Organicism and the analytic method

What does it mean to study a “complex system”? Give yourself an example. Think of the human body: it has a liver, lungs, a brain, and many other parts. The analytic method breaks the system into parts and studies them separately. We can study the liver rather than trying to understand everything about the body at once.

The critics see a problem. If we isolate the liver, do we lose something about how it works with the rest of the body? That sounds like a reasonable concern. But noticing a possible drawback doesn't yet give us a better way to study anything. What alternative do they propose?

Organicism says the whole determines the nature of its parts and that the parts depend on one another. In our example, we'd need to understand an organ through its place in the body. Keep using that example as the wording gets abstract. “Entities,” “relationships,” and “wholes” are much easier to follow when we can picture parts and a system.

Paragraph 2 introduces the theory on which organicism depends: internal relations. Relationships give an entity properties. Without a particular relationship, the entity would lack that property; the theory therefore treats the property as a defining characteristic. It makes that move for every relationship.

Hold on. Does every true fact about something define what it is? A pen writes in ink. That seems central to being a pen. It also has a particular chemical makeup, but are all those details equally central? Likewise, we can imagine the liver's relationship to the body without assuming that every connection—even to a fingernail—defines what makes it a liver. The questionable step is moving from “this property exists” to “this property defines the thing.”

That's exactly the distinction paragraph 3 draws. A defining characteristic affects the entity's identity. An accompanying characteristic can be present, even always present, without doing that. So a new relationship could give something a new property while leaving it essentially the same thing. The author doesn't have to deny that relationships matter; the objection is to treating every resulting property as identity-defining.

The next criticism sounds even stronger: the theory makes learning impossible. Why? To know one entity, we'd have to know all its relationships, which requires complete knowledge of the wholes containing it. Think about trying to understand the liver only after understanding the entire body. But that whole includes the liver we haven't yet understood. Where do we start? The requirement keeps sending us back to knowledge we don't have. A theory intended to help us study things has made knowing anything depend on an impossible prerequisite.

Then paragraph 5 attacks the original complaint. The analytic method already takes account of the system. Scientists first determine its laws and initial conditions, and then study its parts. Studying the liver separately therefore needn't mean forgetting that it belongs to a body. The organicists attacked complete isolation, but that isn't what these scientists were doing.

Now the ending ties both criticisms together. Organicism relies on a problematic theory, and its supporters misunderstood the method they wanted to replace. They have offered “no valid reason” to reject the analytic method or adopt their alternative. That's the judgment we should carry into the questions; the examples and technical distinctions explain why the author reaches it.