Hanson on the Unpicturability of Micro-Entities

Anthony M. Paul
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 22, No. 1. (Feb., 1971), pp. 50-53.
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50 Anthony 111. Paul

MACKAY,
D. M. (1960) On the logical indeterminacy of a free choice, Mind 69, 31-40.
POPPER,
K. R. (19j0) Indeterminism in classical and quantum physics. Br. Phil. Sci. I,

r.

117-33, 173-95.

HANSON ON THE UNPICTURABILITY OF

MICRO-ENTITIES

THELATE N. R. HANSON,
in the chapter entitled 'Picturing' of The Concept of the
Positron (Hanson, 1963), concludes that sub-atomic entities are in principle unpicturable. Although the argument he offers there is ingenious, I do not believe
that it supports this conclusion.
I THEINITIAL PRESIISE of the argument is something Hanson regards as a
fundamental principle of explanation :
[PI] In general, though each member of a class of events may be explained
by other members, the totality of the class cannot be explained by any
member of the class. (p. 43)
T h e relevant corollary of this principle is that
[P,] all the picturable properties of objects, the totality of them, cannot be
explained by reference to anything which itself possesses any of those
properties. (p. 43)
From this corollary Hanson's conclusion about the unpicturability of subatomic particles is supposed to follow:
[C] There are certain properties which atomic particles must necessarily lack:
electrons could not be other than in principle unpicturable. The impossibility of vizualising ultimate matter is an essential feature of atomic explanation. (p. 42)
It is important to notice that the conclusion of this argument is entirely
independent of any evidence or theories there may be about micro-entities.
This is because it is supposed to be a logical consequence of the feature of explanation expressed in PI. Such aprioristic arguments are not uncommon in
philosophical discourse about science, but this one is strikingly different from
most others. These tend to be about the general features of scientific theories,
not about the actual properties of things. Hanson, in contrast, boldly concludes:
'There are certain properties which atomic particles must necessarily lack.'
An argument that is ostensibly this potent deserves a more detailed discussion
than it receives in The Concept of the Positron.

2 THEFIRST QUESTIONABLE POINT in establishing C is Hanson's discussion,

in connection with PI and P,, of Democritus' atomic theory. Thales, Empedocles,
and Democritus, he writes, all sought to explain "the myriad colours, tastes,
and textures of things" by means of "something more fundamental." Of these
philosophers only Democritus

saw that if this "fundamental something" was to explain all the observed
properties of objects, it could not itself possess any of those properties. Earth,

Hanson on the linpicturability of Micro-Entities

51

water, air, and fire did possess them: Democritus' atoms therefore lacked
all properties, save only geometrical and dynamical ones. (p. 43)
T h e point of this passage is that Democritus' theory is an illustration of P,.
Hanson also regards the theory as an illustration of P,. He writes:
Democritus' atomic theory avoids investing atoms with secondary properties
which themselves require explanation. It provides a pattern of concepts
in virtue of which the properties the atom does possess-position, shape,
motion-can account for the other, secondary properties of objects. T h e
conceptual price paid for this intellectual gain is unpicturability-and
unpicturability in principle at that. (p. 44)
Now, why does Hanson think that Democritus' atoms are unpicturable?
The only reason he gives is that they are colourless.
Can a colourless atom be pictured? Windows and spectacles can be pictured only because at certain angles they are not transparent. If the colours
of objects are to be explained by atoms, then atoms cannot be coloured, nor
can they be pictured. (p. 44)
T h e concept of picturability suggested in this passage needs examination.
If mere colourlessness were a sufficient condition for unpicturability then C,
the conclusion of Hanson's main argument, would be unexceptionable indeed.
Hardly any reader of Hanson's book will have thought that sub-atomic entities
are the sorts of things that can be coloured. If this is all that is meant by unpicturability then C is striking only in virtue of its highly restricted sense of
'unpicturable.'
We never, it should be noted, require of a picture that it have just the same
properties as its subject. A perfectly good picture (an etching, for example)
may portray a subject by means of colours (like Hanson, I am here regarding
black and white as colours) that are not in the subject at all. Hence it is not
intolerably strange to conclude that a subject which has no colours at all can be
portrayed by a coloured picture. I t is possible to draw an extremely accurate
and completely serviceable picture of, say, a three-inch equilateral triangle,
even though the picture has colours that are not in the geometrical figure.
It might be objected that the drawings in geometry books are not really
pictures but only, perhaps, diagrams. However, such drawings are essentially
like pictures because, unlike the schematic diagrams of electrical circuits and
company organisations, they represent the spatial relations among the parts of
their subjects. Surely physicists like Kelvin and Campbell rightly regarded the
mechanisms they proposed as picturable even though colourless. Simple colourlessness does not render anything completely unpicturable, as Hanson seems
to want to say it does. C'npicturability-in-principle is colourlessness plus (or
minus) something else. Hanson does not, in his chapter on picturing, say what
else.
In order for Democritus' explanation of the secondary properties to be an
illustration of P, the secondary properties would have to be "all the picturable
properties of objects" and, of course, the primary properties would all have t o
be unpicturable. This, obviously, is not the case: one could hardly picture
anything as coloured without picturing it as shaped.

