Natural philosophy, as I develop it, deals primarily with what can be called objective physical reality--this is the "hard" reality of the senses that lies beyond the reach of our own subjective attitudes and knowledge that reflect and represent this reality. This reality also extends beyond socially constructed and shared systems of knowledge representation and belief, including especially ideologies and other symbologies by which people organize their view of the world. Natural philosophy is therefore a central concern of science and science at least should be a primary concern of natural philosophy.
The trick and dilemma of natural philosophy is to get beyond the anthropological relativity of our own knowledge systems in relation to objective reality--in essence, reality is held to be a-priori structured by rules and principles that are only derivable from observation in relation to reason. Both observation and reason tend to be conditioned by the language and knowledge systems within which these are framed. Therefore, these limits will present forms of bias about objective reality that must be overcome.
It can be said that natural philosophy is a philosophy about science or of science, both in terms of its praxis and knowledge systems, as well as in terms of its principle subject matter, which is the patterning and order of natural phenomena at all levels that this is encountered.
At the same time, a claim can be made that natural philosophy comprehends more than merely scientific knowledge. All forms of knowledge, to the extent that they are themselves natural systems, or at least reflect cultural realities that occur as natural systems, can be said to be of interest in some manner to natural philosophy. Natural philosophy therefore exhibits a comprehensiveness of perspective and interest that transcends, and this makes it potentially a very powerful and useful perspective to maintain.
A key aspect of the development of natural philosophy is the rational justification of a naturalistic approach to human experience, whether this is understood in subjective or objective form. Such a naturalistic approach to the experience of reality is to be contrasted with other possible and more conventional kinds of approaches, especially religious or ideological claims. An important consideration in this regard is what can be considered to be the ontological status of "truth" within a naturalistic framework, versus some other "idealist" perspective. Truth in the former sense is something that remains implicit to or latent within the order of the patterning that is observed in nature, but is nowhere obvious or directly manifest. It is to be equated with "scientific truth" though the latter is based primarily upon empirical and inductive elucidation and experimentation. Such truth reflects a kind of conceptual system, or a metaphysic and an epistemology, about the way the world works independently of our own involvement or influence within it. Though all knowledge is humanly constructed and therefore there is no such thing as truth that is independent of our involvement in its construction, there remains a sense that, though we were not present in the universe to observe and make sense of the world, the world would still continue on in its manner independently of ourselves or what we can bring to our understanding of it. Scientific method and theory is founded upon this basic presupposition that allows ourselves to escape the solipsism of our own anthropological relativity of knowledge. It is our capacity to experience life in a vicarious sense, to possibly realize what a cow or a crow might be thinking or feeling, to recognize that a mouse or even an earthworm may have its own separate and autonomous view of the world that is not entirely robotic or merely spontaneous, but reflects some limited amount of conscious awareness in the world, that provides us the mentality by which to seek and define what we can call scientific truth. It follows that truth is always relative to our understanding of it and can never be known in a complete or absolute sense.
The human brain is a sense making organ, and the kind of sense it makes of the world is symbolic and uniquely human.
In the Western tradition, precedents for a natural philosophy may be found in Aristotle and later in Francis Bacon. Numerous others have made contributions to a philosophy of nature. It is interesting that Bacon found Aristotle mostly wanting and wrong in his ideas, and it is true that most of Bacon's philosophy is found wanting and wrong in very similar ways. Any modern natural philosophy must take fully into account the role and function of scientific knowledge in the world, and how this has shaped our modern worldview at many different levels of knowledge integration. We no longer expect to be bled if we are ill with fever, and we no longer to find the sun spinning around the earth. Science has provided us realistic answers and solutions about the world, about how it works and why, that any previous philosophy failed to provide. There was no way that philosophy, if left alone without some empirical framework for the testing and evaluation of ideas, could have been sufficient to the task of understanding and giving a sense of order to nature as we human beings encounter it. And yet, science by itself, without philosophy, stands as conceptually weak and narrow minded--incapable of seeing beyond the narrow bounds of any particular data set to the shared realities beyond.
Science has not destroyed philosophy. It has only created a new intellectual niche within which philosophy must define itself. Philosophical systems of conception are separate from and interdependent with empirical frames of knowledge, or what we might call taxonomic or classificatory systems upon which description of reality are mounted. Albert Einstein in his own autobiographical script, distinguishes between systems of pure conception or abstraction and systems of empirical reality. Of course, the former system of abstraction cannot at any point be contradicted by the latter system, and to be most successful, must permit at some point the augmentation of the latter system.
