moody's Paper 161
12. HIROSHI NAGAI/Philosophical Meanings of the Concept of
Evolution 175
Index of Names 189
v
ROBERT S. COHEN
PREFACE
The splendid achievements of Japanese mathematics and natural sciences
during the second half of our 20th century have been a revival, a Renaissance,
of the practical sciences developed along with the turn toward Western
thinking in the late 19th century. The equally admirable results of Japanese
philosophers (and historians) of science in our time followed upon a period less
congenial to Western interests in the philosophical questions linked to modern
science; and this reluctance to confront the epistemology, not even the humane
significance, of the sciences went along with devotion to other Western trends.
Thus, with the 'new' Japan of the Meiji restoration of 1868, and the early
introduction of Western philosophy in the subsequent decade by Nishi Amane,
a period of intellectual attraction to utilitarian, positivist, evolutionary, even
materialist outlooks was soon replaced by devotion to scholarly work on Kant
and Hegel, on ethical and general philosophical idealism. These studies often
could emulate the critical spirit (the philosopher Onishe Hajime, praised for his
own critical independence, was known as the Japanese Kant) but the neo
Kantian and neo-Hegelian developments were not much affected by either
empirical sciences or theoretical speculations about Nature. The pre-eminent
philosopher of Japan ofthe first half of our century was Nishida Kitaro, with a
pioneering treatise A Study of the Good, who, with his leading student Tanabe
Hajime, formed the 'Kyoto School' of pre-war philosophy. Tanabe was a bridge
builder from the idealist trends to the study of nature and of the methodology
of the sciences; he continued his work through the early post-war years, a critic
of nationalist ideology.
Another Western orientation in philosophy, one tightly bound to economics
and political science as well as to an historical methodology of analysis, was
Marxism. Under the pre-war cultural politics, mainly Marxist philosophers
criticized Japanese nationalism whereas the Hegelians were among the extreme
proponents of that nationalism. In the first decade of the post-war period,
Marxist outlooks burst forth, throughout the new culture and including
philosophy: some philosophers of distinction joined the Japan Communist
Party, among them the Aristotle scholar Ide Takashi, and the noted student of
Nishida, Yanagida Kenjuro. Marxism was a Western orientation toward
human social problems which seemed inherently to favor a critical while
appreciative stance toward science and technology in human history, and the
continuing influence of Marxist categories was evident well beyond any strict
Vll
F. G. Nagasaka (ed.), Japanese Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vii-xi.
© 1998 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
viii ROBERT S. COHEN
adherence to one or another political party program.
This was so in several ways: first, a sophisticated attention to Marxist (that is
specific historical materialist) interpretation of the history of science and
mathematics; and second, an interest in developing either a logic of the
development of scientific ways of knowing, or a logic of natural processes of
development (in either case, a dialectic of nature with resonance to traditional
Chinese and Japanese views of Nature as well as to the views and problematic
of Marx and Engels and later Western Marxist interpreters). An early
treatment of a development from the history of society was a series of papers
on the relationship between mathematics and the social class structure of
historically changing societies, published in 1929-30, by Ogura Kinnosuke.
This work was as influential and shocking among Japanese intellectuals due to
Ogura's discoveries concerning external, and specifically social class, determi
native factors in the progress of science as was the presentation of Hessen's
Soviet Marxist paper on social factors in Newton's mechanics at the Interna
tional Congress in London in 1931, two or more years after Ogura. An
interesting account, with related materials, will be found in Nakayama
Shigeru's 'The externalist orientation of Japanese historians of science'
(Japanese Stud. Hist. Sci., 1972, reprinted as 'The history of science: a subject
for the frustrated' in Science and Society in Modern Japan, MIT Press, 1974)
along with a clear succinct translation of a part of Ogura's 'Arithmetic in a class
society: notes on arithmetic in the European Renaissance'. Beyond the explicit
scope of this volume of Japanese Studies in the Philosophy of Science but of
interest in itself is Nakayama's paper on 'Grass-roots geology' in the same MIT
volume, wherein we see the leading role played by local field geology in a
mature but unconventional philosophy of science propounded by Ijiri Shoji.
