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Tuesday, November 29, 2005

 

 The BCNGroup Beadgames

National Project à 

Challenge Problem  à

 Center of Excellence Proposal à

 

 

 

 

The Taos Institute

(on the possibilities)

 

 

 [bead thread on curriculum reform]

Communication from Gary Berg-Cross  à  [251]

 

Paul,

 

You may enjoy this from "The Americanization of unity",

From Daedalus,  Winter 1998  by Galison, Peter

 

The article is on a post-war (WWII) effort to unify sciences. It discusses the work of Philipp Frank, who had helped usher in the scientific philosophy of the Vienna Circle and after WWII became  a lecturer at Harvard department of physics.  He developed a plan (for Warren Weaver at the Rockefeller Foundation) entitled "The Institute for the Unity of Science: Its Background and Purpose." You might enjoy some of its discussion of reality and classification of reality (the references are omitted but includes Whitehead, Carnap and Neurath)...

 

Gary Berg-Cross

EM&I, Crystal City

 

Basically he proposed a new Institute for the Unity of Science that emerged in postwar America moving from the scientist-philosophers of the interwar German-speaking world of modernism and Marburg neo-Kantianism, to the new roles of physics, chemistry, engineering, psychology, and sociology in the world. There were 2 parts to the objective: provide a picture of this new unity that is both the extension of the Vienna Circle and also a new philosophical outlook that added new scientific concerns e.g. computers and nuclear power.

 

Here is part of a confidential Rockefeller Foundation report to the trustees (dated March 1949 and reported in the article) that described the metaphysical dilemma. "We have physical experiments, chemical experiments, biological experiments, and other specialized techniques, but it is important to remember that classification into these categories is man's invention. Whether it is also nature's, we don't know." One school of scientists, the report continued, supposed such metaphysical unity did obtain: "a universe of matter and energy whose interactions under certain conditions produce motion, radiation, and the other effects which we label physical, and under different conditions produce the nightingale's singing and other behavior which we call biological."

 

From Alfred North Whitehead to George Sarton, this metaphysical commitment to the unity of nature became an oft repeated creed.  Not everyone agreed, as the foundation's 1949 report made clear. Herbert Dingle, for one, argued that this sort of reductionistic metaphysical unity could not be guaranteed. The Rockefeller trustees would have read in the report that the metaphysical unity of nature was not a sure thing, according to Dingle:

 

We aim at it; we hope we shall achieve it; but we must recognize the possibility that nature may be essentially dual, or even multiple.... We do not ignore the organic unity of nature when we consider laws of motion apart from those of economics, let us say. We simply avail ourselves of the fact that we can make progress by admitting that, at present, motion and economics are disconnected subjects of study. We hope that we shall unify them, but to let our thinking be influenced by the assumption that they are essentially one seems indefensible.

 

That said, the report went on to laud Maxwell's unification of electricity and optics, along with Einstein's of mathematics and physics (through general relativity). But the list did not stop there. Of crucial import were biophysics, biochemistry, psychophysics, psycho-physiology, and social psychology; moreover, the report noted, "other borderland sciences are fields that seem likely to contribute new data for a unitary picture of nature." In the process of this joining together of "borderland" disciplines in pairwise links, concepts that were superfluous would drop by the wayside. Einstein's geometrical dynamics made "gravitational force" a dead letter; the quantum theory of the chemical bond rendered "chemical force" obsolete; and Maxwellian electrodynamics left fundamental optical hypotheses as nothing but a fifth wheel.

 

Would this piecewise integration extend all the way from mathematics to sociology? If it did, would the knowledge pyramid reflect a "natural" order of things? Steering a midcourse between metaphysical dualism and metaphysical unity, Herbert Feigl argued for establishing such connections "without premature attempts at complete unification."

 

Partial connections (such as that afforded by chemical physics) would take place through the "master key" of semantics, "the study of the meaning of words and other symbols." Just as disposing of "chemical force" was a conceptual advance, so too would be a clarification of the myriad of often obsolete terms plaguing biology-"entelechy," "vital force," "mechanism," "holism," and "entity"-not to speak of similar vestiges of an earlier physics, including "absolute space," "absolute time," "simultaneity." Only a rigorous operationalism could effect this purge of the superfluous. Quoting Feigl approvingly, the report continues, "The possibility of a reconstruction of all factual sciences on the basis of a common set of root terms enables us to speak of the reducibility of all sciences to a common, unitary, interscientific language."

 

In an attempt to deliver just such a "basic operational dictionary," Frank and MIT's Karl W. Deutsch began a composition in the fall of 1952. Containing nineteen different categories, with three hundred terms, the sweep of the project is stunning. In all, there would be three hundred "basic concepts." These would include not only standard physics notions like mass, matter, energy, space, time, and field but also (picture Carnap's horror) such hard-to-imagine-operationalized concepts as love (under psychology) or God, belief (faith), soul, and damnation (under religion). (I cannot help but wonder here whether salvation is excluded deliberately or whether it is operationalized under a negative disposition of damnation.)

 

In those cases where the operational definitions were clear from usage, they would be drawn from "scientific writing." If not, then views would be drawn from writers with an appropriate "operational viewpoint." If both were absent, then experts would provide "paper and pencil operations"; if even these were not possible, then "hypothetical operations," analogous to procedures that could be performed, would be utilized. By example: "real" might refer to that which is "familiar from repetitive, gross, bodily experience." Alternatively (Frank wrote), "we mean by 'real' things from which we can continue to learn, overriding past symbols and traditions." "Reality" is signaled by "structural coincidence" between sensations and impersonal records. "Sensations" track back to "traces" within the nervous system and are therefore impermanent and not easily verifiable, whereas "instrument records" are external, more easily verifiable, and forever.

 

One could study these three hundred greatest hits in the concept parade almost mechanically, finding here and there the bits and pieces of prewar Vienna Circle concerns. Starting with "sets, groups, order, and structure," one could discern the elements of the new formal logic and set theory of Frege and Russell that so impressed the group back in the 1920s: class, universals, group, model, order, congruence make their appearance here. Under "prediction" we could track back many of Reichenbach's or Carnap's concerns in their extensive writings on probability: "equipossibility," "limit of relative frequencies," "degree of assent," or Frank's own youthful dissection of the causality notion that had so impressed Einstein. Here, too, we find vestiges of the old Vienna Circle's fascination with Freudian psychology (the list includes id and ego) and the frequently discussed gestalt concept that arose in discussions among Carnap, Neurath, Wittgenstein, and Schlick; we also see elements of economic theory (utility, market, profit, labor, capital, efficiency) that engaged many among the left wing of the Circle. Religious concerns, anathema to Carnap, could no doubt be laid (in part) at Charles Morris's door, as his "Paths of Life" drew him ever more into contemplation of the great world religious leaders and their thought......etc......