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Working Paper,
May 2005 Competitive and
Non-Competitive Narratives Edward Fullbrook© Copyright 2005:
Edward Fullbrook A.
Introduction Einstein's
revolution led philosophers and historians of science to abandon 19th-century
views of scientific progress as a smooth accumulation of tested facts. Scholars came to focus instead on the
processes by which one theory displaces or subsumes another. By the 1960s, obsession with competing
theories became so extreme that increasingly all science was defined and
interpreted relative to its infrequent revolutions. [Kuhn 1962] This narrative Gestalt has spread
through contemporary culture, dominating its perceptions of the advancement
of knowledge. Generally
the natural sciences ignore outsider analysis, but the narrative fixation on
the dialectical side of scientific development has had and continues to have a
deleterious effect on the human sciences. Of course, theory displacement offers
a true characterisation of important chapters in science history. But there are many major advances in
science for which the narrative of scientific revolutions, including its
intervals of "normal science", has no explanatory power. More to the point, in the human
sciences those "extraordinary episodes" which have
"necessitated the community's rejection of one time-honored
scientific theory in favor of another incompatible with
it," are virtually unknown. [Kuhn 1962, p. 6] In economics, for example,
the absence of such episodes weighs so heavily on its pursuit of
understanding that no sensible overview of its fundamental ideas is possible
without abandoning the traditional narrative structure. The
notion of narrative provides this essay with its central organizing
concept. The term is deployed
inclusively, so as to encompass everything from the theories of micro physics
to the myths of traditional societies.
Narratives commonly taught in universities, “knowledge
narratives”, will receive primary attention. It frequently happens that in a field
of empirical enquiry there emerge several narratives which rather than being
contradictory or incompatible are complementary in the sense of offering
different windows for observation of the same or overlapping domains of
phenomena. Every narrative--and,
therefore, every theory, paradigm and research program--launches itself from
a conceptual framework, including a set of presuppositions about the nature
of reality. Inevitably, different
conceptual frameworks offer different points of view on the object of
inquiry. What one sees when one
looks at Michelangelo's statue of David depends on the standpoint from which
it is observed; similarly, what any empirical inquiry makes of its object
depends on the conceptual framework through which it is viewed. Just as full appreciation of David
requires viewing it from more than one perspective, so knowledge accumulation
often depends upon investigating empirical domains through more than one
narrative. I call this the
doctrine of narrative pluralism.
It is the same view of empirical understanding that the physicist
David Bohm describes as follows. What is called for is not an integration
of thought, or a kind of imposed unity, for any such imposed point of view
would itself be merely another fragment.
Rather, all our different ways of thinking are to be considered as
different ways of looking at the one reality, each with some domain in which
it is clear and adequate. One may
indeed compare a theory to a particular view of some object. Each view gives an appearance of the
object in some aspect. The whole
object is not perceived in any one view but, rather, it is grasped only implicitly
as that single reality which is shown in all these views. When we deeply understand that our
theories also work in this way, then we will not fall into the habit of
seeing reality and acting toward it as if it were constituted of separately
existent fragments corresponding to how it appears in our thought and in our
imagination when we take our theories to be ‘direct descriptions of
reality as it is’. [ Bohm 1983, pp. 7-8] The
details of these and related arguments will be set out in three
sections. First, the narrative
function of conceptual frameworks will be explained by examining their
various standard elements.
Second, 20th-century physics will be surveyed as an
exemplary case of narrative pluralism and its benefits. Third, narrative pathologies common to
the human sciences and a consequence of ant-pluralism will be identified. B.
Narrative Selection 1.
Simplification "[E]xperience has to organize," wrote Henry James,
"some system of observation--for fear, in the immensity, of losing its
way." [James 1962, p. 3] At
the social level, this pathfinding embodies itself
in various forms of representation: maps, verbal accounts, formulae, systems
of equations, graphs, pictures, etc..
All representations, whatever their form, proceed on the basis of a
simplification of reality. There
are no exceptions to this rule, not even the most sophisticated scientific
theories. Jorge Luis Borges's parable "Of Exactitude in Science"
illustrates the folly of disregarding this most fundamental of all narrative
principles. .
. . In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that
the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map
of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these
Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of
Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the
Empire and coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of
Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude
cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of
sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still
to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation,
no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography. [Borges 1975, p. 131] But
charming and useful as it is, Borges's parable
illustrates only one aspect of any representation's need for
simplification. For every
empirical domain there exists an infinity of possible points of view and,
therefore, also of potential observations. These plethoras
of possibilities together with the dilemma posed by Borges present
observer/narrators with an acute problem of choice. They must decide which features of
their domains they are going to describe and which they are going to
disregard. Each of their
narratives can proceed only on the basis of a radical simplification of
reality. To this end, and in lieu
of random observations from random points of view, narrators deploy
principles of selection, or what James called "systems of
observation" and today's writers usually call "conceptual
frameworks". This process
abstracts certain features of the narrative's domain while ignoring
others. A narrative may make
explicit its narrative framework, but more often it leaves it partly or
wholly concealed, leaving it to operate outside critical awareness. We
must not forget that knowledge narratives, no less than popular and literary
ones, explore reality by simplifying it.
They obscure great masses of detail, so as to systematically highlight
certain aspects of that reality which a group of individuals have identified
as being of special interest to themselves. Different but non-competing narratives
of the same domain give prominence to different dimensions of that
domain. Each narrative functions
as an interpretative system, as a special way of perceiving some
corner of existence. Narrative
selection proceeds through a set of assumptions which simplify or pre-empt many
features of the narrative's domain.
These assumptions include a system of classification of entities, the
attribution of a limited number of properties to those entities, some
metaphysic which posits a kind or kinds of connection between events, and usually
the recognition of different structural levels within the domain of
inquiry. A narrative also views
its domain from a certain scale, omitting details that it sees as too microscopical or too global, too short-run or too
long-run. Typically it also
describes its domain within some range of accuracy or approximation, ignoring
effects which do not fall within that range. Finally, every knowledge narrative has
its community of practitioners, people who develop and deploy the narrative
in writing and teaching. As
socially, economically, geo-politically and historically situated
individuals, these people bring to the narrative enterprise various
inclinations and sensibilities, as well as overt purposes, all of which help
determine which aspects of the domain the narrative includes, emphasizes and
ignores. 2. Classification Wittgenstein
noted that "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world," and
that "what we cannot think we cannot say either."