It follows that while we learn more and more about reality from our experimentation and experiences, our conceptual systems will undergo rapid revision and reorientation. This is the course of routine-operational or "normal" science that bits off small, small pieces of reality to chew at any one time. Of course, there are also those rare but much more dramatic moments of scientific history when entirely new conceptual systems concerning an area of knowlede comes to take the place of whatever knowledge systems occurred before. This replacement by the new way of thinking of the old is a way of professionally signaling a weather change in a discipline, or what Kuhn has called a scientific revolution or at least a major paradigm shift. A new way of seeing may provide a platform for an entirely new way of seeing and thinking about the facts within a system.
Theory and evidence of symbolic interactionism strongly suggests that revolutionary perspectives by definition cannot come from the center or common ground of a routine science, but must only emerge from the periphery or margins of the system, by groups or individuals by whose social situation experience some degree of isolation, alienation and alternation from the normal or received view of reality. Those who occupy the center of a field of science and participate in its normal articulation are by social definition unable to entertain alternative points of view that would permit the development of new modes of conceptual thinking and operational procedures to emerge from the "rank and file."
We may say therefore that the system as it has been created in a certain dominant idiom, will not be capable in the final analysis of resolving the problems and contradictions that arise because of its attachment to this idiom, and must eventually fall by the wayside to be replaced like decaying carcasses with new idioms of science.
Natural philosophy as I have sought to develop this emanates from a systems theoretic perspective that rose to a peak of popularity in the 1970's in various disciplines and then waned afterward with what can be called a "post-structuralist" phase, especially as this applied in the humanities and the social sciences. Hence, natural philosophy seeks to secure the metaphysical and epistemological underpinnings of natural systems theory.
I believe that natural systems theory remains the most appropriate model for the articulation of the sciences in general as a comprehensive theoretical approach, and is therefore necessary for the development of an adequate and competent worldview that can be called fully scientific. First, it is a holistic approach that permits a broad complementarity of analytical perspectives. Secondly, it presupposes the analysis of pattern and structure from the data such that "structure" can be at least statistically derived, which structure should result in the development of a rule-based paradigm of understanding governing the relations of the hypothetical "system" in question. This derivation is both inductive and deductive, or what might be referred to as historically abductive, in that it depends both upon the capacity to infer order and pattern from phenomena, and also that it superimposes constructed symbolic frames of reference upon this pattern, which becomes then tested (post-historically, if need be) for goodness of fit. A systems approach therefore allows for a greater deal of flexibility as well as specification in the articulation of knowledge. Because anything and everything may be a system or at least a part of some system, and because all systems are at least hypothetically and indirectly related to one another, the contextual development of the understanding of the natural surroundings of the system is equal in importance and explanatory power to an understanding of the system itself in terms of any possible internal dynamics.
Systems science is therefore a kind of mechanics, statics and dynamics of naturally occurring phenomena, at whatever level these phenomena may occur upon. The wonderful aspect of our reality from A to Z is that it demonstrates, without exception, an amazing and always beautiful patterning of order and regularity that in its complexity defies simplistic explanation and in its simplicity defies complex description. The paradox of natural ordering is that it is on one hand chaotic and on the other always ordered and these two contraposed tendencies interpenetrate on another on every level and in almost every manifestation of its patterning.
The study of systems really becomes a study of systematics, or what can be called dynamic change within systems that demonstrate some form of transformational order.
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Natural philosophy is a form of general thinking that deals with the relations of the natural world, and the relations of humankind within this natural world. The basis for a natural philosophy is the acceptance of ordered pattern in reality that is independent of our own awareness of this order, and yet which also underlies our awareness and sense of order. Natural sets and classes occur as a result of this patterning that embody the structural relations contained within and between them, and these sets constitute the statistically derivable basis for an objective knowledge and understanding of human reality upon which we depend in order to have a realistic view of the world. Anthropological relativity of knowledge creates an inherent degree of uncertainty that we bring to our knowledge systems, and presents a basic kind of constraint to the articulation and progress these systems achieve. We cannot escape in our knowledge systems this horizon of relativity, but we can through deductive inference and careful observation both expand this horizon and also gain some degree of visibility of form and pattern of the otherwise unknown beyond. Natural philosophy situates all human knowledge systems in the anthropological and natural substrate of human reality, and seeks to explain its constructive, integrative and adaptive functions in this reality, primarily in terms of its symbolic structure and design. Human reality can therefore be said to constitute a subset of the larger natural world, or what can be called physical reality. It is therefore a part of this larger reality, and not effectively separable from it. On the basis of this natural philosophical foundation, I have attempted to derive what I consider to be basic naturalistic statements about human metaethics, aesthetics, epistemology, metaphysics and logic. I also attempt to apply this form of philosophical perspective as a means of inquiry into the fundamental nature and structure of reality, and as a heuristic problem solving way of knowing that has applicability to a broad range of naturally occurring problem sets in reality. Though we cannot have a naïve, unpreconditioned view of reality, we can approach the real world in a manner that can be said to be naturalistically naïve in a relatively unprejudiced and unbiased manner. This can lead us to new insight and wisdom concerning the nature of our reality.
