Reductionism and Holism: Ontological (Part 2)

The story so far…

In Varieites of Reductionism: Three Varieties (Part 1), I discussed the problem of reductionism as it appears in nursing and described “epistemological reductionism.” This involves the relationship of one theory to another. There are two other kinds relevant to the issue of reductionism: ontological reductionism and practical reductionism. This post will articulate ontological reductionism.

Ontological reductionism and holism

Questions of ontology concern what exists and what kinds of things there are. Whether God exists, whether the number 2 exists, and whether cats have minds like ours are ontological questions. Questions of ontological reductionism ask whether one (purported) kind of thing can be identified with another. Thus, to say that there are no minds or spirits, only brains, is to take a reductionist position.

Note the difference between ontological and epistemological reductionism. In epistemological reductionism, the question about minds and brains is whether our knowledge of minds (and how they work) could be reduced to knowledge of brains (and how they work). The ontological question is whether there are two kinds of things (minds and brains) or just one (brains). The denial of ontological reductionism about the mind would hold that minds exist independently of brains.

Ontological holisms and reductionisms come in weak and strong forms. Strong holism contends that the two domains exist independently. Those who hold that the mind (or spirit) is a non-material entity which can survive the death of the body affirm a strong form of holism about the mind. Those who affirm that only brains exist affirm a strong form of reductionism.

Pain and weak holism

Middle positions are possible, and the Gate Control Theory of Pain provides an interesting example. The Gate Control Theory holds that pain signals travel along two kinds of neural circuit. One runs directly from the injured site to the motivational parts of the brain. The other goes through the higher processing, cognitive parts of the brain. The latter forms a “gate” which can block or modulate pain sensations. Is this a form of ontological reductionism? It seems so, insofar as pain is identified with neurological circuits. Notice, however, that the feeling of pain is not eliminated or explained away. It would be odd to be skeptical about the existence of the feeling of pain in a way that it is not odd to be skeptical about the existence of, say, souls.

The Gate Control Theory assumes that people feel more or less pain, depending on their emotional or cognitive state. Both the feeling of pain and the neurological states are assumed to exist. Hence, it is not strongly reductionist, since it does not deny that pains exist. Nor is it strongly holist, since the feeling of pain is said to depend on neural state; without neurological events, there would be no pain. The Gate Control Theory thus illustrates a weak form of ontological holism.

Conceptual Change

The ontological commitments of the Gate Control Theory are an intriguing example of the kind of conceptual change that comes about through scientific research. We come to understand our feelings of pain as complicated neural events. This is not as strange as it sounds at first. We understand hot and cold as the mean kinetic energy of molecules, and hot and cold are, in the first instance, feelings. There are not two things—heat and mean kinetic energy—there is but one, mean kinetic energy. The conceptual change instituted by theories like the kinetic theory of heat or the Gate Control Theory of pain are changes where two distinct concepts are unified.

To be continued…

Theory Critique by Parody?

The other day, I was looking at a model of transition to motherhood   class of nursing PhD students.  The authors had used grounded theory to identify stages in the process by which women entered the role of being a mother.  As we were puzzling over the diagram — a group of labeled, overlapping circles — one of the students remarked that “this is just like the transition to being a PhD student.”  We laughed, and indeed, all of the categories fit perfectly.  First you felt unready and lost, then you figured it out, and finally you were comfortable; transition complete. 

The categories of the model, it turned out, fit any transition whatsoever.  They captured “transition to pizza delivery drver” just as well as “transition to motherhood.”  The problem is that the categories were vague, even metaphorical, and that the relationships among the stages was not articulated.  One stage was said to “cause” another, but there was no description of what this cause amounted to.

So, here’s the lesson: if there is an absurd application of your model, something is wrong.  If your model can be parodied by making it easily fit pizza delivery or window washing, when it is supposed to be about a specific social process, then model is under-specified.  A model that applies indiscriminately says nothing.

 

People as Measurement Devices

Measurement and qualitative research

In his presentation at the 2009 International Philosophy of Nursing Conference in Bristol, John Paley argued that qualitative research could be understood as a kind of measurement. I was reminded of this provocative thesis when I read a new essay by Gualtiero Piccinini “First-Person Data, Publicity & Self-Measurement” (Philosophers’ Imprint, Vol 9, 2009). Piccinini engages the literature that tries to defend a “science of consciousness.” He criticizes the idea that first-person reports create a special kind of science, but concludes by accepting first-person data (when rightly understood) as scientifically legitimate and valuable.