[Wittgenstein 1974, 5.6, 5.61]
Our categories of thought, including our groupings of the objects of
the world, pervade our descriptive use of language and organize all our
experience. Even the predicates
of everyday language categorize, though not always very precisely, the
contents of the world. These
informal classifications, with their mixtures of the personal and the
cultural, are the means by which we order the perceptual fields of our daily
existences. Similarly, every
narrative needs to provide some classification of the objects in its domain. In
the specialized narratives of science this shaping of the facts is especially
pronounced because the number of categories tends to be strictly
limited. The selection of
categories inevitably involves arbitrariness because there exists countless
numbers of objectively grounded ways in which the contents of a domain can be
categorized. Another parable from
Borges illustrates this inescapable aspect of narratives. An Argentinean consults an imaginary
Chinese encyclopedia which says that "animals are
divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d)
sucking pigs), (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the
present classification, (i) frenzied, (j)
innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camel-hair brush, (l) et cetera, (m)
having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like
flies." [Foucault, 1971], p. 2]
The
outlandishness of Borges's imaginary taxonomy of
the animal kingdom, as well as the ambiguity of its selection criteria, suggests
the diversity of ways in which one can, without forgoing objective grounding,
categorize a sector of reality.
Make-believe classifications, however, are not alone in making
manifest the arbitrariness of conceptual orders and their resulting perceptual
fields. Ethnological studies
offer numerous examples of zoological classifications whose non-essential
nature is immediately obvious to outsiders. Consider the case of the villagers of
Baan Phraan Muan in northeastern Thailand. They divide the animal kingdom on the
basis of two criteria: edibility and habitat. [Tamiah
1969] These generate five major
primary categories: insects (inedible), birds (edible), water animals
(edible), animals of the house and village (animals in the house are
inedible, animals under the house are edible) and forest animals (animals of
the deep forest are inedible and other forest animals are edible unless they
have domesticated counterparts in the house). But these criteria leave numerous
organisms known to the Muan standing awkwardly
alone in their own primary classes and rivalling Borges's
for their apparent fancifulness.
These anomalies include house rat (only small children eat), field rat
(only small children eat; adults eat privately), giant lizard (medicinal food
for children), monitor lizard (edible, but dangerous to mothers after
childbirth), chameleon (medicinal food), snake (inedible), vulture (inedible)
and crow (inedible). The
Karam people of New Guinea also use habitat as one
of the two criteria by which they classify the animal world. [Bulmer
1967] But their notion of habitat
differs from that of the villagers of Muan in being
two-dimensional. Its horizontal
axis has the forest at one pole, the homestead at the other and open country
and gardens in between. Its
vertical axis runs from aerial through arboreal, terrestrial and aquatic, to
subterranean. The Karam's second set of criteria are morphological
(physiological): winged or wingless; bony or boneless; bipedal, quadrupedal, multipedal or
limbless; elongated or not; and large, medium-sized or small. These two sets of criteria divide the Karam's zoological world into 94 primary categories. One of these, flying birds and bats,
contains 44 percent of the Karam's 422 named
organisms, whereas another includes only tadpoles. Cultural
bias may incline us to attribute the disparateness between the Muan's and the Karam's ways of
dividing up the animal world as due to their common absence of a scientific
basis. More especially, we might
expect that modern biology with its grounding in evolutionary theory, would
provide for animals a determinate and definitive classification. But that is not the case. Science teaches us that the
evolutionary process abounds with ambiguities. It is not even clear what are the
units that survive or become extinct.
Are they genes, fragments of genes, chromosomes, genotypes,
phenotypes, groups of organisms, gene pools or species? This assortment of possible basic
units has generated various formulations, offering different points of view
on the selection process. It is
this family of narratives which comprises modern evolutionary biology. Nor
does nature's biological ambiguity as revealed by science end here. Not one but numerous concepts of
"species" have emerged from evolutionary theory. [Dupré 1993, pp. 37-59] These concepts divide into two types,
the "biological" and the "phylogenetic". The former defines a species as
"a group of organisms connected to one another by actual or possible
reproductive links, and reproductively isolated from other organisms." [Dupré, p. 46]
Though we may find the biological species concept intuitively
satisfying, it is inapplicable to asexual organisms and, therefore, to most
micro organisms and, therefore, to microbiology. Phylogenetic
taxonomies, on the other hand, have as their basic principle that the
organisms forming a species should descend from a common set of
"ancestors". But in an
evolutionary context this condition obviously is not sufficient. Rules are needed to identify cutoff points in the lines of descent, and to establish
"what makes a genealogically coherent set of organisms correspond to the
rank of species." [Dupré, p. 48]. To this end, various criteria, each
leading to a different classification, have been put forward and used in
modern biology. The
plurality of possible basic units of selection and the diverse concepts of
"species", however, are neither the only nor the most profound
manifestation of pluralism in the classification of organisms in biology
today. In ecological biology,
niche, not species, is the basic classificatory unit. The idea of niche more resembles the Muan's and the Karam's implicit
concept of habitat than it does any of evolutionary biology's notions of
species. Frequently more than one
species can perform the role required of a particular ecological niche. Consequently, ecological-based
classifications of organisms differ greatly from evolutionary-based ones. [Dupré, pp. 43, 58] Finally,
a brief example from Thomas Kuhn will reinforce much that has just been
said. It reveals two different
classificatory concepts for "molecule" concurrently and
productively at work in the physical sciences. Kuhn relates the responses of a
"distinguished physicist and an eminent chemist" when asked whether
a single atom of helium was or was not a molecule. "Both
answered without hesitation, but their answers were not the same. For the chemist the atom of helium was
a molecule because it behaved like one with respect to the kinetic theory of
gases. For the physicist, on the
other hand, the helium atom was not a molecule because it displayed no
molecular spectrum. Presumably
both men were talking of the same particle, but they were viewing it through
their own research training and practice. Undoubtedly their experiences had had
much in common, but they did not, in this case, tell the two specialists the
same thing. [Kuhn 1970, pp. 50-1] The
gist of this and of our other examples of classification can now be
summarized. Borges's
zoological fantasy, by means of what are from conventional viewpoints its
glaring omissions, called our attention to how any classification of an
empirical domain limits the possible descriptions, and thereby also the field
of possible facts and possible questions. Similarly, without discounting their
epistemological value for the cultural-geographical situations to which they
are applied, the alien taxonomies the Muan and the Karam encourage us to recognize the indeterminateness and
contingency of all classifications of empirical realms. But we also have seen from examples
from contemporary biology that even when it comes to dividing up a domain on
the basis of the most advanced science there exist more than one plausible
and defensible way of doing so. The
best way will depend on the purposes of the narrative for which the
classification is intended.
Every categorization of a set of empirical phenomena uniquely
circumscribes our possible understanding of that realm of reality, rather as
every position which one takes up around Michelangelo's statue of David
limits what one can see.
Likewise, the numerous ways in which any domain can be divided up
means that there exists many different bases for making a systematic inquiry
of that domain. 3. Selection of Properties Of
all narrative genres, ontologies are the most
elemental because they make assertions about the fundamental nature of
reality--about what sorts of entities, properties and relations compose
existence. But all narratives,
and especially knowledge narratives, postulate a sort of proto-ontology in
the sense of identifying a certain range of phenomena (a "universe of
discourse") whose existence, real or imagined, they wish to take into
account. In the formation of
these proto-ontologies, the classification of
entities typically requires the predication of various properties, making
these two processes inextricably intertwined. This conceptual interdependency is
especially pronounced in the more narrowly focused physical sciences, which,
from out of the welter of phenomenological possibilities emanating from some
empirical domain, abstract a very limited set of phenomena for cognitive
attention. Highly
specialized proto-ontologies are commonplace in the
study of physical matter.
