universality versus relativism, reductionism versus complexity

This is an ambitious post and the topics are larger than life but I would like to share here some thoughts from The moment of complexity by Mark. C. Taylor. At the beginning of his essay, Taylor gives us an original account of the history of the debate on, let's say it, how to see the world: are there universal laws or is everything relative - culturally rather than physically speaking? what is the correct method to comprehend Nature, reduce the problem to a series of simple problem or see it as a whole? These are of course very general and deep questions, which may have as many answers as sand grain on a beach. But this does not prevent us to, at least, discuss about it.

Taylor details the philosophy of several intellectuals, among whom that of Lévi-Strauss. Lévi-Strauss is an advocate of universal laws and a reductionist view of the human culture. He is quoted saying:

"By drawing up an inventory of all the customs that had been observed, all those imagined in myths, those evoked in the games of children and adults, and the dreams of healthy and sick individuals and psychopathological behaviors, one would be able to draw up a period table like that of the chemical elements, in which all real or merely possible customs would appear grouped in families, and in which we would simply need to recognize those which societies have in fact adopted.

(Lévi-Strauss, quoted in The moment of complexity by Mark. C. Taylor, chapter 2; italics are mine)

There are many advocates of the other point of view, one of them, and maybe not the most clearer one according to Taylor, is Foucault. Foucault does not deny there are some kind of universal laws but he insists that these laws have been constructed within our own cultural frame, so that these laws are not, I will dare to say it, "universal enough":

"[W]hile admitting that there is an «order of things», he insists that this order is neither natural nor essential and thus cannot be preordained or unchanging. Whatever order is at work the world is historically contingent and therefore to a certain extent arbitrary."

(Mark C. Taylor, The moment of complexity, chapter 2)

This debate is typical between the scientist who applies reductionism in a professional way, and the humanist who restrains himself from doing so. Taylor writes "[w]hile certain scientists tend to reduce culture to nature, many humanists defiantly reduce nature to culture" (Mark C. Taylor,The moment of complexity, chapter 7). For the former, the understanding of human culture and its psychology is attainable from the study of the building blocks that are the genes: you have or have not the gene of painting, singing, writing, seeing the world this way and not this way etc. For the later, nature itself is a psychological construction different between individuals so that little can be said in general.

For Edward O. Wilson, reductionism, far from denying the complexity of nature, should rather be seen as a tool, not a philosophy or a statement about the world. For him, reductionism is "the search strategy employed to find points of entry into otherwise impenetrably complex systems. Complexity is what interests scientists in the end, not simplicity" (Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: the unity of knowledge, cited in The moment of complexity, chapter 2). Edward O. Wilson adds the following lucid statement:

"The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science."

A sensible illustration of such confrontation is also amazingly found in Lettre à D., Histoire d'un amour by André Gorz writing about the different way his wife, an englishwoman, and himself, influenced by French universalism, think:

"J'avais besoin de théorie pour structurer ma pensée et t'objectais qu'une pensée non structurée menace toujours de sombrer dans l'empirisme et l'insignifiance. Tu répondais que la théorie menace toujours de devenir un carcan qui interdit de percevoir la complexité mouvante du réel."

Although I have a lot of respect about critics of science, because as Descartes said we should always doubt, I have to admit that Edward O. Wilson's view seems correct. As again and again, the conclusion from this debate is not so much that one side is necessarily correct and the other wrong, but that each point of view is adapted to different situations or goals.

To conclude this little post, I would like to bring to your attention that according to Marc C. Taylor, it is possible to go beyond this classic debate. One of the mind-blowing example is the feedback that an idea can have on the brain itself. For instance, in linguistic, there is an academic school which thinks that the brain developed also from the use of the words themselves. Terrence Deacon writes that "the major structural and functional innovations that make human brains capable of unprecedented mental feats evolved in response to the use of something as abstract and virtual as the power of words" (T. Deacon, The coevolution of language and the brain, cited in The moment of complexity, chapter 7). James Gardner says also that "information can and does flow upstream into the genome from the particular extended phenotype we know as human civilization" (cited in The moment of complexity, chapter 7).

Applied to the debate surrounding reductionism as I understand it, the simple schema the scientific community chooses to describe Nature would have a certain effect on the brain over time, would physiologically improve it so that the brains of the scientists would come up with a new schema, more adapted to the world. In some way, it is true that the view of science has evolved and still evolves dramatically ; the idea here is that the improvement in the description of Nature has not been completely independent of the previous descriptions; in other words, the description of the world at a certain time has helped to shape the new description at a later time via a physiological change of the brain itself. In this case, reductionism still is the basic tool to comprehend Nature, but the reductionist schema has some internal subjectivity associated with the physiological limits of the brain. I do not know how far this is accepted but it is true that, if correct, it enlarges the debate and may bring possibilities to accommodate both the scientist and the humanist.