I said in my post about burden of proof (last post, 3 August), that many of the relations among specialties can be seen as a network of settled obligations. At the same, unsettled relations among lines of research can often be seen as disputes about what obligations one specialty has toward the concepts, theories, and methods of another.
Many of the obligations among specialties are quite clear and solid. For example, research in many areas presupposes much of modern physics conceptually, theoretically, and procedurally, via embedding in instruments. It's easy to think up a chain of these dependencies: chemistry is obligated to physics, molecular biology is obligated to chemistry, cell biology is obligated to molecular biology, development is obligated to cell biology, and so on, so that we eventually wind up noticing, e.g., that Da Vinci's Last Supper (1498) is obligated to the physics of sub-atomic particles.
The idea of such a neat hierarchy of subject-matters is very popular. But it is far too over-simplified to serve as a useful description of either the world or the ways we study it. The hierarchical picture is built up by picking and choosing from among many working connections. Obligations that contribute to the hierarchical picture are emphasized; those which make the hierarchy fuzzier are de-emphasized or ignored. But the other obligations don't go away just because we down-play them when we organize journals and laboratories. The pattern of connections which we recognize when we think about the hierarchy of disciplines is a very abstract and partial view of the world.
Nothing makes this clearer than considering some sort of concrete practical problem, and then attempting to map the sorts of knowledge we use to solve it onto the organization of basic research disciplines. Consider the example of an ordinary flush toilet. To understand one, we need to build several different little models, including one of the lever-chain-and-valve which controls outflow, another of the float-and-valve which controls inflow, another of the fluid dynamics which empty the bowl, and so on. We also need an integrating model which shows us how the sub-systems interact. If we're being thorough, we also need to build models of the toilet's failure modes: breakage of the metal parts due to rusting for example.
Notice that these models are compatible with one another, but don't imply one another. The mechanics of levers, valves, and so on doesn't help us understand fluid flow, or vice-versa. There's no hierarchical structure of obligations among these different classes of model. Moreover, the models of rust which we get from chemistry are dependent neither on mechanics nor fluid dynamics. In short, there's not a lot of hierarchy here.
This example makes it clear that a simple hierarchy of dependencies will not do as a way of describing either things in the world or the ways we study them. Any way we draw the dividing lines among research specialties emphasizes some of the relations among phenomena and de-emphasizes others. Of course, we can create interesting hierarchies by abstracting chains of obligations in various ways, much as the artist M. C. Escher created interesting pictures by manipulating perspective and symmetry. But you can't live in those buildings.
Viewing the relationship among specialties as one of obligations (including, especially, burdens of proof) brings us to a philosophical conclusion: the attempt to create a hierarchy of specialties (and hence, a unification of all knowledge) based on abstract relations among concepts is doomed to intellectual failure.
Does that mean the effort is pointless? Of course not. A hierarchy of specialties is a social organization, whatever its intellectual merits, and hierarchical organizations are useful devices for gathering and distributing resources. To the extent that the hierarchy of abstraction is reflected in the obligations among specialties, that hierarchy is shaping the distribution of grant money among the specialties, their attractiveness to the brightest students, their access to the councils of authority, and the respect they receive from other lines of work (e.g., medicine, journalism, law) and the general public.
So the way specialties relate to one another is always incomplete, and the consequences of that are always biasing. Which is simply a way of saying, that organizations have imperfect conceptualization, just as individual people have imperfect vision. Often, the defects of both are partially correctible, if we only have the knowledge, the technology, and the dexterity to do so.
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