Consider the case of crystallography, the scientific study of
crystals. It divides solid bodies
into two classes: crystals and non-crystals. This division presumes certain properties--approximately
plane geometrical surfaces with straight edges which meet other such planes,
thus bounding the object on all sides--which identify some materials as
belonging to the crystal category.
Along with six kinds of symmetry (mirroring, inversion, and twofold,
threefold, fourfold and sixfold rotations) these
properties--not mass and extension or chemical composition or
market-value--are the fundamental properties of the crystallography
narrative. These selected attributes divide the class of all crystals into 32
subclasses. The result is a
powerful but quite limited descriptive system, one of many useful frameworks
of classes and properties for viewing solid objects. A
classification of objects leads to further questions about what additional
characteristics of the entities classified should the narrative
recognize. For example, in
regarding material substance, classical mechanics includes the properties of
mass and length, but not the symmetrical properties of crystals or the colligative properties of solutions. The immensity and richness of
actuality compels even the most comprehensive narratives to exclude more
characteristics than they include.
For this reason, the descriptions of any narrative are always stylized
abstractions of reality. Nor is
it only knowledge narratives which are characterized by this sort of abstraction. All narratives, even Joyce's Ulysses
and Proust's Remembrances of Things Past,
take shape on the basis of radical exclusion of phenomenal detail. The Nigerian philosopher and
anthropologist Robin Horton illustrates this narrative principle at work both
in traditional African religion and in modern science. Thus when traditional thought draws upon people and their social relations as the raw material of its theoretical models, it makes use of some dimensions of human life and neglects others. The definition of a god may omit any reference to his physical appearance, his diet, his mode of lodging, his children, his relations with his wives, and so on. Asking questions about such attributes is as inappropriate as asking questions about the colour of a molecule or the temperature of an electron. It is this omission of many dimensions of human life from the definition of the gods which give them that rarefied, attenuated aura which we call 'spirituality'. It is the result of the same process of abstraction as the one we see at work in Western theoretical models: the process whereby features of the prototype phenomena which have explanatory relevance are incorporated into a theoretical schema, while features which lack such relevance are omitted. [Horton 1971, p. 225] This
idea of "explanatory relevance" suggests a further dimension of
conceptual frameworks, namely the inclusion of some basis for conceiving
connections between various categories of phenomena and their properties. 4. Interconnectivity: Ten Kinds of Narrative Linkage Narratives
need notions about how the things they classify and describe are
connected. "[T]he most usual
species of connection," said David Hume, "among the different
events which enter into any narrative composition is that of cause and
effect." [Hume 1955, p. 34]
The relation of causation holds between two events when, given the
occurrence of one event, it results in a second. The putative causal event may be
either natural or supernatural, and the relation may be postulated either as
a general rule as in the laws of chemistry and the procedures of witchcraft
or as a singularity as with events in a novel. Causal linkages make phenomena fall
into configurations, enabling us to apprehend various items as contributing to
an interrelated system of parts or forming an intelligible pattern of
events. This showing of things
leading to other things distinguishes narratives from mere listings,
descriptions and chronological sequences. I wish to consider these cause and
effect linkages with regard to five criteria: whether they explain in terms
of past or future events, whether these explanations are open or closed in
the sense of admitting or not admitting indeterminacies, whether they explain
a property of something as due only to that something's parts or due also to
the structure by which those parts are organized, whether they explain the
whole in terms of its part or vice-versa, and whether between entities they
postulate internal or external relations. a. Teleological and non-teleological explanations Time's
linearity leads to two basic methods of framing narrative connections between
events happening at separate moments.
Items may be explained in terms of their consequences, as when we say
Othello fell on his sword because he wanted to die. Alternately, an explanation may run in
the other direction, the consequences explained in terms of some prior event,
as when we say Othello died because he fell on his sword. Explanations of the former type are called
teleological or functional and find frequent use with respect to human
actions. Such usage arises from
regarding humans as purposive beings, a view which obliges us to explain
their behaviour, at least in part, as a function of wishes to bring about
various future events.
Consequently, the human sciences abound with narratives which explain
operations in terms of their consequences. But the range of knowledge narratives
which rely heavily on functional linkage is much broader than this, and it is
examples from outside the human sciences that I want to emphasize here. Functional
or teleological narratives interpret processes from the perspective of
'wholes' or systems of interconnected components desiring or designed for the
achievement of some end, in other words, a future event. Such narratives focus attention on
culminations and consequences, and link the behaviour of each component to
the end or purpose of the whole or system to which it belongs. Physiology is a well-known example of
a primarily teleological knowledge narrative. It proceeds by identifying the
function an organ performs for its organism and how it works to that
end. Likewise, more often than
not we perceive human artifacts, especially
advanced technology, through functional or teleological narratives. A comb is a device for untangling
hair; an automobile is a mechanism for getting about in and, sometimes, for
impressing one's neighbours. Functional
analysis identifies and classifies an entity's parts in terms of their subfunctions.
For example, we commonly analyze an automobile into its various
parts--a fuel system, an ignition system, a carburettor, some combustion
chambers with pistons, a crankshaft, a transmission, a chassis, a set of
wheels, a steering wheel, a breaking system, and seats--and explain them in
terms of their contribution to the intended function of the whole. The same kind of teleological account
pertains to a system's subcomponents and their operations. Continuing with the car example, a
science dictionary tells us that the crankshaft is an "essential
component of piston engines that converts the up-and-down (reciprocating)
motion of the pistons into useful rotary motion." [Lafferty and Rose
1994. p. 159] The entry then
explains how the components of the crankshaft work to this end. Technological culture could not exist
without narratives of this type. Proceeding
from the other direction, nonteleological
explanations focus attention on the conditions and events preceding the
event, process or state of affairs being explained. "They seek to exhibit the
integrated behaviours of complex systems as the resultants of more elementary
factors, frequently identified as
constituent parts of those systems; and they are therefore concerned with
traits of complex wholes almost exclusively to the extent that these traits
are dependent on assumed characteristics of the elementary factors." [Hempel 1966, p. 93]
For example, under this narrative mode the crankshaft's conversion of
reciprocating motion into rotary motion is interpreted in terms of the laws
of mechanics, the firing of the pistons, and the initial conditions
constituted by the crank pins, the connecting rods and bearings, and the
crankshaft. b. Closed and open narratives Turn
now to another, more difficult, and more provocative aspect of narrative
linkage, the distinction between determinate and indeterminate
explanations. Some narratives are
closed in the sense that they describe all their events as
predetermined, whereas others are open in the sense that they admit
indeterminacies. Narratives
divide between these two categories.
