Metaphysics and Materialism

Abstract

DR. NORMAN CAMPBELL has not understood me. Probably thinking that I am an idealist philosopher, he has supposed that I must be arguing that there is no scientific reality in the accepted meaning—that is, no scientific criterion of reality—and that the naturalist's mongoose, for example, has just as much or just as little realitv as the drunkard's. What I was pointing out was the fact that the principle of relativity is the rejection of materialism. Materialism, is a causal theory of scientific reality. It is the argument that when we pronounce anything in our sense-experience to be real we imply an independent cause of it. According to the principle of relativity, the inference is entirely unnecessary and to insist on it unscientific. Instead of this causal theory relativity offers a simple correspondence theory. The Minkowski-Einstein universe consists of events co-ordinated by observers in their different systems of reference. What is essential to constitute the “real event” of any observer is that there should be point-to-point correspondence between his co-ordination of it and the different coordinations of other observers. The co-ordination of an event by any observer—that is, his perspective of the event—is not an effect which is the appearance to him of a “causal” realitv, but an actual case in point of the reality itself. The “event” in the four-dimensional continuum, and its track the “world-line,” in re-forming the notion of scientific reality has relegated scientific materialism to its right place in the limbo of scholasticism. Whatever his disagreement, at least Dr. Campbell need not be alarmed for the basis of scientific research.