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I put forth the claim that a natural philosophy underlies and justifies natural systems theory and metasystems science. Natural philosophy provides the symbolic integration and rationalization for the conduct of these approaches to reality. Unlike other philosophical systems, natural philosophy arises from a claim about the ontological status of meaning and being as these are constituted in an objectively real framework of reality that is at least inferentially non-human in its independent patterning and underlying sense of order. Natural philosophy thus constitutes a form of logical empiricism and inductivism about reality that combines as well a statement about the non-arbitrary nature of a certain class of knowledge, namely that expressed in mathematical relationships and processes, as being non-relative to the human knower and also essentially non-real in physical reality.
Natural philosophy is rooted to a naturalistic conception of reality as existing "out there" independent of our ability to apprehend or comprehend it. In fact, our ability to understand reality depends critically upon the innate ordering of processes and relationships in external reality, as this sense of order both underlies our own sense-making capabilities, and provides as well the primary reference points by which we can make sense of the world in a non-arbitrary manner.
Natural philosophy is based upon the following premises:
Natural patterning in physical reality occurs independently and separately from the hman experience or apprehension of this pattern.
All patterning in reality forms natural orders of relationship that can be apperceptively apprehended and comprehended in some logical manner.
This ordering of natural patterning is stratified upon many different levels that are capable of being hierarchically organized.
The apprehension of logical ordering of natural patterning coheres in the form of human knowledge systems that represent the order in the form of testable, theoretical models.
In general, valid theoretical comprehension of such patterning will permit an organization of this patterning upon their respective levels in such as manner as to make the theoretical underpinnings implicit to the resulting taxonomy, and to enable predictions or conclusive statements to be made that subsequently prove to be true.
Natural patterning itself will always tend to be underdetermined in character, hence complex and historically chaotic in its state-path trajectories and development.
The human mind and human thought is also a natural system that arose within an evolutionary context as a complex set of trait adaptations to survival.
The human mind and human thought, being based upon cellular interactions in the brain, therefore follows natural ordering processes that constitutes a system capable of being logically understood and explained in all its phases in terms of a knowledge system.
All meaning and being are constructed symbolically and behaviorally in human reality.
All meaning and being in human reality can be said to be constructed in complex ways.
1. It is socially constructed: it is situated and made real in social relations and interactions.
2. It is psychologically constructed: it is subjectively embodied and rationalized in terms of personal experience and interests.
3. It is linguistically constructed: it is encoded, expressed and evaluated in terms that are primarily linguistic.
4. It is culturally constructed: it is sanctioned by implicit and explicit norms of belief and behavior.
All meaning and being in human reality becomes epistemologically constructed in the form of knowledge systems that have several possible functions in the mediation of reality.
Objective knowledge meets the following general criteria:
1. It is socially situated and received.
2. It is empirically referential and testable.
3. It is based upon independent standards of measurement or determination.
Science has an interest in constructing objective-based systems of knowledge that serve to explain and fully account for the natural patterning that is observable in human reality.
Human reality defines a subset of physical reality and the limits of our knowledge systems. Scientifically defined knowledge systems permit us to make inferential statements about the larger physical reality in a manner that is directly unavailable to our normal ways of knowing, thus permitting an expansion of our systems of knowledge and a broadening as well as an intensification of the range of experience that is comprehended in human reality.