Those of the closed or determinate variety claim that give X, Y must
follow, whereas open or indeterminate narratives explain Y in terms of X
without the presumption that Y always follows X. If a field of inquiry is not seen as
wholly determinate, meaning that chance, contingency, choice, uncertainty,
randomness, or spontaneity enter into the relations between events, then the
sets of events open to explanation by the determinate and indeterminate
approaches are not coextensive.
With these different ranges of application, the choice between the two
forms of narrative linkage is one of selecting a method appropriate to the
perceived subject matter. As
such, this question of finding a suitable narrative form must not be
conflated with the metaphysical question of whether reality in general is
determinate or not. Traditionally
philosophers have lavished attention on the latter question, but for us it
need not be at issue. Here we
want merely to consider two types of narrative linkage, two conceptual angles
offering different vantage points on the field of observation. As I will illustrate, within the same
domain of inquiry both types of explanation may prove useful. Like the hammer and saw, the use of
one conceptual tool does not preclude the use of the other. To
place these joint notions of open and closed narratives in a more
traditionalist context, consider Popper's definition of a physically closed
system. "By a physically
closed system I mean a set or system of physical entities . . . which
interact with each other--and only with each other--in accordance with
definite laws of interaction that do not leave any room for interaction with,
or interference by, anything outside that closed set or system of physical
entities." [Popper 1972, p. 219]
This definition, when modified as follows, defines a closed or
determinate narrative. By a
closed narrative I mean an account of a set or system of entities and their
interactions with each other--and only with each other--in terms of
definite laws of interaction that do not leave any room for interaction with,
or interference by, anything outside that closed set or system of entities. Tolerance
for open or indeterminate narratives, however, is very much a modern
development. Robin Horton notes
that in the traditional cultures of Africa, the concept of coincidence or
chance scarcely exists. When
a rotten branch falls off a tree and kills a man walking underneath it, there
has to be a definite explanation of the calamity. Perhaps the man quarrelled with a half
brother over some matter of inheritance, and the latter worked the fall of
the branch through a sorcerer. Or
perhaps he misappropriated lineage property, and the lineage ancestors
brought the branch down on his head.
The idea that the whole thing could have come about through the
accidental convergence of two independent chains of events is inconceivable
because it is psychologically intolerable. To entertain it would be to admit that
the episode was inexplicable and unpredictable: a glaring confession of
ignorance. (Italics added)
[Horton 1971, p. 250] But
Western culture also has exercised a strong bias against open
narratives. This partiality,
which until a century and a half ago was hegemonic, owes more than a little
to Aristotle. His Poetics
scorned narratives whose episodes "follow each other without any
probable or necessary connection," and applauded the Odyssey and
the Iliad for the manner in which their events are "connected
into one event". [Aristotle 1934, Part II, sec. V] With incomparable influence, Aristotle
argued that actions "should arise from the structure of the fable
itself, so as to be the natural consequences, necessary or probable, of what
has preceded in the action". [Aristotle 1934, Part II, sec. VIII ] Moreover, "the fable . . . should
be an imitation of an action that is one and entire, the parts of it being so
connected that if any one of them be either transposed or taken away, the
whole will be destroyed or changed". [Aristotle 1934, Part II, sec.
V] Determinism as embodied in
many scientific theories is but a variation of this ancient sensibility
regarding narrative and the connection of events. Newtonian mechanics, especially as
reworked by Laplace, achieves perfect "unity
of action". Given the
positions and velocities of all the particles at any one moment, this
narrative's system of equations determines the positions and velocities, and
thereby the actions, of all particles for all moments, both future and
past. With every event portrayed
as part of an unbroken chain of events, if any one of them fails to take
place, then the whole scientific narrative would, in effect, "be destroyed". Horton's
example of the falling tree branch, however, suggests that some happenings
may not, at least from an epistemological point of view, always best be
described and understood as emanating from a single and predetermined chain
of events. Observation may repeatedly
reveal gaps in such chains or chance convergences of two or more such chains,
showing elements of unpredictability or randomness in reality. Historically these indeterminacies
have proven no less "psychologically intolerable" to many
scientists and philosophers of science than they have to members of
traditional African cultures. The
willingness of the cultural elites of Western societies to engage with open
narratives is an even more recent development than their willingness to
engage with democratic processes.
Prior to Darwin, no space existed in scientific narratives for
indeterminate phenomena. This
dimension of reality was barred from scientific inquiry no less than was
heliocentric cosmology under the popes.
"The doctrine of scientific determinism," writes Stephen
Hawking, "remained the standard assumption of science until the early
years of this century." [Hawking 1995, p. 59] As a physicist, Hawking thinks of
quantum mechanics as the breakthrough narrative, but biologists have the
better claim to being the first natural scientists to develop an open
narrative that successfully breached the determinist hegemony. Evolutionary theory from Wallace
(1858) and Darwin (1859) onwards relies heavily on indeterminacy as a
narrative linkage. Neo-Darwinism,
which combines natural selection with Mendelian
genetics and whose advent was roughly contemporaneous with the development of
quantum mechanics, exemplifies open knowledge narratives. Neo-Darwinism admits indeterminacy at
several levels. It predicates two
sources of heritable variation, both conceptually conceived as indeterminate
processes. First, the genes of
each individual are the result of a random shuffle of existing genetic
material (genetic recombination).
Second, random mutational jumps occur due to accidents in replication
and repair of DNA, accidents now attributed largely to cosmic rays modifying
gene structures. Natural
selection operates on these randomly shuffled and mutating genes within the
field of a changing environment.
The evolutionary narrative also treats this form of variation as
indeterminate, as resulting from both random non-biological causes--for
example, meteorites, volcanic eruptions, continental drift--and from the
indeterminate and recursive process of natural selection itself. Modern evolutionary biology includes
these indeterminate narrative linkages as well as determinate ones from the
laws of inheritance, most especially that in every case mixtures of characteristics
inherited from the parents do not blend but remain distinct. Despite
the development in the natural sciences of hugely successful narratives
embracing "concepts which formally recognize the existence of various
kinds of limitation upon the possible completeness of explanation and
prediction," [Horton 1971, p. 250] there remain scientists and
philosophers who retain a nostalgia for Newtonian certainties. The vision of a clockwork universe--no
less than one governed by ubiquitous spiritual agency--is a dream not easily
foregone. For those wedded to the
metaphysics of determinism, quantum mechanics is but a halfway house to
perfect knowledge, while evolutionary theory scarcely qualifies as science,
it being so "riddled" with indeterminacies. But metaphysical belief aside, the
open narratives of quantum mechanics and evolutionary biology are the biggest
success stories of modern science, especially as applied to the
practicalities of technology.
