Anthropology and Parallelism : The Individual as a Universal (final journal version)
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | Anthropology and Parallelism : The Individual as a Universal (final journal version) |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Marvin Eli Kirsh |
| Keywords | anthropology, pallelism, relativity, research equipment and cognitive perspective, mechanization, logical positivism, universals |
| Published | 2009 |
| Volume | International Journal of Socio |
| Number | 7 |
| No. of pages | 13 |
| Pages | 112-115 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
It is difficult to define perspective within sets that are self belonging. For example in the study of mankind, anthropology, both men and their studies fall into the same category that contains the topic outline. This situation entails a universal quality of uniqueness, an instance of, to the topic of anthropology that almost may be viewed in parallel to the topic of nature as the set of unique particulars. Yet one might assent to the notion in the inclusive study of man, anthropology, that nothing in its‟ content should conceivably be construed to exceed it. Yet in approaches to the topic, reference to the topic of nature, unavoided, refers to the scientific topic of nature in which contemporary notions are contrasted to and exceed the perceptual experience of nature for explanation. In this presentation problems in approaches and in the application of available tools for analysis to the study of man will be discussed. Framed with respect to a concept of parallelism, notions and stimulus are introdu ced to augment and reorient towards a more creative perspective with respect to the organization of first perspective considerations in studies. The theories of relativity, the idea of mathematical relations for simultaneous events, the presence of artifactual paradoxes as they are reflected in thinking and the scientific tools applied towards investigations are discussed and hopefully highlighted so that they may hopefully be perceived distinctly form realities involved in the pursuit of studies.
Overview
Marvin E. Kirsh, of the Department of Anthropology at California State University Los Angeles, published this essay in 2009. It is not a scientific paper in the ordinary sense — it contains no data, no measurements and no formal argument — but a philosophical protest, and its target is the transfer of the abstracting habits of physics into the study of man.
Kirsh's opening problem is reflexivity. Anthropology is a "self belonging" set: the anthropologist falls inside the category he studies, so there is no vantage outside from which perspective can be fixed. From this he draws a positive conclusion — that anthropology, like nature, should be understood as a domain of unique particulars, with each individual a universal in its own right rather than an instance of an abstracted type. The essay's title states the thesis: the individual as a universal.
What he opposes is the opposite move, which he sees the physical sciences making and anthropology copying: the elevation of "an abstracted statistical particular as a universal rather than a descriptive universal attributed to all particulars." His epistemological premise is austere: "If it is accepted that all knowledge is acquired from the perception of differences between entities there can be no license given to the physical existence of a class of non particulars." Space without location, matter without individuality, statistical summations treated as things — these, for Kirsh, are constructions of our own hands mistaken for constituents of the world.
The argument
Parallelism and the set of unique particulars
"Parallelism" is Kirsh's name for the relation he wants to preserve between distinct domains that must not be collapsed into one another. Nature is a set of unique particulars; the species is one nature and many natures; scientific invention, being open in the way life is open, has acquired "the status of 'a separate (open-like-life) species'". The essay's warning follows from taking that last phrase seriously. Having built an artificial species out of instruments and abstractions, we now try to locate ourselves relative to it rather than to lived experience — with the result that "men can ultimately arrive at no location, identity within this scheme but of ourselves as a species in relation to an artifactual species we have created with our own hands."
Against this he sets the primacy of the proximate: "abstracted locations with respect to the distant stars bear less meaning than the location of the self to the proximal elements of life experiences, especially life experiences held in common."
Relativity as the exemplary case
Relativity is discussed not as physics to be refuted but as the representative product of the abstracting tendency. Kirsh's specific objection concerns simultaneity, which he says "has within its principles, two witness coordinates, one of a particular nature and the other of a statistical everywhere that is embodied by a location-less space." Granting that this may be mathematically workable — he cites Arntzenius's "Is quantum mechanics pointless?" (2004) and Cody Gilmore's "Where in the Relativistic World Are We?" (2006), both live contributions to the philosophical debate over pointy versus pointless spacetime — he denies that it is philosophically admissible: "massless space cannot be applied to the distal end of the same ruler that originates within the tangible realities of existence. This endeavor has more appeal in science fiction."
He adds a reflexive complaint with a deliberate pun: relativity "does not consider the path of the light of its own discourses attained from within a grander path of history." A theory built from within history cannot step outside it to certify its own perspective — the same self-belonging difficulty he began with, now applied to physics rather than to anthropology.
A striking aside treats the atomic bomb as evidence "that matter possesses a near endless amount of mass and that man can reduce apparent and obvious form to the needs of scientific invention and advanced technology."