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Natural philosophy can be said to be a system of thought about physical reality that underlies and accounts for natural systems theory. The basis for natural philosophy is the notion that all of reality, however experienced, is unified and integral to itself. It essentially exists independently of any individual's experience of it, though it universally incorporates all individuals' possible experiences within it. It is all containing of, not contained by, the structure of thought itself. Thought is a byproduct of its patterning and its structure. Thought is epigenetic to the development of natural order in reality, and yet our only means of apperceptively apprehending reality or its structure is by means of our thought and the sense of conscious awareness that we bring to the essential experience of reality. This imposes a basic constraint upon our knowledge and ability to know reality, and this constraint I have termed the anthropological relativity of human knowledge, whatever form or variety it takes. Natural philosophy therefore shares this basic sense of relativity, and even directly identifies it in a cogent manner, but the reference points of natural philosophy are not in the processes of thought or the conceptual models that are built up by means of thought, but the presumed reality to which this thought gains validity or otherwise.
From this standpoint, we can claim that even human thinking is a natural process that is a product of brain function and communication within a culturally carpentered environment. The understanding of the patterning and order of knowledge therefore requires a naturalistic description of knowledges as these are situated, organized and articulated in reality. Knowledge has been an historical and to a great extent a trans-cultural achievement of humankind that was built up over years of trial and error. It thus constitutes a special kind of noetic construction of reality, a part of what can be called a larger system of worldview.
The worldview contained within much of knowledge can be said to be intrinsic and implicit to the knowledge in its noetic organization. Such knowledge implies relational order to a larger system of ideas that is at once both integrated and yet underdetermined. We can say that natural knowledge systems that are not deliberately set under a single ideological umbrella tend to be mostly self-organized. The degree to which such self-organization occurs in knowledge systems can be remarkable given the fact that at no point in the development of such systems was it ever cleary an intentional affair on the part of some single individual.
This integration links the cognitive world, otherwise solipsistic and psychologically relative, to the larger social order of shared and variegated constructs. This process can be said to underlie and form the basis of cultural integration of reality. If we are to seek cultural integration in terms of shared systems of belief and behavior, systems that are internally integrated, then we must see these systems as having a cultural basis and process in reality.
The internal integration of knowledge systems can be found clearly evident in semantics and linguistic patterns within a shared and common language pattern. It makes possible what has been referred to as the remarkable phenomenon of native speaker intuition and it is the basis for the achievement of common sense, knowledge and consensual meanings in society. How a society arrives at such agreement of meaning structures, even of the terms themselves, is not fully explained except in the sense that it was achieved through many generations of communicative exercise and change.
The other facet of this aspect of integration is that the meanings and words that express them are a part of a complex but extremely flexible and capable symbolic system that appears to be intrinsic to human consciousness, albeit as a process that is essentially acquired. Symbolisms make possible therefore both agreement and disagreement, and ameliorates the sense of contradiction that may arise between different interpretations of the same events or experiences. In fact, the symbolic function of language and meaning makes complete or perfect agreement not only unnecessary, but probably undesirable as well. Symbolisms can be said to have therefore a nonspecialized or general function of description of reality without resort to the factual unpacking of a detail accounting of that reality. It is therefore acceptable that not everyone in the world sees the same color patterns in order to share the same terms for what they do see.
This is clearly evident for instance, among Jetty informants who reported certain colors, like orange, violet and brown, somewhat ambiguously. It was not that they were not all seeing approximately the same sets of wavelengths or combinations of colors. It was that they were interpreting what they were seeing in different ways, though they could be said to have a remarkably high degree of cultural consonance and coherence otherwise. In this instance, we cannot clearly separate the perception of the color category that leads to its naming or identification, from the conception of the category itself that relates it primarily to other colors as well as to other things that are similarly colored. The perception of color is therefore critically prestructured by the conceptual system within which its semantic and associational values are made coordinate and meaningful in the lifeworld of the informant.
This is referred to in the literature as perceptual constancy of form. I believe in human consciousness at least that there are no truly naïve or directly apprehended sense perceptions that are not on some level unconsciously or consciously "prestructured" by experience and mental organization of phenomena. Indeed, it is almost imperative that experience is thus prestructured by the mind, else the multiplicity of signals would produce so much noise and chaos that the individual's cognitive machinery would quickly breakdown.
This is clearly evidenced, for example, in second language acquisition and in situations of crossing language boundaries without fluency in a foreign language. Reception of sound signals in a foreign language is perceptible only as noise and chaos that has no significance to the listener. Native speaker intution, or what might be better called as second listener apprehension, is made possible only by the reflexive comprehension of the signals in the semantic structures and realities that are symbolized and deposited in the language itself.