These lines of argument challenge two common nursing conceptions of qualitative research. First, they challenge the characterizations of qualitative research that use measurement as a defining feature of quantitative research. Second, they challenge the common idea that the qualitative investigator is the measuring instrument.

First-person data and measurement

Paley’s argument – and note, this is based on my memory of his presentation in Bristol, so it may not accurately represent his view – assimilated qualitative research to a larger conception of measurement. Measurement is a form of representation, and the use of numbers to scale the measurement is a special case. Paley’s presentation described some interesting techniques for measuring attitude and belief that are semantically sensitive in the sense that they locate the subjects’ belief (attitude) in a semantic network. There is no numeric scale, yet there is an apparently reliable representational scale.

Piccinini is concerned with more with the scientific value of direct, first-person reports. He is arguing against those who take first-person reports of, say, pain or mental imagery to be private, yet legitimate scientific data. Those who support such a view hold that because first-person reports are private, any science which relies on them must have a different character than the familiar sciences with their public, reproducible data.

Puccinini challenges the notion of private scientific data on several grounds, and he ultimately rejects the idea that “the validity of first-person data is untestable by public means” (p. 10, cf. p. 3). His positive view is that first-person data are legitimate scientific data because they are public. Pain reports are a kind of first-person data that is essential to nursing research. One of the mistakes behind supposing that such reports are private is to suppose that the person who is in pain is an observer of the pain. Puccinini suggests that the subjects who are in pain are not the observers: the investigators are. The investigator measures (and thereby observes) the pain through the first-person reports of the subject. Thus:

A subject generating first-person behaviors to fulfill the purposes of a scientific observer is a self-measuring instrument. When a subject generates first-person behaviors, she embodies not only (part of) the experimental materials but also (part of) the measuring apparatus. (p. 11)

A person pointing at a degree of a pain scale thus provides an observation of pain in much the same way as a Geiger counter provides an observation of radiation.

Consequences for qualitative research

Paley and Puccinini are exploring an interesting and new way of assimilating qualitative and quantitative research. If they are right, then “measurement” does not discriminate between qualitative and quantitative research. Interviews (even if conceptualized as phenomenological researchers do) are measurements in much the same sense as glucose assays.

Even more interesting is Puccinini’s argument that the scientist is the observer, not the subject who reports the pain (etc.). Qualitative researchers have often said that the investigator is the measuring instrument of qualitative research. This is supposed to mean that investigator is to record her own responses to the interview, along with what is said (or done). The interpreter’s impressions are the data for the qualitative research. This is a mistake, if Puccinini is right. The researcher is not studying herself, she is studying a population (albeit a small one). They are the ones with the experiences, and their first-person reports of those experiences are the basis of any qualitative research. Puccinini’s essay is a nice reminder that qualitative research is more than autobiography.

Reductionism and Holism: Three Varieties (Part 1)

“Reductionism” is something of a dirty word in nursing and other health sciences. To call a theory “reductionist” is to criticize it as limited and uninteresting. Nurse scholars tend to view nursing as holistic, and therefore rejecting a theory because it is reductionist puts it outside the domain of nursing scholarship. This argument was very important during the rise of nursing qualitative research in the 1980s, and it continues to appear in discussions about the character of nursing science.

But what does “reductionism” mean? What makes a theory reductionist? And why is reductionism a bad thing? These questions are made more complex by the fact that “reductionism” is used in several different ways. It will go some way toward answering these questions if we can sort out some of the different things that people have meant by these terms.

Notice that the verb “reduce” typically implies a relationship. One thing (or sort of thing) is reduced to another. This means that we can gain some purchase on what reductionism amounts to if we begin by asking what is being reduced to what, and how are they related? In the context of scientific research, it is theories (or better, aspects of theories) that are described as reductionist. Hence it is a relationship among (aspects of) theories with which we will primarily be concerned. Moreover, questions of reduction typically involve a “higher” and “lower” level. The question is whether theories at the higher level can be reduced to those at the lower level.

