AGAINST AND FOR HOLISM: A REVIEW AND REJOINDER TO D. C. PHILLIPS - Stanley Bailis

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출처; Holistic Thought in Social Science (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press), 1976, 149 pp.

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AGAINST AND FOR HOLISM: A REVIEW AND REJOINDER TO D. C. PHILLIPS*
Stanley Bailis
San Francisco State University
INTRODUCTION
Those of us who justify interdisciplinary work by appeal to holism must
pay attention to well-made cases against it. D. C. Phillips' case is one. He
maintains that holism, taken seriously, can't work.
Phillips sees in holism three distinguishable theses about complex entities
and ways of dealing with them more appropriately than can be done by the
traditional scientific method. The first, which he calls Holism 1, contends that
wholes emerge from the association of their parts and can neither be investigated
adequately nor explained by mechanistic analysis. Holism 2 identifies the reality of
wholes in powers of organization that cannot be explained by reduction to the
properties of their parts. Holism 3 is a call for conceptual terms referring to
wholes--a call that sometimes denies that such terms can be rigorously developed
under the prevailing scientific image of nature. Certain positive aspects of these
theses have merit, in Phillips' view, but their negative claims about the scientific
method are untenable. For him, the method itself is so reasonable and moderate
that all scientists, even holists, are bound to use it. The futility of holism follows
from its efforts to reject a method that it cannot avoid.
The literature of holism is large and difficult because it is expressed,
often vaguely, in the specialized jargons of many different disciplines. Nevertheless,
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Holistic Thought in Social Science (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press), 1976, 149 pp.
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Phillips presents an ordered account of it that clearly delineates holism's main theses
and applications as they have been developed since the mid-nineteenth century in
several fields--philosophy, biology, psychology, sociology, anthropology,
historiography, political science, and general system theory. His treatment is closely
reasoned, carefully documented, and based on a thorough grasp of the doctrines he
finds wanting. It is, consequently, worth going along with him to see in more detail
what he thinks holism is and has been, what he finds wrong with it, and what's left of
it when he's done, it is also worth considering the possibility of a rejoinder to his
case. For if his case is logically necessary, holism is not.
THE NATURE OF HOLISM
The Theses
Holism 1 had ancient origins but came to modern prominence following the
Romantic movement when it was formulated by certain neo-idealists in philosophy and in
biology by the organicists. Done for the most part between 1880 and the later 1920's, this
work generally reflects the theory of internal relations developed earlier by Hegel and his
disciples: For things to exist as parts, rather than as isolated entities, the wholes to which
they belong must also exist. Things connected as parts in a whole have "relational
properties" that are different from their characteristics in isolation. Parts and wholes are
reciprocally influential, so that neither term can change without altering the other.
From these broad notions, neo-idealists like F. H. Bradley, A. E. Taylor and J.
McTaggart derived five more specific ideas that form the philosophical core of Holism 1.
First, the analytic method is inappropriate for the study of complex wholes and their parts.
Analysis separates parts from the whole in order to investigate them as things in isolation,
thereby depriving parts of their relational properties and wholes of their coherence. Second,
because relational properties are among the defining attributes of parts, parts cannot be
understood as such outside of the wholes to which they belong. Third, wholes are more
than the sum of their parts considered as isolates because wholes include the relational
properties of their parts. Fourth, wholes determine the properties of their parts in the sense
that altering the whole (e.g. by adding, deleting or substituting a part within it) necessarily
alters relationships obtaining among parts. Fifth, parts are dynamically inter-dependent in
the sense that changes in the properties of any one will change the relational properties of
all the others and, consequently, the nature of the whole itself.
Organicists advanced similar ideas in biology, chiefly because they
doubted the ability of mechanistic analysis to explain the discoveries about
vital processes that were being made on every hand: Evolutionists noted
spontaneous variations in individual members of a species that appeared to
spread in blended or diluted form among subsequent generat ions .
Microscopists revealed the internal complexity of the cell and its nucleus, making
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the already elaborate processes of cell division and reproduction that much more intricate.
Embryologists observed that, following tissue excisions, the development process
altered so as to nullify the effects of the damage as much as possible. Naturalists
pondered the regeneration of lost body parts in some species, and the ability of even
simple organisms to modify their activities in relation to varying circumstances.
It was the observed complexity of living things, the intricacy and variability of their
processes, that raised doubts. Mechanism insists that natural events can all be explained in
terms of basic entities and forces operating determinately in accordance with physicochemical
laws. But what entities would be basic enough? The cell was complex and even its
parts had parts. Molecules and atoms seemed too small to contain truly intricate
mechanisms; and the forces acting upon them appeared too determinate to account for
variability. Rejecting mechanism, organicists fastened on the relational properties of parts
to account for characteristics that seemed only to emerge in the functioning of whole
organisms and total ecologies. The rediscovery of Mendel's particulate theory of
inheritance did not blunt the holistic thrust of organicism, and it was not until Crick's and
Watson's time that a fully mechanistic analysis was achieved. Meanwhile, Holism 1
flourished in the work of biologists like the brothers Haldane, R. Virchow, the vitalist Hans
Driesch, E. Montgomery, and later, J.H. Woodger, C.L. Morgan, E.R. Russell and W.E. Agar.
In Holism 1, then, organic wholes are identified with their emergent
characteristics--attributes manifesting the relational properties that their parts
acquire through association. So seen, wholes cannot be explained or predicted
from knowledge of their parts alone. For, as Phillips notes, scientific explanations
and predictions can always be formulated as deductive arguments which, to be
valid, must contain no terms in their conclusions that are not in their premises.
Since premises based only on knowledge of parts do not refer to associations,
characteristics that emerge from associations cannot be deduced from them.
But this line of argument leaves open the possibility of explaining a whole's
emergent characteristics in terms of its parts once the characteristics themselves are
known. For the characteristics can be regarded as instances of interaction laws holding
for the classes of things to which the parts, taken separately, belong. Such laws,
combined with information about parts, yield the very statements of relational properties
that are needed to deduce the whole. Organicists may balk at this claim, which is the
central tenet of reductionism. But, Phillips insists, reductionists can logically both
assert their claim and accept the organicists' view of emergent phenomena--which are,
after all, what they, no less than the organicists, intend to explain. Accordingly, he
separates the formal rejection of reductionism from Holism 1 and represents it as
Holism 2 through arguments developed by the biologist Paul Weiss since the 1920's.
Weiss accepts the basic ideas of Holism 1, but adds that even knowing
the interaction laws and relational properties of parts is not enough to explain the
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