Social Structures and Natural Systems

Is a Scientific Assemblage Workable?

Georges Guille-Escuret

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781786302007
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119476689
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Trapped between the caricatured causalities of biological determinism and the sinister abdications of sociological relativism, socio-ecological interdisciplinarity stagnates. It has lost sight of the ambition of a long-term program and no longer works to conduct applied research on the concrete prerequisites for reliable cooperation, despite an accumulation of emergencies.

The difficulty lies in the general and prolonged abandonment of necessary procedures under the influence of hidden philosophical presumptions. In the end, ecology, sociology, history, economics, agronomy, etc. are seriously handicapped by the absence of a common epistemology of comparative practice, an absence maintained by the dominant epistemology itself.

Social Structures and Natural Systems seeks to demonstrate, with regard to social anthropology and ecology, a scientific compatibility of research subject to methodological requirements that are deductible from the conditions of the existence of science itself. All of this boils down to one observation: this book will be a success if, and only if, it becomes a beginning.

1
Non-Negotiable Conditions for a Scientific Stereoscopy

Is it really necessary to trace the argument back to the disjunction between science and philosophy, or even between idealism and materialism? The solemn vow of utility made in the introductory pages rather exhorts a careful circumvention of these ancient disjunctions, decidedly “easier to grab, than to let go”. Unfortunately, if the devil is in the detail, it is also at work in the “foundations”, “bases” or principles. Not to mention in the “obvious”. At a time when the militancy of indecision rules, evading obscurity at this level would be the equivalent of rushing towards fatal stalemates. However, even if science displays more solidity than what relativism acknowledges, interdisciplinarity, for its part, is characterized by a native instability which severely weakens its initiatives.

The expression “non-negotiable conditions” which opens this chapter sounds like a childish provocation intended to irritate relativists. Let us plead guilty as regards the mischievous spirit, but the case goes well beyond this epidermic character. By no means does non-negotiable imply insensitive to criticism. Bias is attached to the researcher’s position when he undertakes a task: at this moment, ontological considerations regarding knowledge, or its object, should leave the scene and leave room for fixed rules, shared by the protagonists. Discussions regarding correct applications should leave Hamlet’s terrible question aside.

On the opening pages of a now classic collection, La science telle qu’elle se fait [CAL 90], Michel Callon and Bruno Latour also started with a bugle call: “We can either discuss the legitimacy of a sociology of scientific knowledge, or we can put it in practice”. Let us inflect the claim: “we” can be immersed in both activities, and producers are expected to become involved in their assessment, but above all, not at the same time! This incompatibility exists in every science. However, it does not entail insurmountable difficulty for a biologist, whereas the suspicion that weighs on sociological knowledge constantly makes the amalgam a tempting one. Devastating dissymmetry accompanies the cooperation between naturalists and sociologists: while the first ones can easily dissociate assessment and action, the latter retreat to prerequisites by reflex as soon as their partners become cunning. And this under the risk of witnessing the mixture between science and meta-science inhibit any practical achievement.

Far from wanting to support a healthy philosophy against a bad one, or to argue for some kind of neutrality (everyone knows that this pretension would already imply an orientation), the aim here is to make the separation between philosophical discourse and scientific dissertation perceptible, the first one confronting the second one according to two opposite modes: on the one hand, that of external intuitions (sometimes interesting, or tonic) and, on the other hand, that of parasitic infiltration, which secretly undermines research. The challenge then is to conceive a breach other than in the form of a watertight partition: while communication between these areas cannot be proscribed, how can we reorient the constant flow of misunderstandings?

1.1. Operating principles against metaphysical principles

A second unacknowledged dissymmetry concerns the outstanding fact of their dialogue: in fact, an essential gap opposes the assimilation of a scientific conclusion by philosophers and, contrary to this, the reception of an argument proposed by metaphysics in the field of science. In short, this can directly recover the information produced by the “scholar” without any inconvenience, but should, all the same, always transpose the idea of the “wise man”, by translating his terms to the concrete media of every research project. A priori, the difficulty seems quite incidental and technically easy to overcome. When Goethe spoke about nature, Bergson about life, or Sartre about history, their visions camped on a horizon: nobody would have to motivate them to have to prove these as reliable elements, since the reprimand would have quickly become offending. “Even” in the human sciences, a strict caution policy is generally enforced.

Unfortunately, the philosopher does not always display their identity, while at some other times, the scholar tends to weaken their own, by spontaneously fading its boundaries. And here, the situation is sometimes altered in fearsome proportions.

1.1.1. Ventriloquist philosophy

This critical complication elicits very few comments. Worse, when the relationship between science/philosophy tightens, this generally results in a ruling ethereal thought, and this even when the reflection emanates from a scientist, proud of being such: many sociologists – too many, maybe – have been trained by the followers of Plato and Aristotle, and there are countless biologists at the end of their careers who like to pontificate about the deep meaning of nature. Torrents of purely philosophical words regarding the access to truth and episteme emerge from all walks of life, whereas the caution that science should frontally keep against the authority of the specialists of the absolute is dissolved drop by drop. What follows is wishful compensation: next to the debates regarding the epistemological principles that govern the mainspring of science, it is important for science, under its exclusive responsibility, to restore or enact, the sine qua non conditions of its activity, starting by those related to its autonomy. It does not have the status of a protectorate, and complying with the requirements of a distant legitimacy attached to its project, would be equivalent to accepting the inhibitions derived from a never ending suzerainty, or even forgetting that for many centuries, science has already existed in terms of historical and social cohesion.

