I’m not talking about geopolitics, although that is increasingly multipolar as well, as you must already know, unless your head is lodged firmly in the sand or up your nether regions.
I mean instead that no single analytical perspective unlocks all the treasure chests of knowledge.
Different perspectives, and the methods they employ, are suited to different purposes.
The Scientific Method
angles and measurements
The most obvious perspective fitted out with its own, defining method is the scientific perspective and its scientific method.
This has established itself beyond all doubt — which is not to say that the world isn’t crawling with people diving into the worldwide communal soup bowl (into which con men, cultists, social influencers, ideologues and demagogues are constantly pissing).
Anyone who doesn’t want to face facts, whether of science or of credible news reporting, has record-breaking spreads of viral gossip and nonsense laid out for their effortless consumption.
It’s a feast for burnt tongues and a sight for sore eyes!
Nonetheless, those who build their futures on firm foundations know they can’t credibly interpret data, make claims or offer explanations unable to withstand the evidence of measured and controlled experiment and observation.
Not if you have self-respect, in the deepest sense.
For the scientific method imposes standards on what one can claim with the badge of science.
But to impose standards is to place requirements and limitations.
And this is done prior to weighing any particular evidence. In other words, this is a precondition required for the practice of the method to live up to its own standards.
Such preconditions suit the method and its perspective to some matters, while unsuiting it for others.
The scientific method essentially forces all practicing scientists into a universal consensus perspective that accumulates over time a body of knowledge based on proven and repeatable results of experiments, carefully measured, and reduplicated by all who attempt reduplication while following the standards.
The universal consensus is achieved because it is built into the method as its prerequisite conditions and approved procedures.
Of course, there are disputes and divergences at the stage of hypothesizing, but the scientific method is designed to force decisive showdowns between rival hypotheses, namely, experiments for which the rival hypotheses predict conflicting measurable outcomes.
The scientific perspective is that of cause and effect. For outcomes can be predicted with certainty only where one independent variable determines a precisely measurable effect (that effect being a dependent variable wholly dependent on the variable being tested for its causal connection to the effect) when that independent variable is isolated from the other conditions (which are held constant) in the effect’s matrix of causal conditions.
Thus the scientific perspective, the perspective of cause and effect, depends upon the ability to vary one single variable — deterministic, when so isolated — from among the complete set of variables, establishing a one-to-one correspondence between the two variables by directly varying the independent variable and observing the effect of that on the dependent variable.
Here, determinism is less a claim about the world in general than an engineered condition required if the scientific method is to work properly.
Put differently, this engineered relationship of independent and dependent variables critical to the workings of the scientific method of experimentation would necessarily be correct (if the method were to be reliable), whether or not the world outside the experiment ran solely in accordance with the causal perspective.
The world, of course, run according to that perspective in at least some domains, if the scientific method were to be at all applicable. So, we can rest assured of that.
But the assumption that it is the only perspective applicable to the world is an assumption external to the scientific method itself and not necessary for that method to produce valuable results, result that are definitive in areas where the object character of event is sufficient to understand it.
The Historical Method
One obviously opposed perspective is that of the historical method, the basis of history, credible journalism and juridical verdicts, all of which require the continuous cross-referencing of the often conflicting accounts of different witnesses.
But in all of these applications, the trail of evidence is seldom alone enough to determine all we need to know to render a judgment. We must also construct interpretive narratives, making conjectures about motives, means and opportunities. Any competent investigator constructs a plausible hypothesis– a provisional or working theory — as a way to direct their search for further evidence.
Whodunnit? and Why?and How?
The Work of the Working Hypothesis
Come to think of it, working theories (working hypotheses) are crucial in the scientific method, where they are also the organizing principle used to gather evidence. For every experiment is designed to put to the test a suspected cause, which becomes the independent variable that the design of the experiment is engineered to isolate from the other variables that might add static to the measured effect attributable to the independent variable.
In science, negative results are almost as valuable as positive ones, for they eliminate rival causes, narrowing down the suspect pool. Indeed, most positive results ae preceded by a long process of eliminating alternative hypotheses, and this is especially the case where the true hypothesis is counterintuitive or (which may be much the same thing) runs counter to a dominant paradigm of the discipline.
However, the great advantage of the scientific over the historical method is that the scientific method can always hope for a decisive experiment that ends a rivalry of hypotheses for good.
For the historical method, certainty is a mirage as often as not, and its certainty is mostly certainty ‘for all practical purposes’.
So, history must live with perpetual uncertainty, and with the perpetual threat of new evidence, revisionist theories or changing social norms, any of which can overturn old judgments.
And all this uncertainty leaves much more room for advocacy which, like power, abhors a vacuum. And advocacy, if one needs reminding, is cherry-picking the facts — when not distorting them outright — to better suit one’s preconceptions.
While this creates a bias in favor of one’s pet theory, especially if it leads to further evidence, it should remain one hypothesis among many being entertained, until its rival hypotheses are excluded beyond reasonable doubt, a criterion as indispensable as it is inexact.
But, to turn Hume on his head, one cannot derive an Is from an Ought.
so, putting historical facts to use always requires a series of judgments, which can always be challenged or overturned.