Against logical positivism
The essay's historical villain is logical positivism (Kirsh cites Carnap 1956, printed as "Karnap"), which hoped that confining abstraction to what could be empirically tested "would afford a route to the solution of the social and natural problems of mankind." Kirsh's counter is that the "phenomenon of 'path'" — the continuous line of natural emergence along which anything comes to be — "cannot in reality, as logical positivism dictates, be divided strictly into the empirical and the conceptual." He gives two reasons: that natural conditions shape the direction of inquiry in ways that "need not reflect real problems and their causations"; and that a logic coherent at the origin of a path need not remain coherent at points further along it, where entities have been moulded from it. Positivism, he concludes, "contains no relative grasping for the navigation of course."
Path, bend, and impulse
Change, for Kirsh, is better described by path and its properties than by law — and in particular by "bend". Here he draws his one direct comparison with physics: relativity's bending of light near masses is characterised as "a mathematically adjustable lever that does not have, as presented, independent parameters of point of reference, but a single historical focus that is relative to all others." Alongside it he sets Nietzsche's diagnosis that "man had conquered himself", and Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents on impulse as "the continuous effector of path". His judgment is that the bends of civilisation "are ubiquitously the consequence of impulses reflected from and embodied within the courses of nature and should not be willfully augmented by behavior based on abstracted concepts."
The prescription
The essay ends with methodological advice rather than results. Do not "place much emphasis on measurement apparatus and theory from which it and method are conceived", because a theory validated by empirical test "can not only be necessarily wrong but self defining to become more and more fitting themselves to a deviated course" — instrument and theory reinforcing one another into a runaway. Do not assume that "validity, truth, human survival" follow from the coincidence of mathematical logic with the empirical. Instead, "focus of energies on diversity in individual creativities". His closing image: "The free unhampered self chosen brush stroke of an artist might yield more fruit than those applied within the constraints of an induced, already endeavored, logically contrived impulsively veered course."
Assessment
Several of Kirsh's concerns are genuine and are not fringe. The reflexivity problem he opens with — that the student of man belongs to the set studied — is the hermeneutic circle, and social scientists have wrestled with it seriously for a century. His warning that instruments embody the theory that designed them, so that empirical validation can become self-confirming, is the theory-ladenness of observation, and it is a real hazard rather than a rhetorical one. His resistance to letting a statistical construct acquire the standing of a thing is a recognisably nominalist objection, and one that recurs across this wiki wherever an abstraction gets treated as a substance. And his citations are not decorative: Arntzenius and Gilmore are working philosophers of physics arguing precisely about whether spacetime points can be dispensed with, so his unease about "location-less space" connects to a debate that is actually open.
The difficulties begin with the prose, and it is not a small matter. Sentences run through eight or ten clauses without a governing verb; punctuation is unreliable ("unavoided,,", "does not,/cannot,", "5that"); words are misprinted throughout ("tp" for to, "form" for from, "projectories", "occurance", "Karnap" for Carnap). For an essay whose whole subject is the clarity and honesty of perspective, this is a wound to the thesis rather than an incidental blemish. A reader cannot check an argument that cannot be parsed, and in several passages the intended claim genuinely cannot be recovered.
Where the claims about physics are recoverable, they do not engage the physics. Relativistic simultaneity is not a commitment to "a statistical everywhere"; it is a convention for synchronising clocks within a frame, and its empirical content — the dilated decay lifetimes of atmospheric muons reaching sea level, or the daily clock corrections that keep GPS usable, the latter a system Kirsh's fellow critics on this wiki know well — is unaffected by whether spacetime points are taken to exist. Kirsh's own citations concern the ontology of points, which is a separate question from whether the theory's predictions hold. The characterisation of light bending as "a mathematically adjustable lever" without "independent parameters of point of reference" is likewise inaccurate: once the deflecting mass is known, general relativity's deflection is fixed with no free parameter, which is exactly why solar-limb deflection is treated as a test — VLBI measurements of radio-source deflection by the Sun now constrain the relevant post-Newtonian parameter to one part in 104 or better. A theory whose prediction can be missed by that margin is not adjustable in the way the essay supposes.
The nuclear remark is confused in a way that matters, because it is offered as evidence. Fission and fusion weapons demonstrate that a small fraction of rest mass — under a percent — can be converted to energy; they do not show "that matter possesses a near endless amount of mass". Mass and energy are being conflated, and the rhetorical weight the sentence carries is not supported by anything it says.
Finally, the essay offers no method. Its positive proposal — to treat the individual as a universal and to privilege individual creativity — is stated as an orientation and never turned into anything an anthropologist could do differently in the field or the archive. No ethnographic material appears anywhere in a paper on anthropology, and no case is worked to show that the recommended perspective yields a reading the abstracting one misses. That leaves the essay in the position it warns against: an abstraction about the dangers of abstraction, with no particular to test it on.
Taken as a philosophical provocation — a reminder that the tools of a science are made things with histories of their own, and that a discipline can mistake its instruments for its object — the piece has something to say. Taken as a critique of relativity, it does not reach the theory it names.