Evolving Thoughts

Domains, disciplines and levels

I have to get this out of my head so I can go do some real work (like finding some real work). Next time someone wants me to do metaphysics, they better come armed with a cheque.

So if, as I have argued, reduction is one-layered in ontological terms, however many levels there may be in epistemic terms, what does this mean for the autonomy of these theories and their domains/disciplines? Another way to frame that question is to ask: is biology real?

Many emergentists fear that if we reduce biology to physical theories then biology will become a branch of physics and we can close biology departments, and there is a lot to that. Biology programs that do not involve big science (which usually means a physics based approach using molecular, SEM, and other high end techniques and instruments that are largely physical and reductionist) are being deprecated or closed around the world, in part because the funding model of academe these days involves getting very large grants, which you can’t do if your aim is to go out into the field and simply observe and describe. It has to have sexy new technology.

Another objection, voiced most eloquently by Ed Wilson in his autobiography Naturalist, chapter 12, is that the reductionists take over the discipline and lose the valuable work and insights of non-molecular techniques. My friends who do what is now dismissed as “comparative morphology” find this all the time. And they are right to complain. The form of reduction here is not epistemic, but hegemonic. We are losing knowledge (in the western world, anyway; countries like Brazil, Mexico, India and China often preserve the older techniques and results because the big science stuff is out of their reach. My hope is they will reseed the sciences when the big science fad has run its course).

None of this is mandated by my argument. It is one thing to think everything is physical and can be ultimately described without remainder in physical terms. It is quite another to think we can do it in the near future, or even ever. The reason is that as epistemic agents, scientists are limited by the information they can retrieve, by the resources they have at their disposal, and by the computational constraints of working with brains and limited Turing machines. Maybe Laplace’s Demon could do simple physical science and capture everything (arguably) but we can’t. If we ever do get a full account of biology in physical models, we still would need to treat biology as a separate domain that availed itself of physics only when needed. Epistemically, biology (and analogously, psychology, sociology, and complex systems theory) has to be pursued independently because we lack the capacity to learn about the world except piecemeal.

So, why biology? Why not divide it into fields like molecular genetics, palaeontology, biogeography, ecology, and so forth? Actually we do, and the divisions are much finer and more fluid even than that. We divide fields and domains into schools, research programs, traditions, and departments, and these, being sociological entities are as fluid as any other social phenomena. “Biology” does not really exist these days in universities. One can do a “biology” degree and miss out on much of the richness of traditional biological study, as I and my “biologist” friends constantly find and complain about (the mass noun for academics is a mudgeon of curs). What holds biology together is largely social inertia. It came into being as a separate field around 1800 out of “natural philosophy”, and has split several times since. It even used to be part of geology, or at least paired with it. Some days I think we should simply replace all these local terrestrial domains with “earth sciences” (one thing they all have in common is that they occur, so far as we know, exclusively on earth), including the social sciences. This might cause some ructions in university politics.

But we also like to think that the domains are real in themselves. This was widely debated at the end of the nineteenth century. People would discuss what the “natural” arrangement of the sciences was to be, and this evolved over time into the problem of reduction. All this relied upon the presumption that the sciences were more or less delimited according to the “joints of nature”. If, as I suspect, there is only one joint of nature, the physical, what does this mean?

My answer is that sciences are begun and maintained because in a very large part they deal with phenomena (readers may recall my series on phenomena a while ago), and this raises a problem: phenomena are not independent aspects of the world – they rely upon a relation between the world and the observer, and are dependent upon what the observer is disposed to discriminate. So it looks like a scientific domain is a part of reality (or whatever) that we find interesting and different.

And so what if it is? Science is a process of learning about the world, and we start somewhere (with evolved and cultural propensities; nobody starts any investigation tabula rasa) and refine it based upon what assays we can apply, which includes our psychological, computational*, technological and conceptual techniques for discrimination.

But phenomena are real enough. It is not just that we construct the world, there also has to be a world we can construct. Phenomena are aspects of the world to which we respond because responding to them increases our ability to manipulate and navigate the world, and so increases our fitness. Thus we have evolved to get a reasonably good grip on the joints of nature that are important to us.

Science exceeds our evolved capacities in this respect, as I argued in my Scientific American blog entry: in fact science is common sense carried out by other means, and for things that we didn’t originally know could be discriminated. If everything is physical, we still have to discriminate organisms, genes, mountains, tectonic plates, stars and institutions, as well as the content of beliefs, attitudes, experiences and the like. A commenter asked what I would do with “facts” like first person experience (see here), ineffable experiences, the qualitative, the transcendental, and so on. I would say they are, if we really must continue to deal with them, functional classes of phenomena that are made by the relation of the observer to the world. If we can investigate them at all, then we will find ways to reduce them. If we can’t, then why treat them as anything other than functional classes, artefacts of language and sociology?

