Is The World Completely Intelligible? A Very Short Course

This is a question that perhaps only philosophers, religious thinkers, literary writers, and a few physicists might seriously ponder. (No doubt others ponder it, but less systematically.) Here are two different answers: (1) the world is completely intelligible; (2) the world is not completely intelligible. The first answer is given by some physicists (who believe that string theory provides a “theory of everything” that makes the world completely intel-ligible1) and by some philosophers influenced by the “unity of science” program started in the 1930s (who believe that there must be some “theory of everything,” whether or not it is string theory, cf. Chalmers, 2012). An extreme form of the second answer would be given by skeptics who say that nothing is intelligible, either because the world itself is completely random and disorderly (“as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods” to quote King Lear), or because, even if the world is orderly we can never know and therefore understand what this order is (“How unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past finding out,” Romans 11.33). A moderate form of the second answer would be that some things about the world are intelligible, others not. A religious scientist might hold such a position. So might some philosophers, who think that not all mental states can be reduced to, and understood in terms of, physical ones—the gold standard of intelligibility for physicalists (Kim, 2005). A somewhat different answer is given by Nagel (2012) in a recent book, which is that whether or not the world is in fact completely intelligible, “science is driven by the assumption” that it is.