The Liberation of Life: From the Cell to the Community Page: 84
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Models of the living
model in favour of an ecological one would be enormous. Nevertheless,
paradigm shifts do have their importance. Instead of looking for
mechanistic explanations of phenomena and viewing structural and
ecological explanations as provisional and unsatisfactory, scientists can
clarify the conceptuality and methodology appropriate to a world
which is far more complexly interconnected than mechanical models
have suggested. The direction of research will be affected by the types
of questions thereby suggested. Just as in physics Newtonian science is
not rejected but included in a broader context; so also in biology, what
has been learned under the influence of the Newtonian mechanistic
paradigm can be subsumed within what can be learned with the use of
an ecological paradigm.
From substance thinking to event thinking
Although a general recognition of the importance of structure and
interconnectedness is already pervading the sciences, and although the
summary of the present state of biology in Chapter I under three kinds
of ecology is unlikely to appear forced or shocking to scientists,
nevertheless, more is entailed in a shift of paradigms than this. The
continuing hold of the mechanistic model, despite its manifest diffi-
culties and limitations, indicates that it is closely connected with
widespread habits of thought and basic modes of perception. When
Immanuel Kant saw that David Hume had shown the lack of empirical
evidence for the mechanical view of causality, he postulated that it is
the necessary nature of the human mind itself to organise the world in
mechanical terms. At the time he wrote he understood himself to be
providing the needed grounding of science. In this century physics has
struggled to free itself from mechanistic categories, but with only
partial success. The difficulty of doing so gives some support to Kant's
contention, but the effort to do so indicates that Kant was wrong in
supposing that physics totally presupposes this mode of thinking.
The effort of physics to find more appropriate paradigms leads
naturally to raising philosophical questions about the nature of reality.
Unfortunately a philosophy that, since Kant, has grown unaccustomed
to discussing such questions is not well-equipped to assist scientists in
the framing of new models and paradigms. Nevertheless, science and
philosophy need to work together at this task.
The paradigms that have dominated Western thinking since Aristotle
have all thought of objective reality primarily in terms of substantial84
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Birch, Charles & Cobb, John B., Jr. The Liberation of Life: From the Cell to the Community, book, 1990; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc52174/m1/96/: accessed April 24, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Center For Environmental Philosophy.