| | Ed:
I'd say that a scientific "why" is actually a knowledge "how" (e.g. what mechanism drives this?) -- and a philosophic "why" is an understanding "why." To tell you the truth, I'm interested in both questions, though not quite sure that both could ever be adequately answered.
The only meaningful "why" questions are scientific "why" questions. In science (more general: in real life) there is in fact no difference between "how" and "why". Every "why" question is ultimately a "how" question. We can do an experiment, for example measure the speed of a falling object or the force exerted by an extended spring and conclude that it can be described by some simple relationship (distance proportional to the time squared, force proportional to the extension). Many people would call this result a simple fact, but it is of course a theory, a model of the real world. We could easily come up with thousands of different theories that can explain the observed data. Here Occam's razor is of course a useful instrument to make everything as simple as possible but not simpler (to use Einstein's words). If we now ask why this theory works, we're in fact looking for a more encompassing theory, of which our first, simple theory is a subset, a necessary consequence. If we find such a theory, we now have the feeling that we have gained more understanding of what we observe, but we've in fact only replaced a relatively simple and specific theory by a more general, "deeper" theory. Of course we can ask now why this theory works, and so on, until we arrive at some TOE. So all our "why" questions lead to trying to find increasingly more general theories that can explain our data.
Now we might perhaps think that the only "real facts" are the data that we measured. But these are of course also based on theories of the measurement process. The same is true for every fact in daily life. Some theories are so strongly confirmed that we simply forget that they are theories, they are just too obvious. The fact that we can't walk through a wall is a theory, albeit a theory with very solid evidence. Theories that are so strongly confirmed are called facts, theories which still have to be confirmed (or rejected) are hypotheses. For example, sometimes people make a distinction between the fact of evolution (species evolving in the course of time, as indicated by the fossil evidence), and the theory of evolution (evolution as the result of random mutation and natural selection). But both are of course theories, as the step from finding fossils to the interpretation of that find is also a theory. The evidence for that theory is so extremely strong that we call it a fact, while the evidence for the "theory" of evolution is "only" very good (in fact so good that I wouldn't object to calling it also a fact). So every meaningful "why" question is ultimately a scientific question, looking for a theory that can describe our data in a "meaningful" (i.e. without too many ad hoc hypotheses) way our data. Philosophical "why" questions that can't be answered by science may perhaps fulfill a psychological need, but they have no real meaning.
|
|