For better or worse, we live on the eve of the brave new world of
genetic engineering, whereas already quantum mechanics, notes Hawking,
"governs the behaviour of transistors and integrated circuits, which are
the essential components of electronic devices such as televisions and
computers, and is also the basis of modern chemistry and biology." [p.
62] c. External and internal relations We
need to consider briefly a further aspect of causality which impacts on the
distinction between closed and open narratives. This is the question of whether or not
a narrative admits internal, as well as external, relations. A narrative may be mechanistic in the
sense that the internal structures of its fundamental elements are
independent of one another, the elements being connected by only external
relationships. The classic
detective novel, with its resolution worked out in terms of interactions
between unchanging characters, exemplifies this type of narrative
linkage. So too does Newton's
mechanics, where the causal relations of collision and gravity leave the
particles atomistically intact. Internal relations, on the other hand,
are "identity-affecting". [Bhaskar, 1986,
p. 111] Interactions between
characters in a literary novel, for example, usually bring about
"character development".
The description of internally related phenomena has been even more
central to the modern development of the natural sciences. This is illustrated by evolutionary
theory, which is the story of how the identity of biology's primary units
change through interaction. d. Aggregative versus structural properties There
exist two primary ways of explaining properties. Some narratives explain the properties
of things as simply the function of the properties of their parts. For example, engineering treats an
object's mass as merely an additive function of the masses of its parts, and
the floor space of the Empire State Building as the sum of the floor spaces
of its various rooms. Properties
explained in this way, I will call aggregative. Some knowledge narratives deploy only
this approach in their conceptualisation of properties. For example, classical mechanics is
based on only three properties--mass, length and time--and with each
described in terms of an additive function. Further or "derived"
properties are defined in terms of these three primary
"dimensions", as for example, velocity is length divided by time,
and momentum is mass times length divided by time. Thus, although classical mechanics
includes an extensive of list of properties, they all reduce to some mathematical
combination of the three primary aggregative properties. There
exist, however, many things possessed of properties which are not properties
of their components, but instead come to exist only through the structures by
which things are combined. Therefore
many fields, and especially the biological sciences, include properties
explained as the due to the characteristics of the structure by which
something's components are combined, rather than as an aggregation of microproperties.
The property of being able to see, for example, is explained not just
in terms of the various individual cells of the eye and brain--none of which
have the property of being able to see--but also in terms of the way those
cells are combined. Similarly,
human crowd behaviour is understood as depending on the relations holding
between the individuals as well as on the individuals themselves. Although it was Newton's dream that
some day all of existence could be accounted for in terms of aggregate
properties, modern science has tended to involve itself ever more with
structural properties. Even
physics, with its various field theories, today concerns itself fundamentally
with structural explanation. e. Direction of causation: micro or macro Reality
presents various levels of complexity, running from atomistic individuals to
the universe. This polarity
entails two possible directions of narrative explanation: accounting for the
more complex in terms of the less so or vice-versa. The first approach, "micro
explanation", characterizes Newtonian physics and for several centuries
dominated the natural sciences.
Chemistry, for example, advanced by describing the decomposition of
compound substances by chemical processes into simpler compounds or into
their constituent elements. But
sometimes the object of inquiry begs a macro approach, as when a property of
an individual thing appears mediated or determined by the whole or ensemble
of which it is a part. The facts
that I grew up speaking English instead of Chinese and eating with a knife
and fork instead of chop sticks, for example, seem more attributable to the
family and society in which I emerged than to any aspect of my individual
make-up. Likewise, when I die,
although the event will fit some micro explanation such as heart-failure or
perforation of the intestine, the complex changes that will then befall the
millions of cells out of which I am composed will be seen to be due to the
regrettable change in the whole to which they belong. Because
the metaphysics that grew out of Newtonian science was for so long hegemonic,
even today there persists pockets of prejudice against the use of macro
linkages in knowledge narratives.
Yet science has long conceived of some quantitative properties, such
as angle and probability, as based on macro relations. Thus any change in the size of a deck
of cards causes every card's probability of being drawn to change. Even more noteworthy is that in
physics itself, quantum mechanics has forced through innovations in the use
of narrative linkages, placing macro explanation on an equal footing with the
older micro variety. The quantum
factor, explains the physicist Paul Davies, "denies that the world can
be understood in terms of its components alone." Davies continues: the
reality of the subatomic particle cannot be untangled from the environment it
inhabits. . . Evidently the
macroscopic and the microscopic worlds are intimately interwoven. There is no hope of building a full
understanding of matter from the constituent particles alone. Only the system as a whole
gives concrete expression to microscopic reality. The big and the small co-exist. One does not subsume wholly the other,
nor does the other wholly 'explain' the one. [Davies 1995, p. 39]
C. The Narrative Pluralism of 20th Century Physics Until
the appearance of Einstein's theory of relativity (1905, 1915), Newtonian
mechanics with its theory of gravity was unrivalled as the most celebrated
theory in the history of science.
Its verification by countless experiments and astronomical
observations supported the prevailing view of science as a smooth
accumulation of facts generated by the application of well-tested
theories. So inevitably the discrediting
of Newton's theory dismayed and shocked the cultural psyche, traumatizing
20th century thought about scientific advance and fixating its attention on
events structurally resembling the Einsteinean
revolution. Initially
there was strong resistance to Einstein's new narratives of gravitation and
cosmology, Newton's theory of absolute space and absolute time having for so
long been accepted as an unquestionable truth. But following the solar
eclipse of 1919, when Einstein's predictions were confirmed by two teams of
astronomers, there began a cultural shift regarding the nature of scientific
progress. Philosophers and
historians of science especially faced a new narrative challenge. The historical situation no longer
pressed them to account for continuity in science nor permitted them to
characterize science as a process whereby new certainties are endlessly added
to existing ones. Instead they
struggled to identify and describe the processes by which one theory could or
should replace or withstand a challenge from another. The first major work to recast the
narrative of scientific progress in terms of competing theories was
Karl Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery published in German in
1934. Popper
showed that no amount of verification and inductive support can ever prove a
theory. Instead every theory
always remains vulnerable to refutation and replacement by another. This was a narrative which nicely
accommodated the recent astounding events in physics. Popper's account of theory replacement
spelled out various methods, including degrees of falsifiability
[Popper 1959, pp. 135, 112-135], empirical content [pp. 119-123], degrees of
simplicity [pp. 136-145] and degrees of corroboration [pp. 251-282], for
judging between competing theories.
Under Popper's narrative of scientific discovery, competing theories
fight it out on the basis of these criteria of scientific merit, and the
"best" one wins. From
the 1960s onwards Popper's version of the new narrative of scientific
progress increasingly came under attack.
Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
denied the historical efficacy of Popper's objective criteria for
theory-replacement, arguing instead that competing theories or
"paradigms" are often incommensurable and that sociological
factors, rather than epistemological ones, often determine whether one theory
is or is not replaced by another.
