Contextualizing A Process Model in terms of philosophy of science

 

I found this 2000 article by Gendlin this morning entitled "The 'Mind'/'Body' Problem and First-Person Process: Three Types of Concepts"

https://focusing.org/gendlin/docs/gol_2104.html

Now this is the kind of contextualization for APM I've been looking for! I wish a bit more of this was included in an introduction. In any case, I think the discussion about reductionism at the end is important. Sounds like Gendlin did have a sophisticated understanding, though he still doesn't give a lot of references to the philosophy of science literature. How well does chemistry reduce to physics? How well does biology reduce to chemistry? I think people tend to think the reduction is complete. And yet, philosophers who look at these questions find that the answer is more subtle than that.

 

Thinking about this, I do question Gendlin's characterization of the majority of natural science as "unit model". What I think he's getting at with this unit model discussion is the idea of reductionism itself: that biology should reduce to chemistry and that chemistry should reduce to physics. Then we assume that a biological concept, say "the endocrine system" should be describable in the terms of a "lower" level science like physics in terms of its concepts like electrons, protons, electric fields, motion, etc. This is the claim of reductionism, and it needs to be examined carefully to see where it succeeds and where it doesn't. The philosopher Nancy Cartwright is someone I've learned a lot from on this account (see e.g. "The Dappled World"). Another good book on this topic is William Wimsatt's "Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise Approximations to Reality". Gendlin does point here to the concept of multiple-realizability, so it shows he's familiar with some of the arguments.

 

So I'm not sure one could characterize the specific sciences such as biology and physiology or even physics as including only unit concepts. The physics concepts of energy, light, fields, Hamiltonians and maps, coherence... are these unit concepts? Not really.

 

Having said all this, I do think that Gendlin is breaking new ground in APM and this "first person science" is sorely needed. And just like Gendlin points out that "unit science" gets put into a larger context via ecology, we can equally well say that "process science" or first person science needs to also get put into the larger context of the other sciences.