But, for just this reason, it’s not enough to dispute facts without providing a viable alternative theory — and conspiracy theories with unsourced or dubious support, the classic recourse of know-nothings, don’t count.
The Historical Method & Witness Perspectives
Thus, the historical method is beset by ineradicable inexactness and uncertainties, in any case that is not a forensic slam-dunk.
This first uncertainty follows form the required method of investigation. A second uncertainty follows from the nature and character of what is being investigated.
The historical method is by nature and definition multipolar because its task is to reconcile the differing perspectives involved in a dispute.
Further (excepting any metaphysically infallible witness), the witness accounts are all, in principle, both limited in perspective and subject to bias.
Thus, the historical method cannot begin, as does the scientific method, from the presumption of possible completion in a single perspective enjoying a universal consensus among all qualified observers.
Put in positive form, the historical method involves reconciling irreducibly multiple perspectives by continuously cross-referencing them against one another and against forensic evidence, that is, evidence provided by the scientific method, in the limited, but often decisive, areas where it can be applied.
Joining the scientific and historical perspectives, one can build an assessment of the actions comprising human events, past and current, that is less certain than a purely scientific analysis, though more useful for analyzing human events than laboratory science.
The Causal Perspective
One can produce, by combining historical methods with scientific methods, a purely causal account of human events. One does this by viewing human actions as instrumental and technical, and choice as simply a matter of choosing the most effective means to ends given by the natures and situations of the historical agents.
But such a purely causal account is devoid of moral judgments as to the worth or goodness of actions and motives, for it only assesses their instrumental effectiveness as means to ends.
A vivid illustration of what this would look like is Machiavelli’s Prince, and the perspective known as realism in the field of international relations, though the perspective is applicable to all human events.
The Moral Perspective
If you balk at accepting the realist causal explanation as the final word on a human act, hesitating to leap onto the winner’s bandwagon in full acceptance of the winning tactics, you have discovered a third perspective, the moral perspective.
You may still accept the realist explanation as the causal explanation of events, yet insist that another judgment from another perspective is still called for.
Whether it is the 10 Commandments, the Golden Rule, or some other moral standard, your hesitation in joining the victors’ celebration of their deed marks you out as a human agent with a moral conscience, a moral agent.
The moral perspective is not bottom-up and data-driven like either the scientific or historical perspectives.
It is a top-down perspective, a trait caught well in terms like commandments, rules, laws, scruples, virtue, character or Kant’s categorical imperative.
The moral perspective looks to the evidence — since all human acts have precedents, customs, habits, enabling conditions, provocations or invitations, that is, they all arise with an ongoing context of personality formation and social interactions — but that is only its secondary determinant.
The primary determinant of the moral perspective is the unifying system of laws and customs or character of virtues and habits that define the acting agent, the moral subject.
Causal explanations view agents as objects caught inescapably in causal chains and causal matrices. And this we all are. but not only this.
We are all also subjects imprinting our personal character and our social culture — our individual and our communal choices — upon an environment that is, if not simply indifferent to them (i.e., existentialism, stoicism, fatalism, nihilism), then at least resistant to them, if for no other reason than because we are not the sole agents trying to impose our own character and culture upon the world.
And that’s what the moral perspective is all about: whose character and which culture should be imprinted the world, on how much of it, and through what means?
And should the world allow multiple perspectives, multiple cultures and multiple kinds of personality?
And this is what the war in Ukraine is about, and the war in Gaza, and the threat of war in Taiwan, and the culture wars raging across that part of the world free enough to permit open dissent, not to mention our daily struggle to do right by others, and be done right by them, as we all struggle to make our way in the realist’s world of researchable facts and accessible but limited resources and the current and future distribution of property and status, of skills, capabilities and powers.
The context of mathematics is one of abstract definitions generated by iterating operations (numbers and arithmetic), which make measurement possible, and by dividing space into abstract figures and measurable units of extension (length, distance, volume, proportion) and by dividing time into measurable units of extension (duration, sequence, simultaneity, periodicity and proportion).
Music draws on the mathematical context but adds sound (timbre, intensity, pitch) which combined with sequence and periodicity produces melody, harmonic chords, and rhythm, while adding the very non-mathematical aspects of taste, culture, and emotional resonance.
Physics adds matter (that which occupies space) and energy (that which gives motion to matter) to its ultimate context of space and time, making its ultimate context mathematics. This is what gives it its certainty.
Chemistry is about how matter combines into structures. It is mathematical to the extent that matter and energy define or limit its possible configurations.
For example, electrons orbiting an atomic nucleus repel one another, so they can only tolerate one another in orbital shells accommodating fixed maximums of electrons. This yields different kinds of atoms with different properties — the elements, along with their kin, isotopes and ions.
Why is life carbon-based? Because carbon ( atomic number 6) has slots in its outermost shell for 4 electrons, sufficient to allow for the variety of bonds needed to build complex polymer chains (like DNA and proteins) critical to organic chemistry and life.
Elements have differing measurable qualities and differing capacities for combining with other elements, yielding differing combinatorial possibilities — molecules.