It is almost equally true in instances of culture shock in which an individual is immersed existentially in a foreign cultural pattern where everyday behaviors and ways of doing things are completely misunderstood upon a basic level. Perceptual experience at all levels is normally ordered by cognitive and symbolic frames of reference. Much of this prestructuring occurs subconsciously and reflexively--in other words, it is automatic to expertise and experience that permits fluency of perceptual recognition and appropriate or adaptive behavioral response.
Where achievement and the possibility of integration occurs can be said to rest upon the stability of "natural classes" and forms that are basic and almost universally shared across cultural boundaries, and in the degree of shared cognitive and symbolic prestructures that are superimposed upon the organization of reality.
The first set of "natural classes" can be said to be rooted in the basic patterns and differences that are frequently observed in the natural ordering of the world. In this case, zoomorphic or botannical forms are much more basic and clearly recognizeable than those that are culturally constructed. I would refer to these natural classes as the universal ground of human experience that forms the substrate of meaning and that makes possible the inter-translation between languages and the meaning systems they encode and express.
The second form of shared symbolic and cognitive constructs can be said to be those basic or derivative schema or models that chunk experience into meaningful categories and that predetermine to some degree the ordered relationships between categories. These forms of internalized constructs are mostly cultural in origin, and tend to vary considerably and widely across cultural boundaries, although there remains a large degree of overlap and common ground in cultural cognitive constructs, that are shared by many different kinds of people.
Knowledge in general, or knowledges in a more specific or applied sense, are thus to be seen as constituting symbolic language systems that have both internalized and external frames of reference, that are culturally shared and transmitted, and that probably have some kind of function, usually integrative, intermediative or adaptive, in society. We can refer to residual archaic, anachronistic or vestigial knowledge systems that had some former function but have lost their sense of vital purpose in the existing social order. Knowledge systems are said to be integrating of reality as much as they are integrated in and to reality. Knowledge systems are not separate from this reality, but form a basic part of reality and exist in reality. The independence of knowledge from its objective reference in reality is a function both of the arbitrariness of language and its symbolic displacement, and this independence is really only indirect and relative to what is known or expressed as knowledge. Knowledge has a psychological substrate, but it has a social integration and function. Knowledge that does not exist socially as part of the world is knowledge that is doomed for extinction.
Civilized humanity is humanity whose psychology is socially constituted by means of the social integration of knowledge systems. A psyche that is socially constituted is one in which the knowledge systems upon which it is organized is historically built up and transmitted through cultural patterning. We can refer to this as collective consciousness and collective representations of reality. This is not to say that primitive or primordial peoples did not have psychology that was socially constituted, as a clear case for less individual variation of pattern can be made for such cultural systems compared to more heterogenous and sophisticated social systems, only that the basis for this social constitution of their shared mental framework of knowledge invariably had a basic naturalistic focus that was reflected also in an animistic system of belief. This is reflective of societies that tend to be socially acephalous and relatively unstratified internally at least.
A naturalistic accounting of knowledge systems underlying natural philosophy can be said to be anthropologically situated in the cross-cultural and ethnographic and historical record of humankind. We can even infer it in human archaeological and prehistoric records in the form of organized behavior that produced systematic patterns of artifact assemblies. It is tied to the symbolic organization and function of human language and the meaning systems that it articulates. We can therefore understand its principle constraints of knowledge in terms of the anthropological relativity of meaning as this is constructed in human social reality.
We cannot clearly separate the meaning system from the linguistic system that is used to encode and express meaning. Many meanings would be fundamentally unavailable upon at least a conceptual level if there were no kind of language with which to encode these systems. Language not only facilitates the expression of meaning, but makes meaning possible in any linguistic sense. For example, attempt to think a thought without the use of a the silent language of the mind. It is the reflexive connection of linguistic encoding that precipitates meaningful experience in an organized manner. Language also situates meaning and its construction clearly in a social process and praxis, as language itself is constructed socially through communication and interchange.
Knowledge can therefore be defined as a set of statements in reference to reality, or to some alleged aspect of reality, that is symbolically encoded and functions to mediate and express relationship in reality. Knowledge is based upon facts, statements that point directly to reality in terms of objects, events or processes found to be true in perceived experience, and upon ideas, statements about relational patterns that tie together objects, events and processes along with abstract constructs or symbols that may summarize or stand in place of such experience.