As a complement to the classical epistemology forged by those who look at things on the other side (a meta-), scientific researchers should grant an internal epistemology with greater consistency [GUI 97], questioning current operating principles, regardless of the metaphysical principles to be achieved. In the context of major resolved options, the progressive development of an interdisciplinary methodology hypothesizes the reinstallation of a set of discussions which regard the assemblage of multiple technical requirements, coexisting within a frame of ample cooperation: in fact, such deliberations seriously circumscribe the participation of the artisans of research.

Despite their abstract expression, these remarks quickly affect our argumentation because, in concealing the dissonance between external and internal interventions, epistemology implicitly allows all kinds of clandestine smuggling between science and philosophy, especially when the questions involve multidisciplinarity, since the researcher of a district does not always distinguish the extrapolations permeated from another area. The destruction caused by these misunderstandings on the bibliography regarding the relationship societies/biocenosis has reached such proportions that the list would be endless. While it is convenient not to linger on the caricatures offered by scientism or reductionism¹, we can agree that the introductory presentations made by sociobiology [WIL 75, DAW 76], or by cultural materialism, with its “struggle for a science of culture” [HAR 79], have provided textbook cases in this respect. Students should be trained to identify the expedients which contribute to the corruption of a so-called uncompromising scientific ambition². In a totally different context and with far more subtlety, Bruno Latour opened an essay which led him to be a recognized sociologist and, on its last page, he confessed to being satisfied with having accomplished his own “philosophical work” [LAT 91, p. 198]: the invisible trespassing of a later denied threshold thanks to this study, and which led to far-reaching consequences on the intellectual journey of its author. Except that the transition was not visible while it was taking place: practice silently preceded theory.

For a condensed view of the confiscation of this duality and its replacement by confusion, let us quote a double example in which juxtaposition leads to mystification: “negentropy” was welded into entropy [SCH 44]³, whereas “maladaptation” was added to adaptation [RAP 84]. In both cases, a rigorous and binding concept was suddenly decorated by a strangely liberating complement, invented ex nihilo. Apart from the adulterated legitimacy that the derivation sought, our attention should focus on an unnoticed aspect: not only were these “negative” embellishments scientifically unsound, but their advent tended to corrupt their source. A reflection which simultaneously refers to negentropy and entropy uproots the archetype, which is then metamorphosed into an irreversibly philosophical idea. And adaptation only retains its meaning by standing away from maladaptation, or else the two terms would form a tautological couple (the content of one would finally be inferred from the lack of the other).

That being said, processes regularly acquire the more capricious twist of a rebound. In the same way that André Breton defined pornography as the “eroticism of the others”, philosophy willingly reemerged in the guise of an opposing science: biology was challenged by the anthropologist whereas anthropology was mocked by the biologist, and was thus transformed into a gateway for a clandestine philosophical discourse which the interpreter could place under the responsibility of their own discipline. For this purpose, it was enough to criticize an external abuse and to “infer” an appropriate inner position, which, however, would only owe a distant inspiration to the official scientificity defended by the accuser. In other words, while science X denounced the philosophical bias of science Y, it then inherited “corrected” wisdom, as a rebound.

While countless masters of ethology, genetics, or evolution theories have more or less candidly adopted this tactic, their counterparts in anthropology have not disdained it either: for example, when they stepped up against the impudence of sociobiology, Marshall Sahlins and Claude Lévi-Strauss [SAH 77, LEV 83], retrospectively consolidated broad convictions regarding the essence of the social through diverse extrapolations, by taking advantage of the presence of sensational opposition [PAR 17]. The counterproposal, supposedly the outcome of the rebuttal, blithely went beyond the zone of critical efficiency, and set out to compete against adversaries within the truly disproportionate and unjustifiable framework of “scientific” ambition.

Levi-Strauss thus offers us the best opportunity to complete this overview with a last textbook case: the one in which philosophy itself occupies the ungrateful role of the target, and innocently favors the distillation of a stealthy drift inside a scientific construction. The structuralist author published La pensée sauvage in 1962 and, in the last chapter, he forcefully attacked Jean-Paul Sartre, whose Critique de la raison dialectique had recently been published [SAR 60, LÉV 62]. For the time being, let us leave the content of the controversy aside, in order to clarify the ambiguity: the contradiction that the anthropologist contributed in the name of his own competence necessarily fell on the ground of the opponent. It should have been the same for the lesson learned from denigration, but this finally “enriched” the issuer’s knowledge by pretending never to have left him. Structuralism, as a “trend”⁴, drew great advantage from this episode, by way of philosophical support advocating for a sharing between the study of infrastructure as mainly assigned to history, on the one hand (“assisted by demographics, technology, historical geography and ethnography”), and the theory of superstructure attributed to ethnology, which was quickly conceived as a “psychology”, on the other hand [LÉV 62, p. 174]. Nevertheless, the operation was supposed to materialize among the sciences, despite the fact that these had not been invited to discuss its terms. Conscious or not, the coup was undeniably clever, as well as powerful: in the following pages, we will see that it undermined the exchanges between the supporters of ecology and those of sociology (in the broad sense).

Lévi-Strauss received a broad training in philosophy before going to Brazil. Among other things, his triumph on the academic scene radically changed the image of ethnology, which had so far oscillated between the nest of enlightened explorers and human naturalism. The new recruits, bottle-fed by Rousseau more than Darwin, multiplied the bridges with classical studies, which the French used to call “humanities”. Without diminishing the gain obtained thanks to this contest, we should be aware of the profusion of ambiguities, as well as the confusing entanglement that followed, and whic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: The Post-Natural, the Post-Cultural, and Then What?
• 1 Non-Negotiable Conditions for a Scientific Stereoscopy
• 2 Relations Above All (and Before Any Cause)
• 3 Uncertain Ensembles, Imperfect Cohesion and Disruptive Events
• 4 The Spiral of Research: Centrifugal and Centripetal Approaches
• Conclusion: Engagement and Methods in the Face of a Swarm of Empiricisms
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement