Part IV Conclusion

Chapter 8 Empirically Verified Conclusions

Part I of this study expressed the purpose of empirically verifying a hypothetical evolutionary change in the conceptual structure by which a significant portion of humanity views the world. I outlined that structure, identified the particular elements of it that could be shown to be changing, and described the direction of the change.

In Parts II and III, I presented evidence of the evolution I hypothesized, textual expressions of selected views chosen for their relevancy. Using textual expression does not reduce its empirical significance as evidence. Whether the authors themselves held the theoretical positions I attributed to them in my interpretations is a question of fact just as significant as that discovered by any form of inquiry. The facts in this case were obtained from the published works of these authors, and my interpretations can be replicated by anyone using the same methods of research. The meaning of these literal expressions is a matter of empirical observation and disciplined interpretation of the data collected.

Interpretation of empirical data done in this study has been based on the analytical elements defined in Part I. Interpretation has been crucial to the task of understanding, logically organizing, and integrating different sources of data. Interpretation has guided both observation and theoretical analysis, which have proceeded concurrently throughout the work, the results of which are presented here. The meta-structure defined for the study has provided a standard for establishing the significance of particular literal expressions, and a foundation for establishing logical relationships between those expressions. Only the results of the work are shown, not the detailed processing that went into them.

Inquiry is understood here as a form of rational action, having the structural elements (purpose, process, content, and control) necessary to functionality. Rationality is measured by the probability that the structure as defined will achieve the specified purpose. Historically, this structure has emerged from the body of realistic metaphysical assumptions. In spite of the different metaphysical assumptions of idealism, this structure has proven itself essential to any rational organization of the phenomena of conscious experience. However, the metaphysical assumptions of realism versus idealism result in assignment of different ontological status to different portions of the structure.

Convergence from Realism

The realist position ignores the elements of purpose and control, attributing all change in real objects to conditionally described cause and effect. The realist's justification for ignoring these elements is that they are irrelevant to rational description. For realists, specification of purpose or control is not a matter of concern in natural law, being the arbitrary and random effects of organic behavior, and an attempt to specify them would imply determinism contrary to the principle of free choice. Realists are concerned with predicting concrete effects from concrete causes, a mechanistic approach that sees the designation of organic behavior as an abdication from the principles of disciplined inquiry. The realist sees heredity and environment as causes that act on a machine-like organism to produce the specific effects of survival and development. This approach denies the significance of the conscious subject and attributes failure to survive and develop to irrational mechanical responses to real causes. Inquiry, for the realist, is a matter of describing cause and effect rationally. However, the admission of the possibility of inquiry, and the implied common purpose, rationality, as a standard for the results of inquiry, has implications for realism that realism is in no position to address.

Accepting a form of rationality and implying a common purpose for inquiry contradicts the realist justification for striking the element of purpose from consideration. Purpose is not random and irrelevant. A specific purpose is essential to the standard of rationality, and that purpose is functionality. This is the basis upon which realism implicates functionality and organicism in cause/effect descriptions. A systemic description involving only a mechanistic interpretation and denying the significance of functionality will, even in realistic terms, be irrational. Rationality requires an organic interpretation of functionality that explicitly addresses inquiry and action as functions of a conscious, experiencing subject.

A growing pressure for interpretations of organic functionality in systemic descriptions has come from evolutionary biology. That pressure has been important in advancing the use of such descriptions in the study of human action, including inquiry. Radical idealism abandons the cause/effect mechanistic approach altogether, inappropriately discounting its instrumental value in systemic description. Recognizing radical idealism and radical realism alike as untenable approaches to a complete description of inquiry, we have been forced to take a middle path. Taking this path has required exploration of some forbidden territory: extra-scientific metaphysical assumptions. The history of realism alone reveals the middle path as a choice justified by sound empirical insight. This fact has led to reconstruction efforts that seem to transcend the historical realist/idealist dilemma. Parts II and III have dealt with approaches to this dilemma from both the realist and the idealist perspectives.

The mere idea of organic behavior as action, as chosen, instead of being a mechanical relation of cause and effect, implies that these events are not just the results of conditional aspects of existence, but must include normative aspects accrued through experience. Experience implies consciousness, and consciousness brings the subject, and the importance of subjectivity, back into play. The mechanical object can be explained as the construction of a subject, but this involves an explanation of all objects, the most interesting of which cannot be explained mechanically. Thus we have set the stage for transcendent organic explanation.

The concept of action is the starting point for articulating the structure of a wholistic theory of inquiry. Accepting the necessity for normative aspects in any theory of rational structure, one element that emerges is the clearly formulated, unambiguous teleological goal for action: the purpose. Ultimate purposes are the non-logical, axiomatic, affectual reasons for being that are assumed without explanation. Ultimate purposes imply proximate, logical purposes that are instrumental in achieving ultimate ends. These are not simply epiphenomenal, coincidental aspects of human existence. They are the foundations for human understanding of conscious experience.

This kind of understanding, of both mechanical and organic functionality, is itself instrumental to both individual and collective action. Any logical understanding of conscious experience that can lead to functional instrumental action can be described as a systemic whole, a set of functionally related elements that constitutes a rational structure. Given the existence of a system of literal expression, this structure can be articulated, refined and shared collectively. The fact of such sharing is irrefutable evidence supporting a wholistic theory of action, and of inquiry.

Convergence from Idealism

Idealists, as a group, have approached convergence with wholistic rationality somewhat differently. For idealists, rationality emerges from unavoidable terms that are inexplicable, given a single consciousness. The concept of logical action is again the starting point, but with a difference. Here, it is the concept of collective logical action that is inexplicable. To effect coordinated rational action, the conscious individual must join with other conscious individuals to create a transcendent level of consciousness that influences significant aspects of individual behavior. Assumed collective functionality must have a higher level of importance to the individual than individual functionality. A common collective rational structure transcends, for reasons of individual functionality, any individual rational structure.

Where the connection between the individual and the collective is affectual, automatic, mechanical, it does not violate the premises of the idealist. However, here is a source of ideas meaningful to individuals, which individuals give precedence to their own ideas. The radical idealist cannot explain how the individual recognizes such ideas or why they would be given such precedence. This would imply there is some universe external to consciousness that has a material effect on development of ideas, so the mere existence of ideas does not render them universal. The idealist is unavoidably drawn to the conclusion that multiple consciousnesses can join together to act as a single consciousness, and that the process requires the common use of a medium that is material, not ideal. Once articulated, this material medium exerts an inescapably significant influence on individual human action.

It seems that the affectual can be instrumentalized, the axiomatic can be rationalized, the internalized effects of biological determination can be expressed in a literal form the effect of which is to normalize human behavior in a way that a collective believes best achieves those purposes. When we try to rationalize the irrational, the affectual purposes we seek for no logical reason, we can do it, but the results are not empirically supportable. These results become the axiomatic bases for collective rationality, the metaphysical structure. This structure is a non-empirical fact deduced from the universal laws induced from the phenomena of many independent conscious experiences. Once we have the deduced universal structure, we can use that structure to deduce many other non-empirical facts that fill in the gaps in our experience and guide our everyday action in the world around us. This is a wholistic process, reasoning from the abstract universal whole to the significance of the concrete phenomena of conscious experience.

The non-empirical facts deduced from an assumed universal structure are held in place rationally, not by their instrumental value, of which they have none, but by their affectual value, representing as they do the mandates of universal purpose. The concrete objects that represent this universal affectual value are called sacred, and the systems that keep these objects in place are called religions. These systems depend for their existence on mutually significant abilities for literal expression among many consciousnesses. The texts that describe these systems are counted among the sacred objects as the absolute sources of their respective rational structures. This rational structure becomes an organizing influence, part of each individual's conscious experience, that binds individuals into a collective and binds the collective into a universal rational structure. The structure asserts an all-encompassing universal influence representing each individual's affectually held purposes, which becomes the source of power and authority in the collective. All of the authors cited in this work have explicitly or implicitly been trying to produce a significant change in the existing metaphysical structure, the universal meaning of the collectively described phenomena of conscious experience.

