Worldviews, Science and Us

CONTENTS

No abstract received.

How to distinguish genuine science from pseudo science, and how to establish the hierarchical relationships between scientific disciplines. Ever since the 1930-ies, these two questions have given cause for passionate debate but without yielding any consensus on the answers. In this contribution I will outline the standpoints of the principal participants of this debate, as well as the most relevant points of criticism of each of the positions. I will then try to show how this criticism should reveal the fruitless nature of our attempts at formulating criteria to demarcate the scientific terrain and delineate its hierarchy, and how instead we should allow for a concept of science that is more suited to our endeavours to acquire knowledge of the world and of ourselves than through any such demarcation or stratification.

Interdisciplinary inquiry presupposes an open worldview to enable the researcher to transcend the confinements of a specific discipline in order to become aware of aspects that are necessary to satisfyingly solve a problem. Radical constructivism offers a way of engineering such interdisciplinarity that goes beyond mere multi or pluridisciplinary approaches. In this paper I describe epistemological and methodological aspects of interdisciplinarity, discuss typical problems it faces, and carve out its relationship with knowledge and communication from a constructivist perspective. Five implications for interdisciplinary practice and science education conclude the paper.

Modern science has been thoroughly influenced by the centuries-old Simplicity Principle, also known as Ockham’s Razor. This principle is usually formulated as “entities must not be multiplied without necessity”. The main problem with this formulation is that the necessity or redundancy of an entity (e.g. a concept, hypothesis, law, rule, an explanatory element) cannot always be compellingly demonstrated. This means that, certainly within an empiristic, positivistic or materialistic worldview, the use of Ockham’s Razor easily tends towards unjustified reductionism. However, ontologically or epistemologically, the Simplicity Principle can no longer be justified. The Simplicity Principle does not provide a sufficient argument to reject “entities” as irrelevant or superfluous. Moreover, a reductionistic conception of science cannot contribute to tackling issues concerning ultimate values, meanings of life, metaphysics, aesthetics, religion and several aspects of practical life, such as counselling, morals, politics and jurisdiction. Therefore, this article proposes an alternative principle that I have called the Chatton–Ockham Strategy, which is an integration of Chatton’s anti-Razor and Ockham’s Razor and deals with the complexity–simplicity polarity.

At its core, “science” reveals constancy in basic principles, although in practice it is a multifaceted process. Science changes its face depending on how, by whom and why it is utilised. To confine the definition of science to either “the deepening of the understanding of our universe” or “the mastering of our world and developing of tools for society”, would be to oversimplify its actual mechanism. The various stances in science, from “utility inclined” to “philosophically inspired”, translate into a multiplicity of legitimate confrontations. Still, intrinsically, its ongoing creative phase makes speculation a prerequisite, accounting for its underlying multiplicity. Finally, basing myself on elementary scientific developments, I will propose arguments for an inclusive ontology.

Since my early days, Science promised a universal method to explain everything, but university science with its inner contradictions left me bored. Ortega showed that science can fossilise and become superstition. The African tropical rainforest around 1963 and audacious new thinking together with young French scientists paved the way to my later analysis of living system hierarchies. The rainforest is a great debunker of arrogant scientists. Its plants and animals are countless, its inner subdivisions are not sharp, timing of events there is imprecise. In highly complex ecosystems no situation is recurrent. Hierarchical systems analysis, chaos theory and fuzzy logic, all of the 1960-ies, show the same way. Time is no factor, but an invisible dimension, a measuring stick, and visible space is 3D. Knowledge from foreign lands and from the past often sees reality as “more or less” defined, “elastic” (“jam karet”, rubber time, in Indonesian). Our neat science predicts correctly how stars move, but not epidemics or jobless periods, or tree growth. The dilemma of structure (3D) versus becoming (4D) always was central to human thought. It is met by two axioms defining an elastic universe with fractal dimensions. First, structure is a very slow process and process is a very short-lived structure. Second, due to a short life-span, humans can only perceive infinity if broken down, folded, refolded etc., a fractal image. These axioms and some rules derived yield a logically coherent image of the universe, inclusive of but broader than science as taught in schools today.

Science can be inspired or not. It can be contextualised or not in the mind of the scientist. It can be culture-gender-context-sensitive or not. Our claim is that science should not be exclusive in the present-day world, or else it becomes a powerful instrument in the hands of the mighty, and hence against the interests of humankind. These very general epistemological points are admittedly ambitious, and may even sound ludicrous to the “established” scientist. Worse, they may sound that way to the philosopher of science, who should be the professional critic of the whole enterprise of science, rather than the would-be scientist. Our aim is to propose a few ideas in this tricky field inviting our fellow critics to be both firm and fair. We restrict ourselves to social sciences and the humanities, without touching on the question whether or not they differ intrinsically from other sciences. This type of criticism is needed in a time when the political context is not appreciative of the one civilisational precious product of the West, namely the critical and self-critical attitude which has brought us the delicate fruits of the arts, sciences and philosophy.

Sensitive to the calls made by Anthony Kwame Appiah, Jean-Marc Ela, Paulin Hountondji, Joseph Ki-Zerbo, Ali Mazrui, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, and Okot p’Bitek for adapting education and research activities to the polyvalent African contexts, I will examine some dimensions of the as yet poorly understood relationships between Western sciences and endogenous, site-specific or local knowledge practices in Black Africa. By local knowledge, I mean any culture’s unique genius and creativity characterising what its members in their singular context and history meaningfully develop as knowledge, epistemology, metaphysics and worldview.

In modern culture a “disenchantment of the world”, i.e. a turn to the ordinary, prosaic and pragmatic has taken place. This development is mirrored in modern art and philosophy with its low, critical-sceptical style and its allergic attitude towards “higher things” and the ideal. The thesis of the article is that in this way important aspects of human experience (in the sphere of care, friendship and suchlike, of scenic beauty, and of morality, spirituality and vision) are marginalised or discredited. The article pleads for a resumption of a (suitably muted) form of high-style thinking in philosophy, art and society.

This article focuses on the relation between worldviews, sciences and us. Its point of departure is the significant mutual influence of the Western worldview and sciences. It shows how the intertwined construction of science and worldview has modelled our conceptual self-understanding, our being and our acting. The issue is considered from a philosophical-anthropological stance, with due attention being given to past delineations and future alternatives. It is argued that, within the framework of the Western worldview, self-realisation is considered essential for being a human self. There is a tacit, yet conscious, agreement that the way to attain self-realisation is through the gradual development of two potentials: the rational potential and the potential for self-expression. The authors recognise that both are indispensable in forming the human self, but point out that the nature of the development of these potentials can conceptually be misinterpreted, causing problems on the individual, societal and ecological levels. In order to prevent the development of the rational potential and the potential for self-expression from receiving undue emphasis, two more potentials are introduced on the conceptual level, to wit the ethical potential and the potential to be situated in and oriented towards a larger and meaningful whole. The assumption is that bringing these to the fore will also affect the very definition of self-realisation.

We compare different actual forms of democracy and analyse in which way they are variations of a “natural consensus decision process”. We analyse how a “pure consensus procedure” is open to boycott of a minority, and how a “consensus decision followed by majority voting” is open to “false play” by a majority. We introduce a “random consensus procedure” in order to come closer to a natural decision process, and investigate how for such decision procedure false play of a minority is plausible to happen. We introduce the combined notion of “quantum parliament” and “quantum decision procedure”, and prove it to be the only one, when applied after consensus decision, that is immune to false play. We define a new form of democracy applying a quantum consensus system for its decision procedures.

The scientific fields of quantum mechanics and signal-analysis originated within different settings, aimed at different goals and started from different scientific paradigms. Yet the development of the two subjects has become increasingly intertwined. We argue that these similarities are rooted in the fact that both fields of scientific inquiry had to deal with finding a single description for a phenomenon that yields complete information about itself only when we consider mutually incompatible accounts of that phenomenon.