1.1. Science and worldviews
1.1. Science and worldviews
The Western way of perceiving the world is strongly based on a scientific worldview. In Social sustainability, past and future, Sander van der Leeuw describes how the development of research and universities has led to the specialisation of disciplines and how this has probably contributed to many of today's sustainability problems.
In the Middle Ages, and long after, science was largely motivated by curiosity and scientists were mainly amateurs, not professionals. The rise of science from the 17th century onwards increased interaction between scientists, which led to a greater understanding of the phenomena being studied. Certain views gained general acceptance, while others were abandoned. In a sense, the focus was narrowed to certain questions and methods, and alternative approaches began to be seen as wrong and unscientific.
Disciplines emerged when scientists studying the same phenomenon reached a sufficient degree of consensus on the framing of questions and research methods. But as consensus within disciplines grew, understanding between disciplines diminished, as different disciplines studied different phenomena, asked different questions and used different methods.
When the focus within each discipline was firmly on the phenomena of that discipline, other potentially relevant phenomena became distracting "noise" to be excluded from the study. The following figure illustrates this process.
Figure. The concentration of science around certain ideas and methods. From left to right: (a) individual researchers focus on different topics and apply different methods; (b) in interaction with each other, they end up exploring certain questions and using certain methods (and rejecting others); (c) as a discipline matures, the questions it addresses and the methods it uses become increasingly specialised. Adapted from van der Leeuw.
Reductionist thinking, which seeks to deepen understanding by breaking down the phenomenon under study into smaller parts, has been especially important in natural sciences. Reductionism is characterised by an effort to isolate the studied phenomenon from other phenomena. Variation caused by other phenomena is interpreted as noise to be excluded from the study.
Specialised science, based on a reductionist philosophy of science, has produced major advances, particularly in the natural sciences and in applied fields such as information technology and molecular medicine. Despite these undeniable advances, it seems that our overall understanding of our world is decreasing rather than increasing.
Knowledge of individual phenomena or things does not allow us to gain holistic understanding, no matter how precise that knowledge is. The following short video illustrates how the true meaning of things only becomes apparent when their relationships are understood as part of a wider context.
The inability of societies and the scientific community to solve the problems related to climate change and loss of biodiversity has made it clear that even in-depth scientific knowledge does not provide solutions to complex environmental and societal problems.
A poor understanding of the relationships between different types of knowledge also makes it difficult to differentiate between relevant and irrelevant information. We may also completely lose sight of the meaning that arises from the different types of knowledge as a whole. Further, it is extremely difficult to perceive what sort of potentially relevant information we do not possess, and this makes it difficult to make sense of the world.
The divide between different types of knowledge is particularly deep between the natural sciences and the humanities. According to Sander van der Leeuw, this divide arose when concepts that originally were used to interpret broader phenomena began to delimit and define the phenomena to be interpreted (see figure below).
Figure. There is an intimate connection between the concepts people use, and the way they understand reality. Concepts change over time, and so does our understanding of the world and its phenomena.> Adopted from original figure by van der Leeuw.
Before the establishment of scientific disciplines, people and scientists were interested in a wide range of phenomena, of which the relationship between man and nature was undoubtedly one of the most central. Social concepts, such as traditions, values and beliefs, were closely linked to concepts relating to nature, since people's daily lives and livelihoods were closely linked to nature. Concepts were primarily tools used to interpret the wider relationship between man and nature.
As scientific disciplines matured, the concepts and methods of the humanities and social sciences developed in a direction that limited research strictly to social and cultural phenomena. Similarly, in the natural sciences, research was limited to natural phenomena only. In the field of humanities, concepts began to define reality mainly as cultural phenomena, and the concepts used by natural scientists defined reality mainly as physical-mechanistic natural phenomena. When scientists in the humanities and in the natural sciences do not have common concepts and a shared understanding of the nature of reality, communication becomes impossible. A wall is erected between the sciences, preventing any meaningful rational investigation of the relationship between man and nature.
The separation of humanistic and natural sciences has thus led to a situation where most of science is fundamentally incapable of studying and interpreting the relationship between man and nature. Paradoxically, it seems that the development of modern science is one essential reason for the inability of modern societies to live in harmony with nature.