The Science of Change—Part III

Introduction

In this week’s post, the third part of our four-part, whirlwind introduction to metamorphology, the science of change, we continue our previous discussion in Part I and Part II to focus on the way in which the Official view of nature—the myth of a unitary, systemic, law-governed, deterministic universe of matter and energy on the move—simply blinds us to the overwhelming majority of natural phenomena in the universe, which metamorphology opens up to rigorous scientific inquiry and explanation.

It turns out that the apparent diversity of phenomena in the world, the ordinary, everyday world you inhabit day to day, is not merely apparent but is real and irreducible. 

And it turns out too that the delusory prejudice (going back at least as far as Plato) that there is ultimately a single preferred form of scientific explanation has long been, and remains, a major hindrance to scientific progress.  And that’s great news for the future progress and potentialities of science, and it’s great news for anyone trying to understand the world around them.

—The Editors

---

The Science of Change—Part III

The Official View

According to the Official view, which has held sway for nearly four centuries, the universe consists entirely of matter and energy on the move, and comprises a vast, hugely complex and richly interconnected causal system of events, governed by a relatively small number of universal causal laws, some yet to be discovered.  

This Official universe is hierarchically arrayed in a sequence of interlocking stratified layers (or nested shells), with the phenomena of subatomic physics at the lowest level (or at the core), and with layers of ‘higher-level’ phenomena successively arrayed upwards from this base (or outwards from this core).

The laws, known and unknown, governing the behavior of the various classes of interacting elements together determine the course of everything that transpires in the universe.  On the Official view, if there is any room at all for slippage between these universal laws and individual goings-on, it can only be the result of a kind of leakage—some residual indeterminism in the universe due either to quantum uncertainty or to the predictive difficulties of non-linear equations.¹
.

The End of the Official Universe

There was once, and for many there still is, a heady and enticing rationalist dream of nature as such a universal, richly interconnected system unfolding from a relative handful of fundamental laws.  

I have come to believe, however, through decades of dedicated philosophical and scientific work on the question, that this dream is just that:  a dream—pure fantasy, ungrounded in fact, and without a single, compelling philosophical argument to support it.  In place of this mythical conception of nature, metamorphology posits an uncompromisingly empiricist alternative.

In metamorphology, we replace the Official triad of notions of object-and-forces, cause-and-effect, and conformity to universal laws or regularities, with an alternative triad of notions:  flux-and-constraint, purpose-and-design, and adjustment to locally prevailing conditions.  

What is more, we replace the Official picture of the universe as consisting of a hierarchically ordered system of interacting, homogeneous classes of events, with an alternative picture of an anarchic universe, consisting of a myriad of idiosyncratic, autonomous phenomena, unfolding and responding spontaneously to the vagaries of local circumstances which are always unique and unrepeatable.

The success of Official, rationalist science at uncovering general laws with wide applicability shows not that all phenomena in the universe are to be completely described by such regularities. 

Rather, it only shows that the severely limited rationalist methodology, however redoubtably successful it has been within its own terms of reference, is suited only to discovering such universal regularities and is oblivious to the vast majority of distinct phenomena that occur in the universe and which equally merit rigorous empirical, scientific study. 
.

The Reality of Diversity

In metamorphology, the rich diversity of phenomena, everywhere apparent, is seen as real and of fundamental explanatory importance.  I mean this in two ways.

First, it is no use pretending that we can ever arrive at universal laws governing all phenomena everywhere, laws which, taken in aggregate, explain everything whatsoever. 

The diversity of phenomena, even the diversity of phenomena which you are now in a position to observe from wherever you may be sitting or standing or reclining as you read this, is not merely something to be explained away, but part of the essential mechanics of the universe.  

There are, to be sure, regularities to be found governing whole classes of phenomena.  Indeed, it would be surprising if all the pieces of my porcelain dinner service did not display quite a number of common invariances between them.

Similarly, it would be surprising if one could not make remarks about the mechanics of the Krebs Cycle as it occurred in the mitochondria of cells in Richmond, Surrey, in the United Kingdom, which did not differ from the mechanics of the Krebs Cycle as it occurred in the mitochondria of cells in Richmond, Virginia in the United States, or in Kuala Lumpur or Saskatchewan for that matter.  

Yet the narrow but breathtakingly fertile investigatory paradigm of Official science comprises only a tiny subset, roughly a twelfth or less, of the set of generic empirical scientific methodologies scoped out in detail by Francis Bacon in his Novum Organum of 1620, which set out the theoretical and methodological foundations on which all modern science rests.  

This one-twelfth, this artificially circumscribed, narrow Official set of methods, was suited only to the discovery of such universal regularities and, alas, whatever happened to be unique and idiosyncratic in the world was simply filtered out of account, impoverishing scientific investigation in consequence.

Likewise, as Eddington has pointed out,² it was hardly surprising if Official physics has revealed to us increasingly a world consisting entirely of classes of inert, atomistic entities “bound to one another by mathematical equations forming a deterministic scheme.”

For in physics, traditionally, mathematics has been the model of exact inference, and wherever the mathematical chain could not be completed the physicist was forced to admit that knowledge of the kind he makes his stock-in-trade was not yet for the having.³  

I have critiqued the pretensions of Official physics elsewhere, but the important point here is that once we find ourselves forced, as scientists, to take seriously the description of assemblies singled out by biological—let alone human—agents with a point of view (a set of descriptive aspects being heeded by the agent), then the diversity of phenomena can be seen to be real and efficacious, and now must enter fundamentally into our scientific explanations—that is, into the explanantia as well as into the explananda.
.

