Nature Institute
Nature Institute
URL = http://natureinstitute.org/
Works for qualitative and participatory science models.
- The Nature Institute on 'qualitative science'
"We develop ways of thinking and perception that integrate self-reflective and critical thought, imagination, and careful, detailed observation of the phenomena. The Nature Institute promotes a truly ecological understanding of the living world. We study the internal ecology of plants and animals, elucidating how structures and functions interrelate in forming the creature as a whole. Our interdisciplinary approach integrates anatomy, physiology, behavior, development, genetics, and evolution. We investigate the whole organism as part of the larger web of life. By creating life history stories of plants and animals, we open up a new understanding of our fellow creatures as dynamic and integrated beings.
Through this approach, the organism teaches us about itself, revealing its characteristics and its interconnectedness with the world that sustains it. This way of doing science enhances our sense of responsibility for nature. No one who has read, for example, Craig Holdrege's paper on the sloth, thereby coming to appreciate this animal as a unique, focused expression of its entire forest habitat, will be able to tolerate the thought of losing either the sloth or its habitat. As Goethe so beautifully expresses it, all of nature's individual aspects are interconnected and interdependent: We conceive of the individual animal as a small world, existing for its own sake, by its own means. Every creature is its own reason to be. All its parts have a direct effect on one another, a relationship to one another, thereby constantly renewing the circle of life; thus we are justified in considering every animal physiologically perfect." (http://natureinstitute.org/)
- The Nature Institute on the limitations of reductionism:
âWe can discover the coherence of our five reductionist propositions by recognizing in them the operation of a single gesture of the cognizing mind. The gesture itself is not pathological; rather, its singleness -- its operation in conjunction with a *suppression* of the necessary counterbalancing gesture -- is alone what renders it and its reductionist results pathological. Reductionism, at root, is not so much a body of concepts as it is a way of exercising (and not exercising) our cognitive faculties.
The cognitive gesture I'm alluding to here is the inner act of isolating something so as to grasp it more easily and precisely and gain power overit. We want to be able to say, "I have exactly this -- not that and not the other thing, but *this*". The ideal of truth at work here is a yes-or-no ideal. No ambiguity, no fuzziness, no uncertainty, no essential penetration of one thing by another, but rather precisely defined interactions between separate and precisely defined things. We wantthings we can isolate, immobilize, nail down and hold onto.
How do we avoid ambiguity and approach nailed-down, yes-or-no certainty? Part of the answer is: by drawing on one of our highest achievements, which is our ever finer power of distinguishing and cleaving. Whatever looks complex and of diverse nature must be analyzed into distinct, Simple parts with clearly spelled-out relations. Such analysis and clarification is the function of logic, a discipline we have carried to extraordinary levels of sophistication. Materialism, mechanism, and reductionism: their presuppositions and tendencies are all of a piece, because they are all expressions of a single cognitive gesture. The aim of this gesture is to lay hold of a simple, fixed, precise, unambiguous, manipulable reality divested of the inner life and qualities that might make uncomfortable demands on us. We anesthetize the world in order to possess and control it like a thing. But despite this singleness of purpose -- or, rather, because such a single-minded gesture becomes sterile without the life and movement of a counterbalancing gesture -- the presuppositions of the Reduction Complexbetray a striking incoherence. They offer us:
⢠Materialism without any recognizable material.
⢠Mechanism that must ignore actual machines, occupying itself instead with the determinate and immaterial clarity of machine algorithms.
⢠Reductionism that produces ever more precise formulations about an evermore impoverished reality.
⢠A one-sided method of analysis that never stops to tell us about anything in its own terms, but forever diverts our attention to something else.
⢠A refusal to reckon with qualities despite the fact that we have no shred of a world to talk about or understand except by grace of qualities.
⢠Cause wrenched apart from effect; all becoming -- that is, all active be-ing -- frozen into stasis.
⢠Bottom-up explanation that tries to explain a fuller reality by means of a less substantial reality, ignores the bi-directional flow of causation between all contexts, and naively takes the smallest parts of the world-mechanism as most fundamental for explaining it.
⢠Finally, a denial of mind as an irreducible and fundamental aspect of the universe -- this while scientists increasingly describe the world as driven by, and consisting essentially of, little more than collections of mental abstractions -- mathematical formulae, rules,information, and algorithms.
This entire body of dogma defines the reductionist ideology, not science itself. However, the dogma has tremendous power to distort the practice of science, a distortion evident on all sides. At the same time, there is reason to hope that in our day the dogma will finally collapse in upon its own absurdities. If this happens, it will not be because particular discoveries "disprove" the reductionist position, but rather because --much like during the earlier break with medieval thought -- more and more people simply find it impossible to look upon the world in the old way.â? (http://www.natureinstitute.org/txt/st/mqual/)