The Re-Founding of Univocal Sciences
The View from Oregon – 330: Friday 28 February 2025
In newsletter 328 I discussed a number of problems with interdisciplinarity, including my second thoughts about interdisciplinary research. For me, this isn’t just about the viability of interdisciplinary sciences, but it is moreover about the future of science. I’ve outlined a view of the history of science that I call reticulate science in which sciences divide into specialized subdisciplines and then these subdisciplines recombine in novel ways, giving us novel interdisciplinary research fields which can then continue to expand scientific knowledge. You can take this later idea as an example of a “speculative philosophy of the history of science,” discussed by Haskell Fain, and which I discussed in my Today in Philosophy of History episode on Fain. Fain’s point was that we need more speculative philosophies of science because the implicit positivism of much scientific thought had locked itself into a single narrative, whereas what we need is “…the encouragement to fashion story-lines upon which better histories of science could be constructed”
Of course, the story-lines can’t be fictional; they must be factual. The fascination of true crime writing appeals to the same instincts as true science writing. And there is a lot of great true science writing, and the philosophies of science of Popper, Kuhn, and Lakatos all appealed as aspects of the history of science that had been neglected by their predecessors; they gave us novel speculative philosophies of the history of science—Popper through falsificationism, Kuhn through revolutions and paradigms, and Lakatos through scientific research programs. The Cartesian neglect of history translated into modern science lacking any sophisticated history of science from its origins until the twentieth century, when things started to change. But these new philosophies of the history of science didn’t place any particular emphasis on interdisciplinary sciences, or upon the distinction between interdisciplinary sciences and whatever is not an interdisciplinary science. And this of course begs the question as to what exactly is not an interdisciplinary science.
What should we call the disciplines that are not interdisciplinary? If there is any established terminology—there may well be—I am not aware of it. We could call them traditional disciplines, univocal disciplines, mono-disciplinary, intra-disciplinary, or even disciplines simpliciter. Since I need a convention for the moment, I will use “univocal disciplines” today without making any claim that this is a good term, much less the best term, but something is needed to identify the concept in question. Traditional scientific disciplines like astronomy, physics, and chemistry are thus univocal disciplines for my present purposes. Twentieth century hybrids like astrophysics could be considered interdisciplinary unions of physics and astronomy, but at some point—at some as-yet unidentified threshold—the hybrid effectively unifies its multiple sources and achieves univocal status.
Making a distinction between multidisciplinary and univocal sciences suggests what I take to be a fundamental question in the history and philosophy of science: Can there be another (novel) univocal scientific discipline in addition to those traditional univocal disciplines familiar to us from the history of science? If there can be fundamentally new univocal disciplines, there would be another way, apart from what I call reticulate science, in which the expansion of scientific knowledge could continue. However, here we need to introduce yet another distinction, being that between a finite number of univocal disciplines and an infinite (or indefinite) number of univocal disciplines. If there are a finite number of univocal disciplines, and that finite number is low enough, we may exhaust the possible number of univocal disciplines, and once these disciplines are played out, science comes to an end. If there are potentially an infinite number of univocal disciplines, or just so many that they cannot be exhausted by the intelligent agents in the universe, then they are infinite for all practical purposes (calling them infinite is here an idealization), and science can be continued indefinitely as scientific knowledge grows indefinitely. I take this to be a metaphysical question in the philosophy of science, because its answer depends upon the nature of the universe itself.
When I first formulated the idea of reticulate science, at least part of this idea was how human beings take distinctive perspectives on the universe, and these different perspective allow us to continue our scientific inquiry. Now that I am able to put this question in a metaphysical light, I will have to re-think this and try to figure out whether there can be a purely metaphysical formulation of reticulate science, or whether, on the other hand, univocal sciences should be seen in the light of human capacities and perspectives. I’ve written a few things over the past year emphasizing the extent to which scientific knowledge is specifically human knowledge, so this too requires clarification. It may be that human science is a subset of the (possible) sciences by all intelligent agents, making human knowledge a subset of all possible knowledge, in which case the question may be partially a question of anthropic bias and partially a metaphysical question about the number and kinds of things there are in the universe. As can be seen from these considerations, I still have quite a way to go in terms of delineating my philosophy of science, but these are fruitful questions that keep me thinking and keep my perspective on science evolving. I don’t consider any of this settled.
