The Structure Of Knowledge And The Limits Of Physical Science

In this blog I am aim to give a synoptic account of the structure of human knowledge and its implications for our contemporary scientistic worldview.

When we think of knowledge nowadays, the first thing we think of is science. And the preeminent science is Physics. Physics is the most important of the physical sciences – the first category of human knowledge. Physics studies the causal relations between physical objects. There are other physical sciences like geology that study the nature of physical objects.

The physical sciences came of age during the Scientific Revolution with figures like Copernicus, Galileo and Newton. They have made tremendous progress from the start and immensely improved human economic life via technology.

The second category of human knowledge are the biological sciences. While the physical sciences study inanimate objects, the biological sciences studying living creatures. The most important development in the biological sciences is the theory of evolution first espoused by Charles Darwin in The Origin of the Species (1859). According to evolutionary theory, living creatures are driven to survive and reproduce. They are teleological, that is they act to attain certain ends, in a way that physical objects are not.

The third category of human knowledge are the human sciences. The two fundamental human sciences are Physiology and Psychology. Physiology studies the physical mechanisms of the human body while psychology studies the workings of consciousness. Nowadays, many psychologists want to eliminate the study of consciousness, mental states like beliefs and emotions, believing that those phenomena can be reduced to states of the brain and are best understood by neuroscience. However, this is an ideological move and the lack of progress in neuroscience in explaining the workings of consciousness mitigates against doing so.

The fourth category of human knowledge are the social sciences like Economics, Sociology and Anthropology. Human beings are social creatures and these sciences study how human societies work.

The fifth category of human knowledge is History which studies the human past.

The sixth category of human knowledge is Philosophy. Philosophy consists of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political theory and aesthetics. Metaphysics studies the ultimate nature of reality: materialism vs idealism, the mind/body problem, free will and determinism, etc… Epistemology turns its eye toward the human mind and examines the nature of human and the process by which it is acquired. Ethics is concerned with what we should do. Up until now, all of the sciences I have mentioned aim to acquire facts about the the world. Ethics asks a different question. It is on the other side of fact/value dichotomy. As is political theory, which addresses itself to how society is best organized. Finally, aesthetics studies the nature of beauty.

The seventh category of human knowledge is Mathematics. I know very little about the Philosophy of Mathematics and so won’t get into it here.

Let’s turn now to the fundamental objection to this conception of human knowledge. It argues that all of human knowledge is ultimately reducible to the physical sciences. In the 18th century, the great physicist Marquis de Laplace argued that a super intelligent being, often called Laplace’s Demon, knowing all the physical facts about the universe at a particular moment and applying the laws of physics would know everything that is going to happen in the future for all of eternity. While many scientists still subscribe to this view, it is really an ideology and a lot of progress would have been lost had the other sciences and fields of human knowledge not been pursued.

It is also important to understand that the physical sciences are of a different character than the human sciences. Much of the physical world can be captured by mathematics because it is mostly deterministic. However, the human sciences cannot because human beings have free will, making choices in pursuit of ends. Updating Aristotle, it is wrong to think that the human sciences can achieve the level of precision of the physical sciences.

The fundamental problem with this conception of the structure of human knowledge is the relationship between the sciences. How can the physical world be deterministic and the human world have free will if the two interact and are composed of the same basic stuff? Materialism tries to skirt this problem by denying consciousness and free will and reducing everything to physical science. But denying the existence of consciousness and free will doesn’t make them go away. As Shakespeare said in Hamlet: There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your Philosophy.

The unsatisfying character of our current answers to this question suggest that we are in need of a metaphysical paradigm shift. That is, we must move beyond the perennial debate between materialism and idealism, matter and consciousness, mind and body. In his book Galileo’s Error: Foundations For A New Science of Consciousness, Philosopher Philip Goff shows why this is so and points the way forward. Until we make this paradigm shift, we will continue to be stuck in our materialist ideology and bumping up against the limitations of physical science to explain all that there is.