In his Introduction, Professor Nakasaka traces the coming, at last, in the late
1940s and 1950s, of philosophy of science in its professional character, and
with that also an awakening of general philosophers, including historians of
Asian and Western philosophy, to the extraordinary role of science in
civilization. A series of surveys can guide the English reader who wishes to
look deeper:
Nagai, Hiroshi, 'Some Aspects of the Philosophy of Science in Japan' Annals of
the Japan Association for the Philosophy of Science vol. 1, no. 1 (1956)
[Hereafter 'Annals']
Nagai, Hiroshi, 'Recent Trends in Japanese Research on the Philosophy of
Science' Z. allgem. Wissenschaftstheorie vol. 2 (1971)
Ohe, S., 'Philosophy of Science in Japan (1956-1965), Annals vol. 3 (1966)
Teranaka, H., 'Philosophy of Science in Japan (1971-1975)' Annals vol. 5
(1978-79)
Kurosaki, Hiroshi, 'Philosophy of Science in Japan (1976-1980)' Annals vol. 6
(1982)
Murakami, Yoichiro, 'Philosophy of Science in Japan (1981-1985)' Annals vol.
7 (1987)
PREFACE IX
Murakami, Yoichiro, 'Philosophy of Science in Japan (1986-1990), Annals vol.
8 (1992)
and a special article
Yamanouchi, T., 'Physics and Philosophy in Japan' Contemporary Philosophy,
ed. R. Klibansky (1968)
* * *
Several scientists and philosophers have appealed to a Western mind in
particularly interesting ways, and I note a few of their works here.
(1) Watanabe Satosi. Knowing and Guessing: A Quantitative Study of Inference
and Information (Wiley, 1969). A major treatise of natural philosophy:
physics, communication and information theory, cybernetics, statistics,
inductive logic, and steeped in philosophy.
Reversibilite contre irreversibilite en physique quantique' in Louis de
Broglie: Physician et Penseur, ed. A. George (Albin Michel, Paris 1953),
pp. 385-400.
'Symmetry of Physical Laws' Parts I, II, III in Rev. Mod. Phys. vol. 27 pp.
26-39,40-76,179-186.
'Causality and Time' in The Study of Time II, ed. J.T. Fraser and N.
Lawrence (Springer 1975), pp. 267-282.
'Needed: A Historical Dynamical View of Theory Change' in Synthese,
vol. 32 (1975), pp. 113-134. Here we find Watanabe's critique of Kuhn's
theory.
'A Model of Mind-Body Relation in Terms of Modular Logic', Boston
Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 1 (Reidel, 1963), pp. 1-41. This
was the first paper in the first volume of the Boston Studies; Watanabe's
lecture, October 26, 1961, was the first lecture to the Boston Colloquium
for the Philosophy of Science.
This paper was revised: 'Modified Concepts of Logic, Probability, and
Information Based on Generalised Continuous Characteristic Function',
Information and Control, vol. 15 (1969).
'Theory of Propensity: A New Foundation of Logic', Boston Studies, vol.
31 (entitled Language, Logic and Method) (Reidel, 1983), pp. 283-308.
(2) Mutsuo Yanase. This insightful philosopher-scientist, also a noted Jesuit
theologian, has published on fundamental physics, especially concerned
with micro-measurement, with time, with probability, and with the realism
issue in scientific knowing.
'ReversibiliHit und IrreversibiliHit in der Physik' Annals vol. I (1956), pp.
131-149.
x ROBERT S. COHEN
'On Aevum - between time and eternity -' Annals vol. 4 (1975)
'Fuzziness and Probability' Annals vol. 6 (1985), pp. 219-226.
'Analysis of the Quantum Mechanical Measurement Process' (with E.P.
Wigner) Annals vol. 4.