Knowledge coheres into systems of meaning that tend to be symbolically integrated upon a number of different levels simultaneously. It entails that all knowledge is symbolic in character--it functions symbolically and is articulated in the form of symbolism. Knowledge must achieve some minimal sense of coherence within such a symbolic system, which constitutes a kind of implicit or background context for the framing and grounding of knowledge as an ordered, patterned, set of relationships that are capable of being summarized. Knowledge cannot therefore be a loose, odd assortment of facts and ideas that bear no underlying relationship to one another. Knowledge systems therefore can be said to have an underlying sense of order that is implicit to its relational and definitional patterning, and this constitutes the structure of a knowledge system that makes its patterning informationally interesting and predictive.
We can distinguish scientific knowledge systems from all others on the basis of the degree to which these systems utilize the primary constructs of perceptual experience, either directly or indirectly through logically constrained relationships, as the basis for their evaluation and validation. Other systems do not necessarily hold to this stricture so strongly, if at all.
A naturalistic description of knowledge is important to a natural philosophy of reality, because this reality is invariably always "human reality" and because philosophy itself is a special kind of knowledge system with its own functions and forms. We are in other words attempting to get at a relatively unbiased understanding of what a natural philosophy might be in terms of the structure of its own patterning.
Natural reality can be said to be ordered in an a priori sense. This ordering is entirely stochastic, chaotic and self-organizational. But as ordering, it is a rule-based process that means that its sense of order can be made available to our understanding and awareness. Its ordering is independent of our awareness, in fact our awareness depends ultimately upon its sense of ordering in reality.
We, as human beings, are a part of this natural process. We cannot know our larger reality or our place within this larger natural order, except via the vehicle of our own thought structures, and this leaves us with a kind of object-subject dilemma about the structure of reality, or rather, the structure of our knowledge about this reality.
Conceptual systems in human thought share certain affinities and limitations regardless of the field and the differences of framing that occur between these different areas. All conceptual systems are, as knowledge systems, subject to certain ambiguous constraints that are a part of their linguistic and symbolic encoding, and their cultural and social construction.
Conceptual systems in their own right can be powerful tools that can bring theoretical insight and understanding to general problem sets. When coupled with imagination, insight and openness, they can lead to discoveries and understanding of structure underlying the pattern of reality. The role of conceptual development of systems in scientific thought and praxis is not fully appreciated or valued for its potential. Instead, emphasis is placed upon middle-range theory and the development of on the ground, empirical research constructs.
Natural process can be said to be ordered in an entropic manner, which means that all ordered systems in the long run tend toward a state of disorder. Directive inputs of energy are required to drive a disordered system toward greater order, or to maintain a sense of order about a system in spite of the natural tendencies towards disorganization. Order and disorder are relative to one another as complementary and contrastive states. Sense of order or disorder is a residuum of our awareness or consciousness that is based upon the recognition of the pattern contained in the natural processes that we experience.
Natural philosophy constitutes the basis for natural scientific theory and method as a system of conceptualization and knowledge organization. Natural philosophy forms the critical framework for the rationalization and articulation of the sciences, as well as for their symbolic integration. The world, in spite of its scientific advances, has largely gone without a well defined natural philosophy or system of thought that serves to explain its larger relationship to the world.
Natural philosophy is rooted to the proposition that basic rules governing the order of patterning in the universe are implicit to this patterning and define its structure in a repetitive and transformative sense. Based upon these rules, there is a tendency for natural patterning of phenomena to form organized sets and systematic relations that becomes the basis for what can be called a natural taxonomy. This natural taxonomy can be said to have a material basis in the countable, frequency related data that it seeks to describe and organize. This natural taxonomy can be considered, to the extent that it accurately and realistically represents the patterning found in the data, to be relatively non-arbitrary and forms the basis for scientific knowledge organization and data analysis.
Natural taxonomy leads to the problem of hierarchy of relations within the taxonomy that is separated on distinct levels reflecting the stratification of natural systems upon different levels or orders of organization.
I distinguish three levels of articulation of natural philosophy: general conceptual systems, intermediary cognitive-cultural models, and specific informational constructs and methods.
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At the same time, natural philosophy is not a completely in or exclusively objectivist accounting of the world. The second part of its general agenda is the accounting for the subjective and relativistic aspects of philosophy and human knowledge in general as sytems of knowing and communication that are constructed in social contexts. This invites philological and structural critique of such knowledge systems. All natural systems theory must founder upon the rocks of anthropological relativity.
