{"id":28304,"date":"2015-07-03T02:55:18","date_gmt":"2015-07-03T01:55:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/?p=28304"},"modified":"2015-07-03T04:07:31","modified_gmt":"2015-07-03T03:07:31","slug":"the-complementarity-principle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/the-complementarity-principle\/","title":{"rendered":"The Complementarity Principle"},"content":{"rendered":"

The complementarity principle in biological and social structures<\/a><\/p>\n

Complementarity is an epistemological principle derived from the subject-object or observer-system dichotomy, where each side requires a separate mode of description that is formally incompatible with and irreducible to the other, and where one mode of description alone does not provide comprehensive explanatory power. The classical physics paradigm, on which biological, social and psychological sciences are modeled, completely suppresses the observer or subject side of this dichotomy in order to claim unity and consistency in theory and objectivity in experimental observations. Quantum mechanical measurements have shown this paradigm to be untenable. Explanation of events requires both an objective, causal representation and a subjective, prescriptive representation that are complementary. The concepts of description and function in biological systems, and goals and policies in social systems, are found to have the same epistemological basis as the concept of measurement in physics. The concepts of rate-dependent and rate-independent processes are proposed as a necessary distinction for applying the principle of complementarity to explanations of physical, biological and social systems<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Tired of waiting for the promised OP on Moderation from keiths.<\/p>\n

I am hoping participants in the “Teleology and Biology” thread might find this paper interesting.<\/p>\n

It is the epistemological argument that I wish to develop in this paper. What I shall attempt to show is that explanatory knowledge of biological and social systems\u2014from cells to human societies\u2014requires the simultaneous articulation of two, formally incompatible, modes of description. The source of this requirement lies in the subject-object duality, or the distinction between the image and the event,the knower and the known, the genotype and phenotype, the program and the hardware, or the policy and the implementation, however one may choose to express this basic distinction. The essence of the concept of complementarity is not in the recognition of this subject-object distinction, which is common to almost all epistemologies, but in the apparently paradoxical articulation of the two modes of knowing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Conclusion:<\/p>\n

Explanatory theories of biological and social systems are presently limited by the classical paradigm of explanation that requires unified, consistent, objective models. This paradigm is derived from the physical sciences of the last century. An epistemology that explicitly recognizes the individual as an intentional agent in all observation and control processes was forced upon physics only with the formulation of quantum theory, but the generality of this subject-object dualism has never been adequately recognized in the normal thinking of biological, behavioral or social scientists. The greatest difficulty with the concept of complementarity, besides the fact that it is not now a generally acceptable paradigm, is that its formulation and application have not been developed in a broader context than quantum theory where, unfortunately, the epistemological problems of measurement are still not clearly resolved. A second difficulty is that complementarity is an explanatory principle having to do more with the inner consistency of models of observational situations rather than simple simulations that predict results. It is now only an epistemological principle, not a practical engineering principle. Its acceptance in quantum mechanics only came about because of the failure of every other interpretation. This may also be the only hope of its incorporation into biological and social theories.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The complementarity principle in biological and social structures Complementarity is an epistemological principle derived from the subject-object or observer-system dichotomy, where each side requires a separate mode of description that is formally incompatible with and irreducible to the other, and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1045,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy-of-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1045"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28304"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28304\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}