Imre Lakatos's
"Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research
Programmes" (1970) argued that refuted theories may continue to be used
if no better theory exists. Paul Feyerabend's “Against Method” (1970)
emphasized that all observation is "theory-laden" and contended
that no set of methodological rules can account for theory-replacement and
that all knowledge claims are relativistic. But these and other alternatives to Popperian falsification were variations of the basic
narrative which had emerged as the natural aftermath of Einstein's
revolution. Each added to the
collection and interpretation of historical science data to answer questions
suggested by the competing-theories narrative. Almost inevitably the decades of
debate on theory-replacement has had as its primary effect the deepening and
widening of our culture's general perception of scientific progress as the
outcome of a struggle between competing theories. This
essay challenges not the narrative of competing theories as such, but rather
the hegemony which that narrative maintains over our vision of science. That that
narrative fits important chapters in science, including the momentous one
which inspired it, is above dispute.
But there is much more to conceptual science than just the postulation
of frameworks which challenge other frameworks. Formulation of scientific narratives
is also about gaining new points of view on domains of inquiry. Viewing the domain from a new
conceptual perspective may yield not only additional information but also a
new dimension to the understanding of it. The new viewpoint may even reveal
fundamental phenomena which were but dimly observable or not observable at
all when looking through a prior conceptual system. That such new knowledge
may be conceptually incommensurable with that acquired through another
narrative lens should be regarded not as a scandal but rather as due to the
nature of conceptual thinking. Except in the special case where two
narratives make conflicting predictions, incommensurability between
narratives does not argue for competitiveness between them. To the contrary, observing a domain of
inquiry through more than one conceptual framework is eminently desirable, as
is observing Michelangelo's David from more than one standpoint. The renowned physicist David Bohm states the case as follows. One
may indeed compare a theory to a particular view of some object. Each view
gives only an appearance of the object in some aspect. The whole object is
not perceived in any one view but, rather, it is grasped only implicitly
as that single reality which is shown in all these views. [Bohm 1983, p. 8] Phenomena
observed through different conceptual systems may eventually be reconciled
through a "deeper" level of theory (like a "bird's-eye
view"), as with Maxwell's unification of electronic and magnetic
theory. But such unification can
never happen except where narrative pluralism first prevails for that domain
of inquiry. The
narrative of competing theories, especially Kuhn's version, seriously
underestimates the scientific imagination, that talent which John Stuart Mill
characterized as the faculty for
"mentally arranging known elements into new combinations". [Mill
1893, p. 433] Kuhn's narrative
assumes that the scientific mind is so deficient in agility as to be
incapable of alternating freely between incommensurable conceptual systems. I would be the last to deny that
examples of this stereotype exist in every discipline and that in some this
intellectual ineptitude may even dominate. Nor do I deny that narrative
communities sometimes exist in bondage to their conceptual system because
they have failed to make explicit its primary presuppositions. But it seems a cruel travesty of the
truth to portray the scientist in general, on the one hand, as an
intellectual bumpkin, incapable of shifting between conceptual gestalts and,
on the other, as a moral midget, committed primarily to the glorification of
a particular narrative point of view rather than to the understanding of the
empirical domain to which that narrative and others refer.1 For
too long historical data from science have been collected, selected and
interpreted mainly to answer questions posed by the various versions of the
competing-theories narrative of scientific progress. The case for regarding this narrative
as a general explanation of scientific advance has, in its various forms,
been constructed primarily on the basis of examples drawn from physics. Yet even here on its most favoured
ground it is a simple matter to show that the narrative of competing theories
not only fails to account for but also runs counter to most major
developments. In
physics today, indeed for a couple of generations now, fundamental research
is focused primarily on "unification". Various schemes are used to
characterize "the unification process", but all describe a state of
affairs incomprehensible in terms of the traditional competing-theories
narrative of scientific development.
Stephen Hawking, for example, explains the quest as follows. Today
scientists describe the universe in terms of two basic partial theories - the
general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. They are the great intellectual
achievements of the first half of this century. .... Unfortunately, however, these two
theories are known to be inconsistent with each other - they cannot both be
correct. One of the major
endeavours in physics today...is the search for a new theory that will
incorporate them both - a quantum theory of gravity. [Hawking 1995, p. 13] Reading
this passage through the competing-theories lens invites total
misunderstanding. Physicists
perceive relativity and quantum mechanics not as competing theories, but
rather as different and complementing conceptual approaches to the
fundamentals of physical reality.
These two narratives illuminate separate facets of what unification
physicists see as ultimately the same domain of inquiry, but which cannot yet
be reconciled with each other.
The unification dream, with its implicitly deeper level of
understanding, arises directly out of the co-existence of the two narratives,
the heuristic significance of each being enhanced by the existence of the
other. Physicists seek neither to
discredit relativity or quantum mechanics, but rather to create "a new
theory that will incorporate them both". Another
and more common conceptualization of physics's
unification project centres on the four forces of nature: gravity, electromagnetism,
the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force. Physicists aim to develop a theory
which merges the four forces into a single narrative scheme, or, as Hawking
puts it, "to find a unified theory that will explain all four forces as
different aspects of a single force." [p. 76] The theories of gravity,
electromagnetism, and the two nuclear forces, as well as the theory of the
electroweak force (a unification of the theories of electromagnetism and the
weak nuclear force) are referred to as "partial" theories, because
their frameworks of interpretation permit only partial and unreconciled views of the domain of force phenomena. They are conceptually different
ways of looking at that domain, and because they are conceptually different
they reveal different dimensions of that domain. Here again, as with electromagnetism,
narrative pluralism is the indispensable prerequisite of fundamental
scientific advance. Shifting
between narratives with fundamentally different conceptual systems can be a
daily occurrence for 20th-century physicists. The time is long past when one could
make a mark in theoretical physics without the ability to move freely between
conceptual gestalts. Modern
physics requires not only mathematical prowess but also conceptual
agility. Unlike theory
replacement, unification of narratives for a given domain demands the ability
to jump back and forth between three or more conceptual systems: those of the
incommensurate narratives and that of the narrative intended to effect the
merger. But physicists working on
unification projects are not alone in requiring conceptual ability. Today to become a physicist of any
kind, one must master the basic concepts of both relativity and quantum
mechanics. All the rest of modern
physics is derived from one or the other of these two theories whose
conceptual frameworks differ radically. Indeed "the basic concepts of
relativity and quantum theory," notes David Bohm,
"directly contradict each other." [Bohm
1983, p. 176] General relativity
conceives of space and time as continuous; quantum theory conceives of them
as discontinuous. General
relativity conceives of matter as particulate; quantum theory conceives of it
as a wave-particle duality.
General relativity conceives of physical objects as having actual
properties; quantum theory describes them as having only potential properties
within the given physical situation.