“Reductionism” and “holism” are conceptually intertwined. At first glance they may seem to be contraries: to say that a theory is holistic is to deny that it is reductionistic, and vice versa. The vast literature in the philosophy of science shows that matters are not so simple. There are, of course, some extreme forms of reductionism and holism that do define the concepts in oppositional terms. To insist, for example, that the existence of the mind is completely independent from the existence of the body, as Descartes did, is a strong form of anti-reductionism (or holism) about the mental. It is opposed to a thoroughgoing materialism which insists that no minds exist, only brains. There are, however, a range of middle positions that relate mind and body, neither reducing one to the other nor insisting on their separation.

We will need to speak, then, of stronger and weaker forms of holism and reductionism. The strong forms of holism will hold that two domains (e.g. minds and bodies) are utterly distinct and independent; strong forms of reductionism will eliminate one domain by collapsing it into another (e.g. minds are nothing but brains). The weaker positions will hold that the two domains are distinct (thus denying strong reductionism) and that they depend on each other (thus denying strong holism).

Epistemological Reductionism

One motivation for reductionism has been epistemological economy. To reduce one theory to another in this sense is to show that knowledge of one domain suffices for knowledge of another. Philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians have been interested in epistemological reduction because it promises to tighten up justifications.

Classical empiricism is reductionist in the epistemological sense. Empiricists hold that all knowledge arises from experience, and the classical empiricists (Locke, Berkeley, Hume) understood experience in terms of perceptual ideas. Elementary or simple experiences of color, shape, taste, sound, and so on formed the indubitable foundation for all other knowledge. Their project was to show how complex ideas could all be constructed from simple ones. Challenges arose for empiricists in areas where it was difficult to show that the concepts and judgments were constructions of simple ideas. Hume’s critique of causality can be understood as a struggle to understand how knowledge of causes can be reduced to knowledge obtained through direct perception. Mathematics was also challenging: is “2+2=4″ a generalization from experience? What about the Pythagorean Theorem? The rationalists argued that knowledge of mathematics and ultimate causes could not be justified by experience alone, and they therefore represent a form of epistemological holism.

In contemporary scientific inquiry, questions of epistemological reductionism are asked about different levels of inquiry. In the social sciences, for example, there has been a long debate about how social theories are related to psychological theories. Durkheim explicitly denied that his explanations of social relationships could be understood in terms of individual choice. This form of holism was opposed by the “methodological individualists,” who tried to think about social phenomena as the outcome of patterns of individual actions.

In epistemological reductionism, then, issue is whether one sort of theory or intellectual domain can be fully explained by reference to another. Strong forms of epistemological reductionism hold that the higher level theory can be entirely constructed or justified by our knowledge of the lower level theories. In other words, a reductionist about the social might hold that once we knew everything about individual choices and motivations, we would be able to predict and explain the character of institutions. Similarly, epistemological reductionists about the mental would hold that all psychological experience can be understood in terms of neurological mechanisms.

Strong forms of epistemological reductionism hold that some higher-level domain can be fully understood (predicted, explained, justified) in terms specified by a lower level domain. Strong forms of epistemological holism hold that knowledge of the two domains is independent: knowledge of the lower level (e.g. neurological events or individual choices) tells us nothing about the higher level (e.g. mental or social phenomena). There are many varieties of weak holism too. A weak form of holism would deny the strong reductionist claim, but not go so far as the strong holist. On these kinds of view, knowledge of the lower level is relevant, but not exhaustive. Higher level theories would require concepts and methods of justification that were different from those used at the lower level, but knowledge of the lower level is important for a full explanation of higher level phenomena.

Many theories in the health sciences exhibit a commitment to moderate epistemological holism. The gate-control theory of pain, for example, relies on an understanding of neurological mechanisms to explain pain. But a person knows that she is in pain because of her experience, not because of her knowledge of neuroscience.

Other Forms of Reductionism

Two other forms of reductionism are ontological reductionism and practical reductionism. The motivation for ontological reduction is ontological economy: trying to show how some parts of the world are constructed from others. When nurses affirm the value of holism, they are often not denying either epistemic or ontological reductionism. Rather they are affirming the value of a complete and integrated approach to the patient. This is practical holism, and in the next post, we will discuss how it is different from epistemological and ontological holism.

To be continued…

See: Reductionism and Holism: Ontological (Part 2)