The mechanistic worldview

This section will start by introducing one of the first modern thinkers. We shall see that the ideas were quite different from Aristotle’s philosophy and science. Francis Bacon has been chosen as a representative for the mechanistic view because he is regarded as the father of modern science.

2.3.1 Francis Bacon

In “Advancement of Learning” (Bacon, 1952) Bacon describes his empiricist natural philosophy. The book was published in 1605 and was in opposition to the Aristotelian theoretical natural philosophy. Bacon rejects both the Aristotelian logic and the Aristotelian conception of science as knowledge of necessary causes. His empiricist natural philosophy has roots back to the pre-Socratic atomists and especially Democritus, the leading figure in atomism.

Figure 2.5 Sir Francis Bacon8

The natural philosophy is based on the theory that we have to free our mind from the idols before we can gain knowledge. In Novum Organum (Bacon, 1952) Bacon identifies four forms of idols and states that the use of induction to form notions and axioms is an appropriate way to banish idols. The four categories of idols are

1. Idols of the tribe. These idols are false conceptions due to human nature. The human understanding is an uneven mirror that merges its own nature with the nature of things, which results in distortions.

2. Idols of the cave. These idols are conceptions or doctrines hold by the individual without having any evidence of their truth. These idols can result from education, upbringing or admiration of others.

3. Idols of the marketplace. These idols are illusions that seem to rise from agreements and from human communication. They enter man’s mind through words, and an unskilful choice of words obstructs the understanding.

4. Idols of the theatre. These illusions stems from different philosophies. The philosophies create fictional worlds. The same is true for axioms of sciences that have grown strong from tradition, belief and inertia.

In his system of sciences Bacon replaces the scholastic deduction with induction, and observation with experiments. In Novum Organum (Bacon, 1952) he uses the ant and the spider to illustrate the scientists before him that had either been empiricists or dogmatists. The bee is used to describe a new alliance of the experimental and rational: (p. 126):

”Those who have treated of the sciences have been either empirics or dogmatical. The former like ants only heap up and use their store, the latter like spiders spin out their own webs. The bee, a mean between both, extracts matter from the flowers of the garden and the field, but works and fashions it by its own efforts. The true labor of philosophy resembles hers, for it neither relies entirely or principally on the powers of the mind, nor yet lays up in the memory the matter afforded by the experiments of natural history and mechanics in its raw state, but changes and works it in the

understanding. We have good reason, therefore, to derive hope from a closer and purer alliance of these faculties (the experimental and rational) than has yet been attempted.”

2.3.2 Mechanism in the 20th century

In 1942 (Hayes, Hayes, & Reese, 1988) Pepper identified four world hypotheses: mechanism, formism, organicism, and contextualism. Within each hypothesis other world views can be interpreted, but not directly compete. Later on Kuhn should express similar views as paradigms. In “World Hypotheses” Pepper (Pepper, 1942) describes mechanism to have two poles; the lever and electromagnetic field as a material model. In both cases the root

metaphor is a machine. He states that mechanism has three primary (effective) categories and three secondary (ineffective) categories that correspond to the description of a machine. The primary (effective) categories a machine has is 1) a specified location, 2) all parts of the machine are expressed in quantitative terms, 3) the effective relationship or law among the parts in the machine, which can be described in the form of a functional equation. This equation describes an efficient law of action inherent in the structure of the machine. The secondary categories are qualities observed in parts of the machine, but not directly relevant to its action (e.g. colours, texture and smell). The location defines existence of mechanism and determines reality.

“Things are real only if they have a time and place. Only particulars exist. This principle must never be abandoned, for the penalty is the dissolution of mechanism. If this implication is realized, one sees at once that in a mechanistic nature there can be no alternatives and that for mechanism statistical laws are not laws of nature in any ultimate sense, but only human constructions symbolizing to some approximation the

actual relations of nature. The mechanists’ instinctive belief in the complete determinateness and determination of nature is hereby justified.”

(Pepper, 1942, p. 211, authors italics)

Koestler (Koestler, 1967) states that before Behaviourism (which started with the American psychologist Watson’s article “Psychology as the behaviourist views it” (Watson, 1913)) it was the psychologists and logicians view that mental events have special characteristics and that these characteristics distinguished them from material events. However, the

physiologists materialist view was that “all mental events can be reduced to the operation of the ‘automatic telephone exchange’ in the brain.” (Koestler, 1967, p.202). Professor Gilbert Ryle, an Oxford Philosopher, called the mental events ‘ghost in the machine’ (Ryle, 1949). However, if we overlook this ghost, which is responsible for the actions of the body, we take the risk of turning the ghost into a malevolent one (Koestler, 1967). Among Koestler’s four pillars of unvisdom we find that all organisms are essentially automata controlled by the environment and that the only scientific method worth that name is quantitative measurement.

Fritjof Capra (Capra, 1983) also discuss different paradigms, and has the following comments to the reductionist approach:

“Although Descartes’ simple mechanistic biology could not be carried very far and had to be modified considerably during the subsequent three hundred years, the belief that all aspects of living organisms can be understood by reducing them into their smallest constituents, and by studying the mechanisms through which these interact, lies at the very basis of most contemporary biological thinking. [....] Although the reductionist approach has been extremely successful in biology, culminating in the understanding of the chemical nature of genes, the basic units of heredity, and in the unravelling of the genetic code, it nevertheless has its severe limitations.” (p. 94).

The Newtonian Physics (Capra, 1983) had to make way for the new physics in the beginning of the 20th century when Albert Einstein initiated two revolutionary trends in scientific thought – theory of relativity and the beginnings to quantum theory. The new physics are related to general systems theory which, according to Capra, is based on wholes with structures arising from interactions and interdependence of their parts. Capra further (Capra, 1996) explains that Bertalanffy insisted on using biology, not physics as the basis of General Systems Theory and emphasised the crucial difference between physical and biological systems. The next section will deal with the systems worldview in more detail.