Fallacy of misplaced concreteness
The fallacy of misplaced concreteness is an expression for the incorrect placement of direct experience (concreteness) in abstractions. It was introduced in 1925 by the British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead in his book Science and the Modern World . Whitehead wanted to explain the functioning and inadequacies of the mechanistic materialism that arose in the 17th century . Through the fallacy of misplaced concreteness , the direct experience of an object is ontologically narrowed to a certain area and thus restricted in another way or impossible. One example is the conception of bodies in theoretical physics , whose existence is only recognized in terms of spatial and temporal position, while colors or sounds are not part of their properties. The geometric abstraction of a certain body as an object in a Cartesian coordinate system is privileged over itself and pretended to be the actual body. All properties of the body that deviate from abstraction are then explained as addition by the senses or the spirit, which leads to a “ bifurcation of nature ”. Whitehead drew the consequence from this to treat abstractions with caution: It could be quite practicable and sensible to start from a "simple position" with abstractions, but one must always be aware that they are abstract, not concrete Objects.
Initial problem
In Science and the Modern World , a summary of his Lowell Lectures , Alfred North Whitehead dealt with the emergence of science against the background of the philosophical upheavals that took place in Europe in the 17th century. The materialistic mechanism developed at that time is based on a passive matter: bodies do not act, they only react to external influences. This idea was mainly justified by the fact that the English physicist Isaac Newton had answered one of the great problems of the time - the movement of simple bodies - with his laws and precisely predicted the movement of these bodies solely through their mass and position as well as that of other bodies could. The peculiarity of the equation systems constructed by Newton, René Descartes , Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and other natural philosophers was that in them the simplified description of a condition coincided with the explanation of its causes. The representatives of the mechanism took this success as an opportunity to pursue an extremely idealistic conception of matter. This abstract matter has an exact mass and exactly one position in space and in time (referred to by Whitehead as the “ fallacy of simple location ”) and is defined by these three properties. Although it is primarily a matter of positioning in symmetrical coordinate systems, a paradox reveals itself in the comparison of time and space, according to Whitehead: If a homogeneous body occupies a certain space, a certain part of this space contains less mass than the entire space. If, on the other hand, the body exists for a certain period of time, which is broken down into parts, then these parts still contain as much mass as the entire period of time. It follows that time does not affect the body. Mechanicism consequently assumes that the world is composed of a sequence of different constellations of passive matter. These constellations determine the forces that work between them and are in turn determined by these forces.
This idea gave rise to several problems that preoccupied European philosophers, especially during the 18th and 19th centuries: If time has no influence on the body, then no conclusion can be drawn about another time (regardless of whether it is the past or future). Induction thus becomes impossible, but it also means that natural laws can no longer be derived from empirical observation . This problem was particularly highlighted by David Hume . In addition, mechanicism offered no place for properties such as color or sound as part of nature, since they have neither a fixed location nor a mass. The mechanistic philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries reacted by declaring these properties to be unreal: it was merely a causal (albeit unknown) chain of movements of bodies that created the illusion of color in the mind of the viewer or listener or evoke sound.
Whitehead's answer
For Whitehead this solution of the mechanicists was unacceptable because it led to the division of nature into two realms of existence with different degrees of reality, the so-called bifurcation of nature . He scoffed at them with the remark that according to the mechanistic view it was not nature - roses , nightingales or the sun - deserved the praise of the poets, but only the poets themselves, because of what they admired in nature - scent, song or Color - a product of their own mind. Unlike in his previous natural philosophical work The Concept of Nature (German The concept of nature ) was not him at this point, however, primarily a matter of overcoming the division of nature. Instead, he tried to explain how it became necessary for the mechanicists to answer the problem of colors and sounds in their own way. Whitehead accused them of a fallacy, as a result of which they confused abstractness with concreteness: because Newtonian abstractions of the 17th century were so successful and actually only got along with the three quantities of time, mass and space, the mechanicists assumed that they were spoke of concrete, not abstract objects. From this they would have drawn the right to identify their abstractions with the actual objects and to explain all their properties that do not fit into the scheme of their abstractions as imaginations that are not found in nature. Since they had not noticed their mistake, they had no other solution, so Whitehead.
Consequences of the misplaced concreteness
From the mechanicists' confusion between abstract and concrete objects, Whitehead draws the conclusion that abstractions are necessary for thinking, but that specific problems each need their own abstractions in order to make them tangible. The mechanistic model is appropriate for the branch of physics that deals with simple, homogeneous bodies, but not for biology , psychology or particle physics . The mechanistic fallacy of misplaced concreteness , to which the sciences were committed at the beginning of their emergence, prevents the respective disciplines from developing appropriate models for their work. All disciplines are caught in the requirement of the mechanism to reduce their objects of investigation to lifeless, inert bodies and their causal effects on one another.
Bruno Latour illustrates the effects of the fallacy on modern epistemology and ontology with an exaggerated example of a hike on Mont Aiguille : The principle of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness would be tantamount to the assumption that a hiking map of Mont Aiguille depicts the actual, geometric shape of the mountain whereas, according to this logic, impressions such as colors, weather or cold would only be added by the mind. The Mont Aiguille on the hiking map should therefore be more real than the one that Latour experiences as cold, gray or foggy on his hike. On the other hand, Latour argues that for this one not only has to hide the clearly different scales, the two-dimensional character of the map and the missing cartographic symbols in the landscape: The main argument against the higher level of reality of the mountain in the hiking map is that one should be aware of the Mountaineering can get frozen fingers, but not by simply unfolding a map. For Latour, confusing concrete objects with their abstract representations opens up a problem of speaking about the way the sciences work. The ontological limitation of reality to three-dimensional space and linear time also leaves no room for all those experiences and existences that cannot be grasped in geometric metaphor.
swell
literature
- Bruno Latour: An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. An Anthropology of the Moderns . Harvard University Press, Cambridge 2013, ISBN 978-0-674-72499-0 .
- Isabelle Stengers: Cosmopolitics I . In: Posthumanities . University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 2010, ISBN 978-0-8166-5686-8 .
- H. Edward Thompson: The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness: Its Importance for Critical and Creative Inquiry . In: Interchange . tape 28 , 1997, pp. 219-230 , doi : 10.1023 / A: 1007313324927 .
- Alfred North Whitehead: Science and the Modern World. Lowell Lectures, 1925 . Pelican Mentor Books , New York 1948 (first edition: 1925). ( online ; PDF; 3.8 MB); German: Science and the Modern World, translated by Hans Günter Holl , Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 1984/1988 (TB)