In every scientific subject, there is an inverse relationship between the universality of the initial subject and its concretion. The study of ”animals” is more universal than the study of “dogs”, but the study of dogs is much more concrete. There is a continual fascination with the idea of a science that will bring both universality and concretion together, and be able to deduce all things, all the way down, from a single set of principles. At one point, Hegel thought he could derive everything from his dialectical metaphysics. Presently, some speak of physics being able to do this, as though all other sciences are really just modes of physics, and a complete physics will tell us all that is really there. A related but more subtle error is to think that ”science”- spoken of vaguely as a single method- can explain everything we can know with rigor. This search for concrete universality of a single science or method one of the more common sophistries that the mind can fall prey to.
The error is pretty straightforward- the study of life, for example, can only tell us about insects insofar as they are living, not insofar as they are insects. If one wants to speak of insects as such they need more than what they find in the science of life as such. This is certainly not to say that these two studies are unrelated, or even that they can’t be put in one book, but it is to say that one cannot merely reduce entomology to biology. Any attempt to do so will rob entomology of its concretion as the study of insects as insects.
The desire to reduce all things to a single science really just ends up making us understand them on a vague, abstract level. This makes it seem like you created a universal science, but all you have done is refer in a general way to something that deserves to be studied in a particular way. One can “reduce” the study of termites to physics, but only if you ignore termites as termites, and only pay attention them as moving. This reduction makes us deny the obvious truth that there are simply new truths that are just proper to termites, or living things. We have to kid ourselves into thinking that real proper truths aren’t there and that we were just deluded when we imagined that something real accounted for the difference between ”moving” and “being a dragonfly”.
This inability to reduce all things to a single subject also shows why we couldn’t ever reduce all things to a single method. Methods are ways of knowing subjects, and so real distinctions in subjects lead to real distinctions in methods. One can borrow various methods from other sciences, and one can even talk about aspects of a method that sciences have in common, but again, wherever there is a real distinction in a subject, we need there will be a real difference in the method that gets to it.
netrok said,
May 9, 2008 at 11:28 am
When you say “as such”- termites “as such”, etc.- do we take this to mean a reference to substance? Or perhaps (also?) as reference to the universal (ie., common noun) as abstracted from the particular, by which we denominate all things into species and genera?
a thomist said,
May 9, 2008 at 11:53 am
Sorry for repeating that “as such” so much, but it is absolutely necessary to this post. First of all to speak of “animal as such” is the same as saying “animal as an animal”. In general, “X as such” = “X as X”= “X insofar as it is considered as an X”. To give an example, when you consider a mouse as such, you are seeing it just as a mouse. When you consider a mouse as an animal, you are seeing it in a way that makes it no different from an elephant, a cat, or a mosquito. The mouse in a certain sense “disappears” into simply animal as such.
Here’s the catch: when you explain a mouse as an animal, you really do explain something about it, but what you say can also be just as well said of an elephant or a chimp or a two-year-old boy. Physics, which treats of the mobile as mobile, can tell us something true about everything in nature, but it can’t tell us anything about the various individual things distinctly, or “as such”.