The domains of science are the parts of the world we have some grasp of, some handle on, some way to continue investigations. They are not sui generis in the ontological sense, but they may be in terms of how we can find out more. And if we ever do get a complete physics, this will not be the end of science, although it may be the end of pure physics (applied physics will go on indefinitely, I think). Biology, geology, psychology and even computer science will continue on their own until we get to a point, if we do, that we have just exhaustively covered the whole domain, independently of what we might think of our grasp of the principles of physics. The Radiohead Conundrum means that reductionism need not be hegemonic.

That’s enough. For now. Send money…

* I use the term “computational” a lot. It doesn’t just mean computers; before automatic computing devices were invented, a “computer” was a human being, usually a woman, with paper and a pencil. In my usage it means the ability to reason exactly, externally or internally, consciously or subconsciously.

Biology Epistemology Logic and philosophy Metaphysics Natural Classification Science Systematics

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Comments (22)

  1. I can´t resist:

    Phenomena are aspects of the world to which we respond because responding to them increases our ability to manipulate and navigate the world, and so increases our fitness.

    The extraordinary good and concise sentence in which pragmatism marries biologism. Needless to say that Husserl and Heidegger probably wouldn’t agree. The first probably with the explanation of “phenomena”, the second with the conclusion why we respond to them.
    And nothing contradicts this statement more than the first sentence of Aristotle’s Metaphysic.

    1. It will in no way surprise you to know that I think Husserl and Heidegger and even Aristotle are wrong here. This is a philosopher’s prerogative. But as to Aristotle’s “All men by nature desire to know”, I can think of few philosophical apothegms less mandated by experience.

      1. You are right. It was not the first sentence, but the second . Or I should have sent this one, Metaphysics 981b:
        But as more arts were invented, and some were directed to the necessities of life, others to recreation, the inventors of the latter were naturally always regarded as wiser than the inventors of the former, because their branches of knowledge did not aim at utility.

      2. Just to be fair to Aristotle, here’s a slightly longer version of the quotation from the Metaphysics:

        “All men by nature desire understanding. A sign of this is their liking of sensations, for, even apart from the need of these for other things, they are liked for their own sake, and of all sensations those received by the eyes are liked most. For, not only for the sake of doing something else, but even if we are not going to do anything else, we prefer, as the saying goes, seeing to the other sensations. The cause of this is the fact that, of all the sensations, seeing makes us know in the highest degree and makes clear many differences in things.”

        I’m not arguing for Aristotle’s point of view here; but the man did argue for his own point of view. It wasn’t just asserted. The bit about “even apart from the need of these for other things” is the crux, or so it seems to me. Note that one can perfectly well agree that our ability to respond to phenomena came to be in order to increase fitness without accepting that this explanation settles what our sensibilities mean to us now or ought to mean to us now.

        1. I am not disparaging Aristotle, who I have often called much greater than his detractors admit. I am merely saying that the opening to the Metaphysics is a case of projection. Aristotle wishes to know (or understand, oida) so he argues that all do, when only a little reflection would show there are a number who do not. However, he is not being stupid here, and as you say gives a kind of argument for it.

        2. Pedantic footnote: I reached for the first translation of the Metaphysics I had on hand, which was Apostle’s, hence the slightly strange sounding ‘understanding.” I’m also more used to thinking of the line as “All men by nature desire to know,” which is Ross’s version and seems a natural way to render the Greek, which apparently you also looked up.

          Aristotle reputation isn’t what’s at stake here, of course. Lord knows he’s had a good enough run already. It is interesting, however, how often looking at what the old guy had to say unearths something important about current issues. In this instance, for example, a metaphysical discussion turns out to have a lot to do with a matter of values as illustrated by VMartin’s quotation. The arts of leisure are valued more highly than those that are merely practical = the activities of gentlemen are better than those of tradesmen and artisans. Thing is, though, whatever you think of Aristotle’s notorious snobbery, it isn’t entirely clear, to me, at least, how the alternate assessment is any less an instance of projection, albeit one based on a different cultural politics.

        3. Now this discussion is probably also too speculative unless one reads Aristotle in original. You cannot deduce from English translation what he exactly meant or what he didn’t mean. I hit on this problem when I started to read Heidegger first in a Czech translation. Unless you read Heidegger in German you simply can’t understand him, or better you may completely miss the point, because his thinking is much based and rooted in German words and their meaning. Now when he philosophizes he often quote Aristotle in Greek, because obviously words like aletheia (die Lichtung in his rendering ) can’t be simply translated only as “truth” having another important co-meaning of “unclosedness” etc… Truth as the basic philosophical problem – what is it?

          A Czech translator who translated Aristotle into Czech from Greek mentioned this at the beginning of the book and often explains the meaning of Greek words and their context under the line. Probably the inter-connection between philosophical thinking and language is more deep than often presumed. Heidegger allegedly went as far as to claim that poets are the pillars on which history stands (and not the techno-science as one might presume ).

  2. E.O.Wilson, in ‘On Human Nature’, Chapter 1, makes the point that raw reductionism is but half of of the scientific process. He goes on to say “The remainder consists of the reconstruction of complexity by expanding synthesis under the control of laws newly demonstrated by analysis. This reconstitution reveals the existence of novel, emergent phenomena. When the observer shifts his attention from one level of organization to the next, as from physics to chemistry or from chemistry to biology, he expects to find obedience to all the laws of the levels below.”

    I interpret this to mean that if we form a hypothesis in biology we should require it to be consistent with what we know of chemistry and physics – unless we have observations that need further investigation at those lower levels of organization.

    So if I assert that little girls are made of sugar and spice and physics and chemistry say that this isn’t so , then my assertion is refuted. If I assert that humans have a soul then asking how this arises out of physics and chemistry is a reasonable challenge…

  3. Don’t know if you’re aware that at Flinders University, “earth science” includes geology, oceanography, meteorology and hydrology. I’m not aware of any other institution where earth science is defined so broadly, but I think it should be.

    An incidental effect of this organisation may be Flinders being less tolerant (compared to at least one other university I could name) of climate science denial from its geology department. Having meteorologists as peers would tend to discourage that, I suspect. It amuses me when people fabricate an opposition between earth science and climate science, because no, it’s actually all earth science.

    1. The university I hope to do my research on soil taxonomy at – UNSW – has a school entitled Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences. It is in that school I will be working if I get the grant.

  4. I’d say information is not physical, if by physical you mean material and if you take material literally. Cutting the cake that way, I’d even claim that energy is not physical/material either.
    With this in mind, there are at least three approaches/perspectives to an ecosystem for example. Nutrient CYCLES and other circulation patterns of material are a typical pattern seen from the material perspective (though not for rivers). The energy perspecitve yields FLOW patterns (that’s physics of course given the second law of thermodynamics). The information (interaction) perspective, as far as I understand, yields NETWORK patterns like food webs.
    I do not see how the distinction between reductionism and its opposite can be applied here. Were the Odums, for example, reductionists because they tried to physicalize ecosystem ecology with their energy perspective and thermodynamic research programme? Or were they hoslists, because they did not chop ecosystems down into their parts (guilds, species, etc.) and lose themsleves in the diversity of all that?
    “-isms” (reductionism, phisicalism, materialism) are no tool to get a grip on that, I guess.

    1. Information is not physical in the way that numbers are not physical, not in the way that fields or energy are not physical. So far as I can tell, information (and numbers!) have no causal power whatsoever except in virtue of representing states of an information processing system like a brain. Taking an informational perspective to be about ontology rather than epistemology (and in particular representation) is to make a fallacious inference.

      1. Ok, drop information. Then there is still an ambiguity about reductionism. Some say the thermodynamic, physics inspired, energy perspective on ecosystems was reductionistic (guided by a machine metaphor) others think it was holistic (not analysing parts but the whole ecosystem). One might distinguish part-whole reductionism from biology-physics reductionism. But if that’s the choice, what is holism meant to be?

      2. “Taking an informational perspective to be about ontology rather than epistemology (and in particular representation) is to make a fallacious inference.”
        The claim that there’s an inference here, let alone a fallacious inference, is way too strong a claim unless you are able to show what specific premises were relied on and what “rule of sound inference” was violated. Not every proposition one encounters in science is the conclusion of an inference — there are also straightforward “posits” (i.e., stipulative definitions) the theoretical value of which is determined after the fact, based on the “fruitfulness” of research embodying those posits. After all, the idea that there is information which does not serve any representational function is not obviously incoherent.

  5. DiscoveredJoys:
    If I assert that humans have a soul then asking how this arises out of physics and chemistry is a reasonable challenge…

    Are you planning an experiment to resurrect the ghost of Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge in order to have someone to argue with?

  6. I’ve been watching this discussion, and IMO you’re leaving out the role of information. For instance, when ancients speculated what the “soul” (psyche=self) was made of, they couldn’t answer. Based on modern experience, the most obvious answer is information. Thus, in living humans, this information represents the current state of the brain (or rather an abstract of parts of its longer term state), while the proposition that the “soul” can continue after death requires some alternative “carrier” for that information.

    The same applies to biology, as an emergent phenomenon of quantum physics: it’s the information regarding how specific atoms, molecule fragments, molecules, and higher-level structures are put together that distinguishes e.g. a “living” bacterium from a non-living mass of identical chemicals.

      1. Your “here” link just goes to your old Sb front page.

        I’d be interested in reading what you have to say about information.

        My own take is that information is a well-defined physical concept (roughly, dynamically enforced correlations of system states) and that we’d do well to make use of it in a physicalist metaphysics.

  7. Grammer quibble: you meant “collective noun” when you said “mass noun”, a common mix-up. A mass noun is a noun that doesn’t occur in singular or plural form, eg, “rice”. You can have more rice or less rice but not (usually) one rice, two rice, etc. Because of the “a” you put before it, “mudgeon” would be a count noun (as in “The conference was attended by ten mudgeons from as many states.”).

    1. Academics are all an indistinguishable substance when mudgeoning.

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