'Hidden Realism (I)' Annals vol. 5, pp. 225-244, and 'Hidden Realism (II)'
vol. 6, pp. 129-138.
(3) Hideki Yukawa. The pre-eminent physicist of Japan has published many
articles and books of a philosophical or broadly cultural nature, and
critically commented on the inadequacy of modern fundamental space-
time theory. His own work at the level of elementary particles, in his self
reflection, was originally derived from what Yukawa termed a metaphysi
cal idea of the classical Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu; perhaps
intuition.
Here are two representative reflections.
'Elementary Particles and Space-Time Structure' Annals vol. 1 (1960).
'Intuition and Abstraction in Scientific Thinking' Annals vol. 2 (1962).
(4) Other philosophical physicists of scientific renown: Tomonaga Shin'ichiro
whose 'The World Reflected in the Mirror' (Tokyo 1965) is a reminder of a
favorite story of Niels Bohr; Yamanouchi Takahiko who has been a
sympathetic colleague to analytic philosophers, and a critic of the 'Un
scientific' factor of instinct or intuition as in Yukawa, published Man and
Machine (Tokyo 1965) and later a philosophical study of the logic and
explanatory power of model theory in On Understanding ofM odern Physics
(Tokyo 1970); and Sakata Shoichi, interested in the emergent levels
structure of Nature, as well as Taketani Mutsuo whose work on the
Problems of Dialectics (two volumes, Tokyo 1946 and 1959) was a major
post-war Marxist work of scientific philosophy.
These are personal glances at a rich literature of which no doubt the English
Annals, itself a treasure house, is only a sample. In very recent years, a
collection on the theme of 'Mind-Body Problems' was published (Tokyo,
1980) with contributions from Omori, Inoue, Kuroda, Yamamoto, and
Hiramatu. This vexed problem in the philosophy of science subsequently drew
much attention, notably Omori's Fragments (1981), and Sakamoto's Philosophy
of the Human Machine (1981). At the same time, in 1990, a special symposium
of the journal Philosophy of Science was devoted to the question: what should
be the future of philosophy of science? Sawada's paper lucidly presented the
different situations of philosophy of sciences past, present, and (alternatives?)
future; Sakamoto set forth his original conception of the desired 'unified
science', not that of the logical positivists but rather a great synthesis of all
scientific activities. Thus for Sakamoto a comprehensive study of bioethics
PREFACE Xl
must draw upon many sciences in essential ways, but also each would appear to
take care to mind solely its own business; and yet bioethics is ethics, essentially
philosophical, and the insights of each science must be philosophically
coordinated. This coordination, this unification, should be regarded as an
important part and task of the philosopher of science. (The harmony of this
view with that of Otto Neurath's 'orchestration' of the sceinces comes to mind.)
In 1991 Akira Oide's work, Challenge to Paradoxes dealt especially with
quantum logic. Also in 1991 Sakamoto published his New Developments in the
Theory of the Origin of Language, again, as in his bioethics, a provocative
synthesis of investigations from many sciences. Also in 1992, Kuroda's Act and
Norm was a notable posthumous publication; and Omori's Time and Ego, his
last book. Clearly this sampling from the current decade shows strength of
mind and great focus upon humane philosophical responsibility. Now the new
philosophers are at work, those in their forties or early fifties, mainly from the
University of Tokyo or Keio University: our good guide Nagasaka tells us to
look for the names of Soshiti Utii, Yosaku Nishiwaki, Tanji Nobuharu, Keiichi
Noe, Teruo Yokohama.
The volume before you seems to be representative of the best of the first, the
'renaissance' generation of Japanese philosophers of science. Our Preface and
our Introduction provide maps of what constitutes the Japanese philosophical
landscape for philosophers and historians of recent science. Of course, our
major gratitude goes to the authors of the articles in the book, twelve very
patient philosophers. And warmest thanks to Francis Gen-Ichiro Nagasaka.
Boston University Robert S. Cohen
Center for Philosophy and History of Science
March 1998