Biology is about complex molecules (organic chemistry) which have the additional characteristic of exhibiting functionality when certain rare combinatorial structures emerge from random aggregations resulting from lower-level chemical and physical properties without regard to the resultant accidental functionality.
Because such biological products are in the above sense accidental, their origin and continuance can only be assessed in the context of their entire localized (and, thus, peculiar and non-universal) history, that is, their local evolution within their local environment.
Thus, the unique lineages that define biological species are the first instance in which locality trumps universality — the accidental sequence yielding the configuration tells us more about the species than any universally applicable laws can.
Biological lineages are the first context in which individuals matter, and they matter initially only insofar as they carry mutations that weaken or strengthen the lineage.
If a mutation works, it survives, breeding variant mutations, which, in turn, survive if they work.
Every day is a twisting road…
The Individual Self in the Social Context
The next stage in the development of individuality must wait for the characteristically accidental biological evolution of consciousness sufficient to support behavior localized not simply by the internal (genetic) and external (habitat) physical environments but also by the internalized behavioral environments of societies and selves.
In other words, only once behavioral characteristics can be carried by something other than physical genes can a truly social environment arise, and only within a truly social environment can a self arise.
The term memes is used to refer to this non-gene carrier of behavioral attributes, passed by imitation and communication, social rather than strictly physical events.
Conscious memory makes learning from experience possible, and learned behavior can be passed on by bottom-up mimicking, by top-down training, and ultimately by linguistic instruction. But all of these require, at a minimum, the society of the family unit with parental care.
And parental care is a noteworthy feature of birds and mammals, the two most intelligent classes of animals, with the most complex brains and behavioral patterns.
Culture likely came first, for culture is typical behavior copied throughout a social group, transmitted by parents and often enforced by the social group or by similar responses of the group’s members to individual behavior.
Selves likely emerged when individuals experienced themselves as split between an outward face presented to the group and an inward reserve aware of its own distinct interests, even when they diverged from those of the group.
Psychology and the social sciences are about the relations of selves and societies.
Because of their localized historical (thus, accidental) evolution, both genetic and cultural lineages are not determined by universal laws but by localized genealogies.
So, genealogies cannot be understood universally but only historically. Historical sequences routinely have gaps, which detract from certainty, and, even when intact, require interpretive hypotheses about why the history developed as it did and how its components — both inert objects and agent subjects — reacted to one another as they did.
Selves and societies interact with other selves and other societies in many ways ranging from friendly to hostile, from affection and kinship to trade and transfer (economic exchange and cultural imitation) to force and fraud (whether criminal or geopolitical).
Cultural complications
Certainty & Context
Mathematics attains certainty because its ultimate context is one of definitions imposed upon the uniform extensions of space and time.
Logic attains certainty because its ultimate context is that of the identity, mutual exclusion or partial overlap of abstract definitions. (A logical map of concepts would look like a massive and intricate fabric of Venn diagrams. )
Physics attains certainty because its ultimate context is mathematics. To the extent that any non-mathematical properties of matter or energy (including their convertibility, origin, or variants like “anti-” or “dark” matter) are not derived from the context of mathematics, they must remain hypotheses and guesswork.
Inorganic chemistry attains certainty only where it draws on the context of mathematics. For example, filled outer electron shells of noble gases make bonding and forming compounds difficult. The math might not be enough to predict all the chemical properties of a new compound, but if those properties are consistent, statistical analysis will reveal such consistent properties after repeated observations, assuming that underlying conditions remain constant.
Organic chemistry will always remain incompletely certain, as so much depends on functionality within accidentally organized systems of functions. For example, food for one species may be toxic or indigestible for another. Yet how proteins fold can apparently be partially predicted by deep AI.
Biological species will always be uncertain and non-universal because: 1) species and their environments are continuously evolving, 2) the form a lineage takes is an accidental historical emergence of functionalities adequate for survival in its changing local habitat, and 3) individuals themselves are accidental products of random mutation, while their survivability is determined by their altered functionality within their local habitat.
Cultures and human nature and character types (the social sciences equivalent of species and socio-cultural categories, e.g., extroverted Russian ballerina) will be yet more uncertain and non-universal than species because: 1) cultures change faster than physical habitats, 2) the more complex the culture, the greater the division of labor and of distinctions, 3) information, memes, and cultural attitudes change and spread faster than genes, and 4) reasoned foresight and rationalized social organizations and technology accelerate purposeful change with top-down guidance (for human agents deliberately target and accelerate intended transformations more purposefully than random physical events (whose outcomes are aimless, accidental to any end), while agents’ conflicting purposes can trigger unintended consequences, whether beneficial (Adam Smith’s invisible hand) or devastating (war), whether immediately (peace treaties, nuclear holocaust) or cumulatively so (scientific progress or climate change).
The sciences of life (including the social sciences) may be uncertain, but for all that, they are the sciences of us. And since value is in the eye of the beholder, what knowledge we can glean from them is of most value to us.
And be warned that technical knowledge and know-how devoid of self-knowledge is as dangerous as a loose cannon on deck.
Life, in short, is where the action is, in all its unpredictable splendor and potential desolation. Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets!
When All Is Said and Dunn 