General relativity conceives all physical reality as determinate and
all events as in principle having a causal explanation; quantum theory admits
indeterminacy and events incapable of causal explanation. Conceptual differences greater than
these are scarcely imaginable. In
their fundamentals, relativity and quantum theory share little in common as
descriptive approaches to physical reality. Yet for most of a century these two
metaphysically dissimilar narratives have worked not in competition but in
tandem to the produce arguably the greatest advances in the history of science. D. Anti-knowledgeRobin
Horton has categorized the similarities and differences between African
traditional thought and western science.
He identifies a general principle of divergence. What
I take to be the key difference is a very simple one. It is that in traditional cultures
there is no developed awareness of alternatives to the established body of
theoretical tenets; whereas in scientifically oriented cultures, such an
awareness is highly developed. It
is this difference we refer to when we say that traditional cultures are
'closed' and scientifically oriented cultures 'open'. [Horton 1971, p. 230] A
similar distinction pertains to communities of scholars and scientists
associated with various domains of inquiry. Some are open narrative communities,
in the sense that, like modern physics, they understand and support the
epistemological importance of examining a domain from more than one narrative
point of view. Others, like
traditional societies, are closed narrative communities in that they
insist that there is only one legitimate way of looking at their domain, all
others being taboo. Open
narrative communities may be the rule in the natural sciences, but in the
human sciences they are few and far between. Closed narrative communities, however,
rarely exist in isolation but rather in opposition to one or more other
narrative communities focused on the same empirical domain. These oppositions do not create
situations like those featured in the competing-theories narrative of
scientific progress. In the human
sciences, narrative pluralism -- far from being a normal state of affairs --
rarely exists except as a temporary truce among mortal enemies. The conflict endemic to these less
successful fields of formal inquiry is idiosyncratic and inadequately
understood. The Popper/Kuhn narrative
of scientific development contributes little to comprehending these domains,
where theories "compete", but not in the traditional
philosophy-of-science sense. Unlike natural scientists, social scientists
never need to come up against reality's hard-edged recalcitrances. With rare exceptions, the links
between social scientists narrative beliefs and the world around them are
conceptually tenuous. Rarely do their domains generate significant falsifiable
predictions, making it virtually unknown for a narrative community in the
human sciences to reach the point where, in Kuhn's words, it "can no
longer evade anomalies that subvert the existing tradition of scientific
practice" [Kuhn 1970, p. 6]
This freedom to forever evade reality when combined with monist
beliefs and true-believer mentalities, leads to various narratives
pathologies, of which two are especially important. 1. Narrative cleansing Closed
narrative communities typically live in open hostility toward
"alien" narratives.
There exists a danger of radically misunderstanding the basis of this
belligerence. The despised
narratives rather than being "competing" theories in the sense of
the Popper/Kuhn story of scientific progress, are complementary theories in
the sense of the narrative pluralism of 20th-century physics. Advocates of closed knowledge
narratives often publicly embrace an extreme and primitive form of
philosophical idealism, whereby they declare that their conceptual framework
rather than offering a point of view on an empirical domain, determines the
extent of that domain. This can
be true even of narratives founded on a strictly materialist
metaphysics. Behavioralist
psychologists maintain that psychological phenomena not visible through their
conceptual lens does not really exist.
Horton describes a similar mind-set ("the magical
world-view") common to traditional cultures. Since
he ['the traditional thinker'] can imagine no alternatives to his established
system of concepts and words, the latter appear bound to reality in an
absolute fashion. There is no way at all in which they can be seen as varying
independently of the segments of reality they stand for. Hence they appear so integrally
involved with their referents that any manipulation of the one self-evidently
affects the other. [Horton 1971,
p. 235] Similarly,
the behavioralist claim to universality entails
that when it changes its conceptual framework, as it does from time to time,
then the domain of psychological phenomena changes also. Those parts and aspects of the domain
which cannot be perceived form the current conceptual point of view are said
not to exist. Knowledge
narratives deployed hegemonically block or
discourage other knowledge narratives and thereby the scrutiny of other aspects
of reality. It can be said
that this mode of narrative deployment constitutes antiknowledge. Consider a hypothetical example. The narrative called "Newtonian
physics" could have been deployed (and perhaps was for a while) to block
the study of elementary physical phenomena not covered by the Newtonian
narrative, such as electro-magneticism and the two
nuclear forces. Physicists could
have retreated into subjective idealism and refused to recognize as
"physical" those phenomena which can not be embraced by the
Newtonian narrative. They could
have decreed that non-physical phenomena are precisely those phenomena that
are incapable of being analyzed with the Newtonian narrative. This kind of radical inversion of the
scientific ethos and retreat into ultra subjectivism is common place in the
human sciences. For example, a
standard economics graduate textbook informs its readers that "noneconomic problems are precisely those problems
that are incapable of being analyzed with the marginalist
paradigm." [Silberberg 1990, p.2.] This mindset, which promotes and
protects a priori thinking and is endemic to today’s
“mainstream” economics, anthropologists identify as
characterizing traditional cultures.
Their members, writes Evans-Pritchard, "reason excellently in the
idiom of their beliefs, but they cannot reason outside, or against their
beliefs because they have no other idiom in which to express their
thoughts." [cited by Horton 1971, p. 231] This "absence of any awareness of
alternatives” notes Horton, “makes for an absolute acceptance of
the established theoretical tenets, and removes any possibility of
questioning them." [p. 231] Daniel
Robinson, in his classic study of the history of psychology, describes an
important example of anti-knowledge with a structure similar to the one noted
by Harden in traditional cultures.
Surveying the contemporary scene in American university psychology
departments, Robinson notes that "hardly a vestige" remains of the
program of experimental analysis of consciousness from earlier in the
century. But
observe the difference between this shift in emphasis or complete abandonment
of interest and the changes that have occurred in physics and biology. We do have minds, we are
conscious, and we can reflect upon our private experiences because we have
them. Unlike phlogiston or the
inheritance of acquired characteristics, these phenomena exist and are the
most common in human experience.
The absence of orthodox Wundtians or Titchenerians or Jamesians,
therefore, cannot be attributed to the disappearance of their subjects. Rather, it is to be understood as the
result of the inability of the accepted method of psychological
inquiry to address these subjects.
The contemporary psychologist, if only insensibly, has made a metaphysical
commitment to a method and has, per force, eliminated from the domain of
significant issues those that cannot be embraced by that method. [Robinson
1986, p. 398] Anyone
coming from the natural sciences might wonder why social scientists expend so
much time and energy "defining" and redefining their
disciplines. But this otherwise
pointless activity is a natural adjunct of anti-pluralism, it being an easy
shortcut to narrative cleansing.
