The usual frame for these questions is now being called by some in the
natural sciences (where deviation from this canonical view is a very
radical move indeed) "externalism": that the observer models the system
observed, from a stance or viewpoint outside that system, "over-looking" it
as it were, making it an object that is subject to our gaze, our
domination. The issues arise because natural science accepts that
observation as a process is possible only via interaction with the system
observed, and therefore data are always data in and of a supersystem that
includes the observer and the activity/process of observation. To create a
model of the system from an externalist viewpoint therefore requires at
least "factorization", the basis for 'objective' description, which is
supposed to be observer-independent. All issues are those of how to best
achieve the most complete factorization of the joint supersystem into
observer-and-apparatus-and-procedures vs. an object-in-itself.
This viewpoint was explicitly rejected in physics by Bohr, who claimed with
very cogent arguments that have been ignored but not refuted within the
logic of modern physics, that factorization is in principle impossible, and
not merely impossible to the last quantitative degree, but irreducibly and
qualitatively impossible: what we can know about a system is not what is
left when we eliminate all observer-dependent effects, but is rather the
sum of all possible observer-inclusive 'views' of the system. The crux
comes because in modern physics we can show that if a set of views is
sufficient to characterize the system for the purposes of physics, then at
least some of these views must be incommensurable: different, and not
subject to any determination of consistency or equivalence with one
another. (This is the deep meaning of the so-called Uncertainty Principle.)
Bohr takes a step here toward "internalism", which seeks to redefine the
nature of science and its view of reality completely and radically. The
internalist project is still rather vague and getting underway. One view of
it is that its discourses speak from a viewpoint that always situates
itself within a system being characterized, rather than outside or 'above'
it. All systems are defined in such a way that the observer is internal to
the system, and all characterizations of systems are about the observation
process as it is specific to that system. In some sense all of science
becomes about the observation process; there is nothing else that can be
known, and nothing else that needs to be known.
This shift is not subjectivist, mentalist, or psychological, though some
efforts have tried to use those discourses as clues. It is not about a
human observer as such. It is at least as much about the entire material
apparatus and enterprise of observation, or experimentation, as it is about
any human who is part of this active network. It tends to borrow from
semiotics, esp. Peircean semiotics, a general notion that inanimate systems
also operate in terms of signs, or meanings-for, and that even the simplest
material systems do some sort of self-observation. In fact in this paradigm
self-observation _is_ dynamics, it is the process in terms of which one
makes sense of everything about the system. Some of this gets quite
radical; e.g. the law of conservation of energy, usually taken as valid for
some outside observer who looks at net energy in and energy out, is merely
epiphenomenal to the activity within every system by which it adjusts
internally (and over time) by self-observation in such a way that to an
observer who only looks from a larger, slower scale (i.e. quasi-externally)
the net results are conservation of energy. There are many complex
questions here about relationships among scales, but at least some balance
is restored between the modern view that the conservation laws determine
the dynamics and the original one that the dynamics are autonomous and
conservation is just a by-product. To me one of the most interesting
features of internalism is that is has to assign very great importance to
timescale relations.
In biology, too, there was an older movement, associated with von Uexkull
and the _umwelt_ notions, according to which the biological world could
only be understood as the sum total of what that world meant from the
viewpoint of each species, or organism, within it.
Sophisticated cultural relativism (aka cultural relationalism) likewise
maintains that the socially meaningful world is the sum of its meaningful
networks of activity as determined relative to each possible position
within it, and where these are not at all the same as viewed from different
positions (whether these be from different actant or social roles, social
class positions, or cultural stances). In this view, even the best
sociological arguments for "objective" social facts or structures (Bourdieu
is pretty eloquent in the Durkheimian tradition today), mistake a
combination of higher scale and materiality for observer independence. (The
unobvious error being to assume that observation occurs only from the human
scale and not also on/from higher scales.) Perhaps it is not surprising
that internalism traces the objectivist fallacy ultimately to humanism
itself. Internalism does not allow any scale to be privileged
epistemologically.
The potential project of internalism has quite a lot of work to do ... it
needs to develop an account of the nature of 'observation' that is both
material and semiotic and which connects across scales by both
distinguishing and integrating 'same-scale' 'up-scale' and 'down-scale'
observation (or the appropriate generalizations). It needs an account of
observation as a fundamental phenomenon that includes the special case of
human cultural meaning-making with/about material interactions, but is not
limited in ways that privilege our activities or scales.
Internalism and externalism potentially give very different accounts of
"time". Internalism of course subsumes externalism in the larger sense,
since it must give an account of why externalism 'works' but is radically
incomplete and misleading as a fundamental perspective. Internalist time is
'flow' or process-on-going-now, across different scales of duration, but in
all cases from the 'participant' perspective rather than the 'observer'
perspective (these terms are Bourdieu's; he did have this idea in his early
work). Externalist time is retrospective or prospective (probably always
retrospective in structure, even when prospective in orientation, "the
remembered future"), and always 'outside' the process.
In Bill's beautiful list of quotations about time, the Einsteinian view is
the ultimate reductio of externalism: in a complete externalist logic, time
is impossible, a mere illusion. The Whiteheadian view derives from a much
more internalist epistemology (ontology in his case): time in the sense of
process from the participant perspective is the very essence of reality.
Both are profoundly correct.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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