The Necessary Diversity of Explanatory Forms

To summarise our line of argument on this point, which I have been able to do little more than allude to in these first three parts of our four-part, brief introduction:  If we cannot do without the concept of change, then we cannot do without intervention, without purpose and description and point of view, in our scientific explanations of states-of-affairs.  And the purposes of agents, especially given the infinitely re-describable nature of reality, are as diverse as you please.  Diversity will not go away.

This, then, is my first point about the reality of diversity and its fundamental explanatory importance.  

Second, however, there is a more critical point still, namely, that we must not expect that all explanations will be of the same form, as Aristotle, Ryle, Toulmin, Gosling and others have also been at pains to point out,⁴ and as Gosling in particular argues eloquently in his defence of the necessity of a wide diversity of forms of scientific explanation as well as of the kinds of matters to be explained.⁵ 

Explanations of “why this rather than that?”—the level of rigor we demand in any metamorphological account, in which we show that no other state-of-affairs was possible at that point in time—will themselves be of the most diverse forms.  

Explanations of the behavior of a violinist performing in an orchestral concert, or of a gardener pruning the roses in a particular manner, or of a philologist performing certain analytical operations on a text, if the explanations of their behavior are to be genuinely objective and scientific, will need to rely principally not on the knowledge of the behavioral scientist but on the knowledge of the musicologist, the horticulturalist, and the philologist respectively.  

There is no one form of knowledge which holds the copyright on irreducible scientific truth.⁶  The form of an ultimately acceptable explanation will depend on what the questioner is seeking specifically to know.

But what is particularly exciting in all this for the natural scientist, is that whereas the Official methods gave us access only to regularities as a subject for scientific investigation, the metamorphological approach opens up the rich diversity of the unique, the unrepeatable, the idiosyncratic to rigorous scientific investigation and understanding.  

If the mechanics of the universe are infinitely diverse and richly intertwined with description-from-a-point-of-view, then there is a vast, rich field in which empirical science can make its contribution to the world by revealing and elucidating those mechanisms.  My own empirical work in metamorphology has largely focussed on the exploration of the idiosyncratic but rigorously demonstrable, ineluctable mechanics of one-off situations, whether in nature or in the world of affairs.⁷
.

The Broadening of Physics

The laws of physics are at a very high level of abstraction and apply equally to phenomena that are widely dispersed in space and time.  However, the laws of physics tell us very little about what goes on in the universe, and for all but a relatively small number of very simple phenomena they explain—and, even ultimately, can explain—very little indeed.  

This is not to imply the least discredit to physics (where indeed would we be without it and its dazzling record of achievements?), any more than it is a discredit to the aeronautics industry that their products are quite useless for getting about town.  Universal laws, such as those discovered by physicists, are handy and, when aptly abstracted and accurately delineated, quite effective for getting us to the sorts of theoretical and practical destinations to which such laws are useful for taking us. 

But there are other sorts of places, more local destinations, where we shall need to go, and there we must rely on more local forms of—equally scientific—transport, equally rigorous.

This dissident, metamorphological view of the universe gives more scope to empirical science than the rationalist, ‘systemic’ universe ever allowed.  It permits us rigorously to investigate empirically an infinitely greater range of phenomena in the universe.  

What is more, where the ‘same’ phenomenon can be predicted or retrodicted on both types of explanatory account (that is, from within an Official, materialist, causal framework or from within a metamorphological framework of flux-and-constraint), the phenomenon can virtually always be predicted or retrodicted with far greater rigor, precision, and specificity within our dissident, ‘negative’ epistemology in metamorphology, as our work has amply shown both in theory and in practice, and as we have discussed throughout the pages of Change over the previous 67 posts.⁸  
.

Looking Ahead

In our next post here in Change, which will be the final installment of this telegraphically brief, four-part introduction to the science of metamorphology, we turn to the reality of everyday life, the nature of mind and its role in the mechanics of the universe, and the way in which metamorphology provides the scientific foundations for the very practical business of swiftly creating sweeping, major transformations overnight in the world of affairs with absolute precision, by means of tiny, typically inconspicuous, rigorously pinpointed communications.  We look forward to seeing you there!

© Copyright 1995, 2023 Dr James Wilk
The moral right of the author has been asserted

---

1. see “The Metaphysics of the Physical World,” a two-part article published here in Change

2. A. S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1928

3. ibid.

4. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, London:  Hutchinson’s University Library, 1949; Gilbert Ryle, Dilemmas, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press G. 1954; Stephen Toulmin, The Uses of Argument, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press,1958; Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy, London:  Routledge & Kegan Paul 1958; J. L. Austin, Philosophical Papers, Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1961; J. C. B. Gosling, Plato (in the Arguments of the Philosophers series), London:  Routledge & Kegan Paul,1973 

5. J. C. B. Gosling, Plato (in the Arguments of the Philosophers series), London:  Routledge & Kegan Paul,1973, Chapter XVII, “Preferred Explanations”

6. Cf. Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy, London:  Routledge & Kegan Paul 1958

7. James Wilk, Principia Metamorphologica:  Novum Organum; London: Brunel University (PhD dissertation), 1995

8. argued in much greater detail and at greater depth in James Wilk, Principia Metamorphologica:  Novum Organum; London: Brunel University (PhD dissertation), 1995