The anti-pluralist seeks to establish as off-limits those areas and
aspects of the empirical domain not visible from his or her single chosen
conceptual vantage point. Laying
down a definition which excludes phenomena invisible through that system,
works to establish a professional taboo against the extension of human
knowledge and understanding to all the rest of that empirical domain. This technique of defining away the
unwanted is common to many forms of anti-pluralism. Two notorious examples are the Nazis
defining "German" so as to exclude Germans who were Jewish, and
America's founding fathers defining "citizen" so to as to exclude
Americans of African descent. A movement that began on the fringes of economics in the 1990s
illustrates points raised in this section. The history of economics is diverse but nevertheless
anathema to the idea of pluralism.
Beginning with the French Physiocrates in
the mid 18th-century, economists of all varieties have been
inclined to believe that their approach to economic phenomena reveals, if not
the whole truth, at least all of it that is worth knowing. It is with these broad
conceptualizations, which are called “schools”, rather than with
subject areas, that economists,
like psychologists, form their primary
professional identity. The
assorted teachings and members of these narrative schools are labeled orthodox or heterodox depending on whether their
school is the dominate one or not.
Until very recently economists of all varieties have been comfortable
with this quasi theological scheme of things. But from the 1960s on, neoclassical economists were increasingly successful at purging economics departments of economists who viewed economic reality through other conceptual lenses. This cleansing took place worldwide, a process that accelerated with the rise of neoliberalism, which justifies itself by appeal to the neoclassical narrative. Traditionally non-neoclassical schools of economics have quarrelled among themselves hardly less than with the neoclassical. But in the mid-nineties, faced with near extinction, a peace movement began among these schools. Under the banner ICARE (Confederation of Associations for the Reform of Economics) (later changed to ICAPE , with “Pluralism” substituted for “Reform”) it sought, declared its manifesto, “to promote a new spirit of pluralism in economics, involving critical conversation and tolerant communication among different approaches”. But as these words show, this is a pluralism in the mode of a council of churches, a strategic pluralism rather than the epistemological pluralism of the natural sciences that this essay endorses. Even so, ICAPE’s conciliation campaign helped to breakdown among non-neoclassical economists the Popperian-Kuhnian tradition of viewing economics through the lens of competing narratives. This proved to be prophetic. In the summer of 2000 a group of French economics students circulated a petition that attracted attention from the media in France and subsequently from economists worldwide. The students labeled mainstream economics “autistic” because its allegiance to a single narrative necessarily means that in the main it refuses to look at economic reality. The students called for “a plurality of approaches adapted to the complexity of objects analyzed.” Today this non-competitive approach to narratives is being advanced by growing numbers of economists under the banner “Post-Autistic Economics movement”. 2. Narrative inversion A
knowledge narrative may become invert, meaning that instead of being
used mainly as an instrument for explaining reality, its focus becomes
itself. Turning away from the
empirical phenomena that inspired it, it becomes transfixed with its own
existence. This may take the form
of formalism, where the narrative's empirical content is subordinated to the
articulation of formal devices, where a language “refers to the
observer’s logic but not to the subject” [Piaget 1973, p. 25], as
in much recent economics and political science, or with an obsessive
hermeneutic interest in "reading" and interpreting the formative
texts of the narrative, theology being the supreme example, but with
psychoanalysis sometimes not far behind. In
subject areas where experimentation is difficult or impossible, mathematical
models may have no connection with the concrete or empirical world. Symbols in the equations, instead of
referring to measurable quantities, may be only imaginary placeholders, like
"Monopoly money" is imaginary money. In these cases--and they are
especially common in economics--the models are merely play things,
“being no more than a play of mathematical relations” [Piaget
1973, p. 25], referring only to those relations themselves, rather than to
relations in the empirical world.
The practitioners are not “engaged in forging tools to arrange
and measure actual facts so much as making a marvellous array of
pretend-tools which would perform wonders if ever a set of facts should turn
up in the right form.” [Worswick 1972, p.
79] In economics the
inversion often goes even further.
There exist branches of economics that differ from branches of
mathematics only in two respects: they are of no real mathematical interest
and some of their axioms and terminology may have in the distant past been
related to some empirical question.
In these pursuits, so favoured by promotion and grant- and
prize-giving committees, further assumptions are made willy-nilly to
facilitate mathematical manipulation rather than from any desire to simulate
reality. And by varying the empirically empty assumptions, thereby generating
an endless range of conceivable logical possibilities, a virtual infinity of
“models” can be fabricated, each generating one or more
publications and all impregnable to empirical critique -- a scientist’s
nightmare, but a careerist’s dream. E. Summing UpEven more than physics, modern medicine, where the general practitioner shifts freely between knowledge narratives, exemplifies the antithesis of the monistic approach to knowledge that characterizes traditional societies and many human sciences. The germ theory of disease, along with psychosomatic, genetic and life-style explanations of disease are each a family of narratives, and between which the competent doctor shifts freely back and forth in seeking a true and full explanation of his or her patient’s complaint. These narrative families have overlapping domains – for example, diet (not enough red wine and too much butter) and stress (not enough leisure and too much aggro) contributing through bio-chemical processes to genetic susceptibility to heart disease. But there is no yearning or pressure in the community of medicine for a reduction of its many knowledge narratives to a master narrative, nor for a unification of narratives as in physics. Instead the medical community understands that its multiplicity of narratives for explaining disease and its absence is needed to serve the complexity of medicine’s empirical domain. Indeed, it is almost self-evident that the ill-health and good-health of the human organism are causally more complex that the fundamental properties of the physical universe, and, therefore, not open to narrative unification. It should be self-evident that this is even more true of the socio-economic realm. If the human sciences are to be a constructive part of the human conversation, they must be willing to adjust the conceptual vantage points of their narratives both to fit changes in the topics of that conversation through time and to illuminate the diverse perspectives of its participants. Above all, the conceit that because one is a social scientist one is blessed with a privileged or God’s-eye view of the human world must not be indulged. Richard Rorty’s injunction to philosophers is no less apt for social scientists: “to be rational is to be willing to refrain from . . . thinking that there is a special set of terms in which all contributions to the conversation should be put – and to be willing to pick up the jargon of the interlocutor rather than translating it into one’s own.” [Rorty 1980, p. 318 Epistemologically this is the recognition that a plurality of narratives enriches our understanding of any sub-domain of the human project, that, whereas in the special case such narratives may be incompatible, in general they are complimentary and their plurality essential to the good health of society. Endnote 1.
It is not generally appreciated how much the popularity of Khun among people in the humanities is due to the
satisfaction, sometimes glee, they take in what they see as his portrayal of
the scientist as implicitly intellectually inferior to themselves. Your typical university literature
lecturer, for example, thinks nothing of in a morning shifting through a
whole range of gestalts (Marxist, Freudian, historical, New Criticism,
deconstructionist, etc.) in interpreting a literary work. ReferencesAristotle
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Jorge Luis (1975) "Of Exactitude in Science" in A Universal
History of Infamy. London: Penguin, p. 131. Bulmer,
R. (1973) "Why is the casowary not a bird? A
problem of zoological taxonomy among the Karam of the
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