52

Anthony M. Paul

3 TOSHOW THAT Democritus' theory is not an illustration of P, is not to show

that P, is an unsound principle. Indeed, an explanation in terms of something
picturable of why all picturable things are picturable would be as circular as
saying that all red things are red because they contain red particles. T h e flaw
in Hanson's argument is not in the initial premise, PI, or its corollary, P,.
Rather, it is in the unstated premise, P,, that is needed in order to get from the
argument's innocuous premise to its surprising conclusion. By itself P, implies
only that if atomic theory is to explain why picturable things are picturable it
must do so by reference to entities that are themselves unpicturable. T o get
from P, to C one must also hold
P, In order to be adequate a micro-physical theory must explain why all
picturable things are picturable.
However, P, is a premise that there is no reason to accept.

4 THEINITIAL PLAUSIBILITY of Hanson's argument comes from an equivocation present in PI and P,. PI is that "though each member of a class of events
map be explained by other members, the totality of the class cannot be explained
by any member of the class." The distinction glossed over in PI, and in P, as
well, is that between explaining why all F's are F and explaining other things
about the class of things that are F. Hanson's very persuasive examples, such
as the circularity of explaining that all red things are red because they contain
red particles, are examples only of the former kind of explaining. Indeed, a
satisfactory explanation of why all red things are red must be in terms of something which is not itself red, but other things about all red things
- may be explainable without the necessity of recourse to non-red things.
Such classes as the class of physical things are pre-eminently the kinds of
classes for which science aims to provide only the second sort of explanation.
That is, science attempts to explain a good deal about physical things, but it
does not attempt to explain why they are physical. A scientific theory which
fails to explain why physical things are physical is not therefore in any way
inadequate. This simply is not a scientific question.
Now I should like to suggest that the class of picturable things is like the
class of physical things in this respect. That is, a micro-physical theory, in
order to be adequate, must explain a great deal about things that are picturable
but it need not necessarily explain why they are all picturable. It is not very
clear what an explanation-of why all picturable things are picturable would be
like, but uneasiness about the notion that physical science should leave some
specifiable characteristic of physical objects unexplained can be allayed by considering Hanson's principle PI itself. If applied to every such characteristic it
leads to a debilitating infinite regress. For example, if picturability must be
explained by means of things that are unpicturable, then unpicturability must,
in turn, be explained by means of things that are picturable, and so on. The moral
is that to stop somewhere is reasonable, and Hanson gives no reason to suppose
that physics should not stop short of attempting to explain picturability.
There could possibly be an adequate atomic theory which did not posit unpicturable entities (as there would be if the world were Democritean). Such a
theory would not at present be acceptable unless it provided a convincing reinterpretation of things like the "wavicle" evidence. This does not, however,

Hanson on the Unpicturability of Micro-Entities

53

mean that the ultimate constituents of matter are in principle unpicturable.

If they should turn out to be unpicturable this will not be because of any logically
necessary features of explanation but only because of such contingencies as the
evidence on which the Copenhagen Interpretation is based.
A N T H O N Y M. P A U L

Unizlersity of Alaryland, Baltimore

REFERENCE

HANSON,N. R. (1963) The Concept of the Positron. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

NOTE
IRVING
THALBERG:
New light on brain physiology and free will? Brit. J. Phil. Sci. 21
(1970), 379-83.
Professor D. M. MACKAY
feels that his arguments have been seriously misrepresented in
the above note, and intends to publish a reply in the May issue.

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Hanson on the Unpicturability of Micro-Entities
Anthony M. Paul
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 22, No. 1. (Feb., 1971), pp. 50-53.
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