The aim of natural systems theory is to embrace both sets of terms in this dialectic between the two cultures of the sciences and the humanities, and to attempt to create a new paradigm that will move beyond these camps.
It is fitting that this perspective should have arisen out of anthropological inquiry and the social sciences in general, as the social sciences have always had a foot in both cultures and though being straddled betwixt and between has been an unenviable position entailing a lot of divisiveness and internal conflict within departments, mastery of both sets of issues allows us the means of transcending the differences and reconciling them in a new synthesis concerning human knowledge and its articulation.
There are aspects of knowledge systems that natural philosophy must deal with that are conventionally construed as "unnatural." This would include abstract systems as represented by mathematics, on one hand, which can be said to be a priori true as noumenal realities in a Platonic sense. It would also include what can be called artificial systems that are the product of human imagination and industry, and that had no previous existence in the natural scheme of things before human beings invented and created them. We might include a third class of what can be construed as "non-natural systems" but this would be a vague and all inclusive kind of catch-all category describing any unknown system that might be found to occur in reality that can be said to be the result of some intelligent agency that is separate from the stochastic and normal ordering of relations in reality.
In general, and in a strict sense, all systems can be considered to be "natural systems" even if they are technically not so. Artificial systems that are the product of human fabrication remain a product of a very natural system of order. Thus we can claim that cultures and the pot-sherds that represent them in the ground constitute a kind of natural patterning or class of natural phenomena that can be described in a naturalistic manner. Because some human agency intervened in the constitution of this patterning does not change the assessment in the slightest. Similarly, I believe that abstract mathematical and logical systems are purely the product of human intelligence, or the functioning capacity of the human brain, and thus can be also described in a naturalistic fashion. The difference therefore between natural and non-natural systems can be said to be the fact of intermediation of some form of deliberate intelligence, implying a kind of arbitrary determinism that affects the outcomes and shapes the end-products, regardless whether the intelligent agency itself stemmed from some natural process. Otherwise, nonnatural systems can be considered only as a special subclass of natural systems, and this is the manner that I have chosen to treat them in the development of my theory.
Human history reveals at every complex turn of events how true it is that natural forces and patterns influence in unintentional ways the best laid plans of mice and men. Specific outcomes of complex historical event structures are never clearly predictable or even completely understandable. And so it is with all of the natural world as well.
The interesting thing about the natural world is that so much order does exist in it, in spite of the disorder that occurs throughout. Order and chaos hinge in the dialectic of the world like the symbols of yin and yang that turn forever about itself. There appears to be nothing that occurs in the universe that is fully determined as a system, and yet at the same time, there appears to be nothing that is also fully undetermined. Even our concept of what "nothing" really is begs a question when it comes to the most fundamental forces and properties of our physical universe. We are as a consequence of these same processes, and our ability to think about the world naturalistically or philosophically arises out of the fact of our being situated wholly and materially within the world. We therefore come to share in the same forces and patterning as the world around us and that made us and flows through us, and we share the same basic kinds of constraints and limitations.
The desire to step beyond the bounds of the dialectic that informs the differences between the knowledge cultures of the sciences and the humanities stems from the requirement within anthropological inquiry to regain its lost sense of middle ground. Cultural anthropology in particular has lost its center of balance as a unique and deserving discipline largely because of the divisive tendencies that pull at it from both directions of the sciences and the humanities, making it difficult for its practitioners and professionals to straddle the ground between. It seems then that the lessons learned in these systematic efforts at reconciliation and discovery of common ground can be applied fruitfully and productively to many different disciplinary areas of inquiry--softening up somewhat the hard sciences, and at the same time, stiffening up the softer sciences and humanities with some sense of empirical spinal column.
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The goals of natural philosophy are ambitious and manifold. We can concisely state a few of these goals:
1. To offer a system of natural logic and reasoning that is anthropologically realistic and suitable to the tasks of solving real world problem sets. This natural logic would embrace both pragmatic, philological and linguistic accounts of reasoning and human cognitive patterning, as well as an accounting of human symbolization and symbolic logic as systems of knowledge construction and application.
2. To offer renewed and vigorous scope for philosophically driven inquiry in virtually all fields of knowledge inquiry and application, in both the sciences and the humanities with the aim of developing a "metathetical" platform of the integration of such knowledge and of understanding the natural patterning of distribution of such knowledge between and across different domains of inquiry.
