The Distinction Between the Natural and Social Sciences as Found in the Vision Logic of the Tree of Knowledge System

When the first depiction of what would become the Tree of Knowledge System “fell out of my soul” in a moment of inspiration in 1997, my mind exploded and for months it seemed like I was seeing something new in the diagram every day.

These days it is pretty rare for me to see something new in the vision logic* of the ToK System itself. The standard ToK depiction is now just part of the automatic way in which I see reality and our scientific knowledge of it.

Well, this morning I did see something new. The idea itself has long been familiar to me, but today I saw it afresh in the logic of the ToK diagram itself. Let me explain.

Recently, I have been involved in several conversations about the nature of science and scientific knowledge, both viewed from within the ToK System and in philosophy more generally (see here for an excellent review). Several of these have involved the relationship of the knower to the known in quantum mechanics and general relativity, and the measurement/observer entanglement issues. Other exchanges have been about the relationship between natural and social science.

When I am being technical, I characterize the ToK System as providing a framework for understanding the basic natural-into-human/social sciences. Basic refers to the difference between basic and applied sciences, wherein the goal of the former is to describe and explain complexity and change, whereas the goal of the latter is to make a difference in the world (i.e., effect change for the better). The difference is important, and I used it to characterize the primary difference between the science of psychology and the profession. Psychological scientists try to describe and explain mental behavior via research, whereas professional psychologists work to improve human well-being by carrying out assessments and interventions.

The primary point I want to share here is what I mean by the “natural-into-social” science reference. First, let me be clear that I consider the task of the “basic/pure/nonapplied social sciences” as being to describe and explain human behavior at the individual and group levels of analyses. From the ToK System vantage point, it consists of the following five disciplines: (1) human psychology (which, BTW, in this context, should be thought of as including linguistics and cognitive science, see here); (2) anthropology; (3) sociology; (4) economics; and (5) political science. Human psychology forms the “unit base” of the social sciences and bridges down into basic-comparative psychology. In this regard, we can think of its relationship to the social sciences as being akin to what neuroscience is to (basic) psychology. That is, just as neuroscience is properly conceived as the hybrid between biology and (basic) psychology, human psychology is a hybrid between basic psychology and the social sciences.

In terms of the organization of the social science disciplines, the basic alignment is as follows. First, human psychology is concerned with individual into small group behavior. Next comes anthropology, which is the general science of human behavior and is the primary social science discipline. Its concern is little “c” human culture, which refers to human activity and their social relations and products and changes over time, and its central focus is human cultural arrangements, differences, and evolution. Sociology comes next. I consider it the science of human behavior in civilizations. Although closely related to anthropology, it brings in more focus on the macro-level social organization and societal institutions. Then, there economics, which is the study of resources, market exchange, scarcity, and wealth production at the micro and macrolevels. Finally, there is political science, the science of governance and political structures in civilization. Of course, there are complicated relationships with history and philosophy here, but these two areas of inquiry do not attempt to play by the rules of the language game of modern science.

When I state that the ToK System provides a framework for the “basic natural-into-human/social sciences” what I am getting at here is that there is simultaneously a continuity from natural into human/social science, while at the same time there is also an important discontinuity. The nature the continuity is that (a) we can indeed apply the language game of science to human/social behavior, and (b) via the ToK we can follow the cosmic evolutionary line from hominids as primates into modern Culture-Person activity.

However, the nature of the discontinuity pertains to the fact that (a) the Culture-Person plane is of a different kind (but, we should quickly note that we see similar discontinuities with Life, and Mind) and(b) as framed by JUST and many other perspectives including common sense, humans have explicit self-concept recursion capacities, which makes things interesting (and gets people tangled up via the “free will versus determinism” confusions), and related to this (c) there is a feedback loop between scientific knowledge as a kind of justification system, what it describes and explains in terms of human behavior, its production and dissemination and how that feedbacks into humans and changes them and then feeds back again into scientists. This “c” point is what I am focused on here. It is a massive tangle and much has been written about it. It is arguably the center of the tangle regarding what I call the second half of the Enlightenment Gap (i.e., the complex relationship between science and society; the first half of the gap being the proper relations between matter and mind).

My primary reference point for (c) has been the sociologist Tony Giddens’ and his analysis of the “double hermeneutic”. Hermeneutic means interpretive system. From the vantage point of UTOK, we can change this to mean “justification system”. The point is that the natural sciences have, as their task, the development of a interpretive system of scientific justification that describes and explains natural phenomena. Physicists, chemists, and biologists debate and challenge each other about what is valid. The collective result gives rise to the paradigm, and the process is essentially what Giddens meant by a “single” hermeneutic.

However, the situation changes radically when we move to understanding human-social behaviors. One key reason for this is that the interpretations of scientists feedback into the human world because humans use the concepts and change their behavior. Here I show how the concept of ADHD interacts with society and how people think of their natures in complicated feedback loops. It is an example of the double-hermeneutic in action.

With this background, we can now turn to my “insight” this morning, which is that I have not previously seen that the above argument is directly present in the vision logic of the ToK diagram. That is, it shows the continuity of Culture into Science into Social Science and back again in a way that is different from how it depicts the relationship between the natural sciences, scientists, and their domains of inquiry. Here is what I mean.

Notice via the circles that there is a continuity between the object and scientist in the social sciences that is far greater than between the natural scientist and their objects of inquiry. To see this more clearly, I have replicated the diagram, but this time I have added the continuous blue lines in the diagram below to make the point. I have also added the “object” of inquiry to make a point about language. Notice that thinking about humans as “objects” activates something, such as the justificatory retort that humans are not mere things! Therein is the nature of the feedback and the tensions I about which I am referring.

The bottom line is that the vision logic of the ToK System carries with it the double hermeneutic. It offers us yet another clear illustration regarding why we need the ToK System to help us frame and resolve the “science versus society” relation that is second half of the Enlightenment Gap.

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• Note: The concept of “vision logic” comes from Wilber’s Integral Theory and refers to a kind of “post formal logic” thinking. I am making that connection loosely. The UTOK is a metamodern system that uses a new kind of representation that I used to call “pictographic” but found that term was already in use. I have found that vision logic is a nice way to describe the different kinds of UTOK representations.
• It is important to note here that findings from other sciences can, of course, influence the conception that humans have of themselves. Think here of Copernicus and Darwin. There is a difference in that the social sciences are directly attempting to describe and explain human behavior, which makes the relation and feedback more intimate and philosophically problematic from a “fact versus value” perspective.