In any case, in regard to the above question as to further univocal sciences not yet formulated, here I have a framework for answering the question, though the detailed discrimination and individuation of sciences would require significant additional work. In newsletter 326 I discussed what I call emergent complexity pluralism, in reference to my recently published paper, “Peer Complexity in Big History.” In the context of emergent complexity pluralism, it is extremely likely to that there are potentially a great many as-yet-unformulated univocal sciences, though these sciences would be based on emergent complexities not yet available to scientific research because they would be on other worlds where alternative complexities have emerged in place of the complexities familiar to us from Earth.
While most research in novel univocal sciences must lie far in the future for us, when we are able to visit other worlds routinely, thus enabling boots-on-the-ground scientific research, we can get a hint at the kind of sciences that would be possible from what we have learned from polluted white dwarf stars, which I discussed briefly in newsletter 326, because they’re such a great way to introduce the idea of emergent complexity pluralism. In a couple of presentations in 2022 I referenced the paper “Polluted white dwarfs reveal exotic mantle rock types on exoplanets in our solar neighborhood” (2021) by Keith D. Putirka and Siyi Xu, in which the authors discuss distant planets that may “require new rock classification schemes.” The authors have continued their work in what they call exogeology (e.g., The chemistry of extra-solar materials from white dwarf planetary systems, 2024, by Siyi Xu, Laura K. Rogers, and Simon Blouin) since I cited the 2021 paper.
Of course there are a lot of questions of about the classifications of the sciences that arise in relation to such research. We can think of this as an extension of geology or mineralogy, or we can think of it as an extension of planetology, beyond the planetology suggested to us by the planets of our own solar system. On the other hand, if there are planets that are fundamentally different in chemical and mineralogical composition than what is known to us from Earth and the planets of our solar system—if, for example, there are non-silicate planets—this legitimately may be ground for a science of these new kinds of planets. There is also a question here as to what constitutes a fundamental science.
We can think of recent sciences like exogeology or astrobiology as later scientific work building on earlier geology and biology, but there is another sense in which these sciences can be understood as an initially parochial science, conceived anthropocentrically by human beings confined to Earth and the evidence available on Earth, finally being extended to something that approaches the generality with which they always should have been conceived. In this latter sense, the introduction of astrobiology isn’t a later interdisciplinary science that builds on terrestrial biology; rather, it is what biology should have been from the start. As such, astrobiology is a re-founding of biology, which was, in its original formulations, illicitly terrestrial, geocentric, and anthropocentric. The same holds true for astrogeology. Indeed, the same ought to hold true for all the sciences that have not yet converged (or have not yet started to converge) on their properly universal formulations. However, the universal formulations, i.e., the re-founding of these sciences as what they always should have been, must come later in the history of an intelligent agent, since any intelligent agent will begin in a particular place at a particular time, giving that intelligence a particular perspective on the universe that privileges, in a non-Copernican sense, evidence that is near to hand in space and time.
Perhaps one of the things that makes physics so seductive as the ultimate “hard” science is that it was very nearly conceived in this universal form ab initio; it is the closest that we have to a pure science because it approximates universality to a greater extent than any other science. Perhaps astrophysics can claim a similar status, though it appears much later in scientific history, and astrophysics itself could be taken as the universal re-founding of physics. Discoveries from the twentieth century have forced physics to take account both of relativity and quantum theory, which also place physics in a universal context; in order to understand relativity we literally have to understand the distribution of matter in the universe and how this distribution shapes time and space, and this in turn necessitates our assessing our proper place in the universe, i.e., our Copernican place in the universe.