3. To offer a metaethical foundation for human attitudes, values and actions that provide a panhuman frame of reference for ordering our relations with the larger world, including, and perhaps most importantly, with the natural world that lies before and beyond our own constructions and destructiveness.
4. To offer a metaphysical view of reality that is coordinate between the sciences and the humanities, and that serves to provide a comprehensive system of worldview, symbolically ordered, by which we make sense of natural and nonnatural relations with the world.
5. To offer a revised natural epistemology of human knowledge systems, particularly as these are constrained by various forms of anthropological and non-anthropological relativities, and that serves to effectively transcend the sense of dichotomies that have affected and informed traditional use of epistemology in Western Philosophy especially.
6. To offer the foundation for a set of aesthetic principles rooted in the natural patterning of reality and in its appreciation, encompassing both emotional and subjective responses as well as rational and relatively objective reactions to such patterning. The aim of such a natural aesthetic would be the incorporation of such principles into the patterning of everyday life, and its transformational consequences upon our current state of the world in alternative ways.
7. To offer an ontological accounting of natural reality both from a human and a non-human frame of reference, which accounting includes questions of fundamental meaning, origins, determinancy, etc.
8. To offer a means of hermeneutically evaluating and critically deconstructing symbolic and ideological systems of knowledge, situating them as social constructions in relation to a larger cultural praxis. At some point, natural philosophy must deal centrally with the problem of human culture and cognition, its definition, dynamics and determinations.
9. To offer a natural heuristic as a means of applying knowledge to real world problem sets and to devising new strategies and designs that work towards some long term goal structures. This entails the problem of defining what these goal structures may be and how they can best be met.
10. To offer a means by which diverse knowledge systems and different methods of inquiry can be intermediated and reconciled within a larger framework of understanding and operation that is non-exclusive and effective. A part of this last goal is to provide a context for the development of a uniquely comprehensive system of inquiry that both incorporates and complements all other forms or areas of inquiry.
These goals indeed lay an entire array of philosophical concerns at the doorstep of natural systems theory and metasystems science.
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Systems approaches in the literature exhibit the following sets of properties:
1. Multivariate causation or determination. Systems are multiply or complexly determined. No single factor is the complete determinant of a system, but it is determined by a number of interrelated factors. Correlational factor analysis is a means of analyzing the variable distribution and relationship of multiple determinants within systems. We may distinguish primary and key determinants that may affect the behavior of the system in some critical manner.
2. Control mechanisms. Systems can be said to be governed by mechanisms of control, which may or may not be the same as determinants of a system. Control factors are constraints that govern the operation of the system, often by setting limits and introducing feedback that regulates the system on a basic level. A mechanism can be said to be any set of relationships between factors that result in a form of automatic or self-inducible pattern of response, which pattern is usually highly coordinate and predictable. This entails some kind of cyclical process, or a recurrent patterning.
3. Contextual determinants. All systems can be said to be contextually determined. In a physical sense, all systems are thermodynamic and entropic in an ambient set of surroundings. In a behavioral sense, all systems occur in relationship to larger sets of factors and frameworks that affect and constrain the behavior of these systems. Contextually variation may affect the outcomes of behavior of systems in terms of their state-path trajectories.
These are important dimensions of systems theory because they permit some form of systematic interpretation to proceed at alternative levels of integration in a manner that is consonant with scientific investigation and theory into these systems.
It remains an open question as to what other kinds of constraints or critical factors may affect systems in a general sense. A general definition of a system encompasses a very broad range of fundamentally different kinds of systems, the design features of which may not all be identical. All systems can be said to be derivative, to the extent that we have not yet defined well what the most fundamental system is. Chemical systems can be said to be fundamental to biological constructs and systems, and hence all biological processes may be fundamentally reducible to chemical relationships and the terms between them. At the same time, it is clear that biological processes embraces a broader range of properties than are explanable in chemical terms. Relative to more basic atomic or subatomic systems, we may say that chemical systems are by contrast derivative. It appears possible that we cannot ultimate specify an absolutely fundamental system in reality, therefore all systems can be said to be relatively derivative on some level or another.
Just how derivative systems are is an important consideration, as the number of emergent properties of derivative systems must increase with increasing levels and orders of complexity that are associated with such systems.
Blanket Copyright, Hugh M. Lewis, © 2005. Use of this text governed by fair use policy--permission to make copies of this text is granted for purposes of research and non-profit instruction only.
Last Updated: 03/08/05