#reductivism

These are not different sides of the same coin. They are polar opposites, light years apart

Greater good is reaching for the stars

Lesser evil is a race to the bottom

If mainstream media and the Democratic Party had pushed the former narrative even half as much as they dutifully pushed the latter, we probably would have had better presumptive nominees in 2016 and in 2020

The IBHA newsletter EMERGENCE for summer 2023 is now available, with a new Frontiers column by me.

Frontiers – Summer 2023   

That the distinct thresholds of emergent complexity are approached in fundamentally different ways points to the qualitative differences that make these thresholds distinctive, but also points to a limitation. Big history, in seeking to unify a narrative about the universe around emergent complexity, tries to bring together these disparate methodological approaches to qualitatively distinct areas of knowledge, so that big history acutely feels the limitations that emerge from the fundamentally different methods employed in the study of distinct emergent thresholds.

It would be tempting to say that these methods are all scientific, and so possess a fundamental unity, but this is not the case. The emergence of mind (or, if you prefer, consciousness) has been primarily studied in philosophy as the mind-body problem, where it has an ancient history. And there is no consensus on the relationship that holds, or ought to hold, between the physical sciences and the social sciences. Many philosophers have claimed that the social sciences require a distinct methodology, no less scientific than the method of the natural sciences, but also not the same as the natural sciences.

And where are we to locate mathematics and the humanities within the framework of a science extended to a scope sufficient to address the unifying narrative of big history? Mathematics is non-empirical, so we know that it is not studied by the methods of the natural sciences, but it is also not studied by the methods of the social sciences. Nevertheless, it is the language within which the various sciences can be unified. Ought mathematics, then, to be the basis of all that follows? Should big history be a formal science, with its principles stated as axioms, and its results demonstrated as theorems?

The humanities seem to stand apart from all of this—they are not easily assimilated to the mathematical framework that unifies the other sciences—except for the nagging feeling that the humanities ought to be relevant to the social sciences (or vice versa) in some fundamental way: for example, the languages, literatures, and arts studied by the humanities are the expressions of the individuals and societies studied by the social sciences. Should there not be a scientific interest in relationship between societies and the artifacts that societies produce, even if we do not yet possess a scientific method sufficiently subtle to study this relationship?

Can big history achieve its unification of knowledge according to emergent complexity if it unifies the bodies of knowledge produced by the special sciences, but does not have any unity of method of its own? In asking this question we see that we can make a distinction between big history that is an eclectic curation of scientific knowledge, and big history that is a science that unifies the special sciences within a larger framework and thus gives to the knowledge of the special sciences its own form. Is this the telos that is implicit within the research program of big history? Big history no doubt can integrate bodies of knowledge in a single framework without integrating the methods by which knowledge is constructed, but this would be a superficial kind of epistemic integration—skin deep only, without shared methodological roots.

The idea that all science is either physics or it is stamp collecting has been attributed to Ernest Rutherford, though no secure source testifies to this attribution. Regardless of the source of the idea, it is a powerful expression of the reductivism that has characterized the natural sciences, and physics in particular. Anything that fails to correspond to this narrow reductionist program is to be dismissed as “stamp collecting.” Big history, focused as it is upon emergentism, may be cast in the role of an antithesis to reductionism. The conception of big history as a curator of scientific knowledge to be assembled ad hoc, as it were, conforms to the “stamp collecting” conception of science, belittled by Rutherford (or whoever is the ultimate source of the idea). This would constitute a less than optimal unification of knowledge, but such an effort would still possess value.

However, the possibility of a big history that methodologically unifies the various methods of the special sciences and gives its own order to scientific knowledge based on a unified methodology, suggests a more ambitious program for big history than stamp collecting. Perhaps, if big history follows this ambitious path, one day we will be able to say that all science is big history or it is stamp collecting. Followed to its logical conclusion, the optimal form of big history in which the sciences are methodologically unified would require a root-and-branch rethinking of science. That is a tall order, but also an aspiration that could drive research for the foreseeable future.

The very idea of a methodologically unified science being the source of big history poses large and difficult questions that cannot be evaded. Must a rigorous science be reductive? Would big history, in methodologically unifying science, converge upon reductivism, or can it maintain its emergentist framework? Can big history, or can any scientific methodology, be both reductivist and emergentist at the same time? Must scientific knowledge respect certain limitations, or should it proceed without regard to present boundaries? Can science be expanded to encompass methodological unification, or would unification spell the loss of what has been essential to scientific knowledge? Would a radically scientific reconstruction of big history spell the loss of what has been essential to history?

Frontiers - Spring 2023

Many years ago I retrieved a book from a free book bin. It was Carl Hempel’s Fundamentals of Concept Formation in Empirical Science. I was intrigued by the idea of concept formation, and the book has turned out to be an ongoing influence on my thought to the present day. Hempel’s monograph was squarely within the tradition of Anglo-American analytical philosophy, featured as Vol. II, No. 7 in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science (IEUS), an ambitious but unfinished positivist project, closely associated with the Vienna Circle and logical empiricism.

I have since acquired several other monographs from the IEUS. In Vol. II, No. 1, Foundations of the Social Sciences by Otto Neurath, I found an anticipation of big history in which Neurath imagines, “all sciences as dovetailed to such a degree that we may regard them as parts of one science which deals with stars, Milky Ways, earth, plants, animals, human beings, forests, natural regions, tribes, and nations—in short, a comprehensive cosmic history.” (p. 9) However, the unity of science imagined by Neurath was reductive rather than emergent, being based upon the conceptual framework of early twentieth century positivism. There is a collection of papers, Otto Neurath and the Unity of Science, edited by Symons, Pombo, and Torres, focusing on just this difference between reductive and emergent conceptions of unified science.

Another monograph in the IEUS, Vol. II, No. 5, The Technique of Theory Construction by Joseph H. Woodger (who, in another work, The Axiomatic Method in Biology, has given a spectacularly reductive account of biology), includes this interesting aside: “The mere ordering of statements does not of itself create new information.” (p. 77)

While this is true, it ignores the fact that the ordering of information has a significant bearing upon emphasis and obviousness. The reductive unification of the sciences orders knowledge hierarchically, emphasizing the fundamental nature of physics in a material universe. An emergentist unification of science also orders knowledge hierarchically, but with the emphasis on the implicit possibilities that flower into later complexity. Both are true; each is complementary to the other; and each puts knowledge in a decidedly different light.

The logical empiricists, largely neglected today, are to be admired for the consistency and thoroughness with which they set about the reorganization of knowledge built from the bottom up by an explicit program of concept formation that built a common conceptual framework for the enterprise. Big history also seeks a thorough-going reorganization of knowledge on emergentist lines. Pulling back from the detail both of traditional history and of reductivist theories of knowledge, big history is a re-ordering of knowledge that places the facts of the world in light of the bigger picture—perhaps this is not new information, but it is a new perspective on information.

Big history would do well to study the history of concept formation, the better to understand the process of concept formation, and to pursue its own systematic effort at big history concept formation no less ambitious than that of the logical empiricists. There is much material upon which to draw. Years after I found Hempel’s monograph, I got a copy of Heinrich Rickert’s The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science: A Logical Introduction to the Historical Sciences. This work also systematically approaches concept formation, but Rickert belonged to those philosophers who thought that history requires a method distinct from that of the natural sciences, so his work is complementary to that of Hempel.

Once I started actively seeking out works on concept formation I also found Alfred Schutz’s 1954 paper “Concept and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences.” Schutz had attended a seminar held by Nagel and Hempel, and, impressed by their methods, sought to extend the analysis of concept formation to the social sciences, and within a phenomenological framework. Again, this places knowledge in another light, and constitutes another complementary effort from which big history can learn. 

“It was no accident that kings and prophets styled themselves as shepherds and likened the way they and the gods cared for their people to a shepherd’s care for his flock,” writes Yuval Noah Harari in his book Sapiens.     I don’t like bucolic narratives and I don’t like the way that we equate people we don’t like with sheep in modern American political discussions. Bucolic romanticism…

Imagine you have a bushel of apples. A [very] small amount of apples in this bushel are rotten. However, the bushel of apples can still feed a large amount of people for an entire day.

Buckminster Fuller

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller

Why Minimalism is the Most Important Design Style to Master