Those who have some training in Aristotelian thought often analyze the modern sciences by saying that they “study material and efficient causes, but not formal and final ones”. This is true, but it is true in a very particular way, and it does not get to the bottom of things. The sciences might be read as favoring material and efficient causes so far as they seek to explain all that happens in nature by causes that exist physically prior in time to the effect. As Russell put it: “in science, the present determines the future; it is not the future that determines the present”. The end is not a cause, and since every form is an end (of matter), form is not a cause either. This opinion doesn’t really exploit anything proper to science- it is more a metaphysical doctrine about causality that could be mapped onto any particular doctrine. It was asserted about nature before the scientific method and could be perfectly well asserted abut it after the method was lost or abandoned. So considered, the claim “it studies material and efficient causes” is not a claim that arises from science as such.But science as such does give rise to the negation of finality (and for that matter efficient causality) by seeing all things in the line of a formal cause that is most proportionate to our understanding.
Again, the modern sciences, considered in themselves, do not study the material and efficient causes so much as they study a kind of formal cause, sc. the mathematical principles of natural things. What we call “scientific” most of all analyzes its subject with numerical tools: meters, grams, seconds, percentages, per capita counts, standard deviations on surveys, statistical models, graphs and charts, etc. All these things are in the line of formal causes- in fact, in the line of the formal cause which is most proportioned to our intellect: a mathematical form understood in terms of a unit that owes its existence to us. The perfect intelligibility of quantitative form and artistic form are brought together into a single tool: the numeral (as opposed to the number), and after this, all nature is understood as if it were nothing but these numerals: whether they are grouped into hundreds, or set on Cartesian co-ordinates, or obeying the strict rules of an algebraic dance. So considered, “science” is nothing other than the attempt to understand all things in terms of the form which is most intelligible to us. The character of what we call science reduces to this character of the form that it seeks to understand things in terms of. In the measure that we can understand things in relation to a form that is perfectly intelligible to us and owes its existence to us, we will have a proportionate power over the existence and intelligibility of nature. At the same time, this form which is perfectly intelligible to us prescinds both from matter, end, agency, substance and quality, though not all in the same way.
Just Thomism 
PatrickH said,
December 12, 2009 at 11:22 am
Would it be fair to say then that science does not need (or use?) the concept of causality in the sense of “push”, i.e., efficient causes? I can’t help thinking of scientists like R.A. Fisher saying that science deals with correlations, not causes. On this view, the correlational mathematics (it seems clear to me now) is explanation by formal cause, and abandons explanation by efficient cause. This view may seem advantageous to scientists like Fisher because you cannot really say that something is an efficient cause without talking about the final cause toward which it is being efficient, so to speak. And of course, mathematical models (or at least rigorously structured systematic models) are sometimes even called “formalisms”, which seems a recognition of this. It also relieves the scientist of having to respond to those pesky Humean questions about causes, questions that are inevitable given a certain empiricist epistemology.
I”m asking, I think, if the the attacks on causality by scientists such as Fisher are really attacks on efficient causality, not causality as such, in the name (so to speak) of formal causality, whose unacknowledged presence is hidden by words like “correlation”, “model”, “predictive formalism” and such. If this is right, it’s rather ironic, isn’t it, that the popular view of science as dealing with efficient causes (and that being the very reason for its success as a method!) is exactly and utterly wrong.
James Chastek said,
December 12, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Right. I think there is more gold in the vein of seeing science as looking to what is proportionate to us, or even most of all proportionate to us. This immediately raises the question of form.
It is very unclear what “formalism” means for contemporary people: I suspect it might involve Kant’s idea that we are born full of forms that we pour the “formless world” (whatever this means) into. The numeral has to get involved somewhere.