Historically, idealism has attempted to reduce the domain of reality to the domain of ideas, while retaining the established privileges of the real domain. The effect of this has been to return the subject as an object of interest in inquiry, but to proscribe subjective experience, to limit it to what could be described objectively. Idealism brought back the subject, but only as an object. Subjectively produced abstractions of reality, whatever their source, are still discounted by idealists as non-objective. The historical perspective is brought into doubt by the fact that collective entities, societies, are defined rationally and articulated literally by all humans. There arises in each distinct society a class of norms of behavior which has no basis in individual instrumentality, where instrumentality assumes a collective basis, and is therefore objective only in a collective sense, dealing with ends that are not part of the individual's conscious experience, but are defined by the shared rational structure as necessary to fulfill collective purposes.

Collective norms being essentially non-objective, idealists have had to confront this anomaly, an abstract, subjectively produced, rational structure, and accept it as an empirical fact requiring a significant place in any description of conscious experience. The fact of collective rationality, together with the obvious diversity of human behavior based on collective rationality, leads to the necessary conclusion that the structures are the product of cooperative behavior among individuals in the subjective, rather than the objective, realm. Collective rationality does assume some objective form, but the real form is mainly irrelevant to the ideal meaning each subject associates with it.

Having established that shared subjective structures exist, and that they are objectively diverse, we have found, and I have demonstrated in this study, that it is possible to distinguish some common set of elements to which any rational structure must necessarily conform. These elements are consistent throughout abstract or concrete descriptions. Two relationships between the abstract and concrete have emerged in this discussion: 1) the ideal meanings associated with real phenomena are related to ideal meanings in metaphysical systems of explanation, and 2) the status given to real phenomena affects the dynamics of change in metaphysical systems. While collective metaphysical systems influence the way the individual understands the world, individual experience of the world ultimately influences metaphysical systems.

Legacy of the Realism/Idealism Debate

Describing a mutual interaction between abstract and concrete understanding is a legacy of the polemic interaction between realism and idealism. The legacy of realism is the determinate explanatory value of relations of cause and effect, plus an understanding of the instrumental use of this structure in describing the conditions in which rational action takes place. Cause and effect explanation is relevant to describing every aspect of conscious experience. This is called the objective realm.

The propositions in the brief summary above, associated with the supporting data as offered in this study, constitute empirical substantiation of the following claims:

1) That the interpretations of the authors presented here converge on a single rational structure that I call a wholistic theory of inquiry. Convergence is clear despite differences among the authors' terminology, explicit explanatory structures, and specific emphases or focuses of attention.

2) That this unified rational structure, taken as a total system, is an original development of theory and not simply a restatement of the theory articulated by the authors. The new theory has been built on a systemic understanding of their texts as data, a process of observation and verification. Although all of the standard elements specified in the new theory may be found in some form in each of these authors' works, the complete structure that composes the wholistic theory of inquiry is distinct from that articulated by any of them.

3) That a wholistic theory of inquiry as specified here is crucial to the worldview expressed by each of these authors and is instrumentally relevant to the points and claims that each of these authors is making. Not only would this theory have assisted them if they had used it explicitly, the theory explains the work of these authors individually and collectively, objectively and subjectively.

4) That the most material aspect of the emergence of a wholistic theory of inquiry is not an esoteric, scholastic exercise, but a matter of the correct observation of the empirical facts of everyday life, in particular the polemics that occur between the advocates of the two perspectives of realism and idealism. Although the project represented by this study is by no means complete, I believe the evidence of the emergence of the structure specified here is adequate. The facts are sufficient to establish the existence of some structure, and the facts necessarily describe this specific structure.

5) Finally, the four conclusions given above substantiate the accomplishment of an empirical verification of a wholistic theory of inquiry that was established as the purpose of this study. I claim that, at this time, it is undefendable to understand the interactive phenomena of inquiry and action within a context of conscious experience in any other way.

If these conclusions are accepted, I believe this theory is applicable to a broad range of human experiences and problems. I expect it may also stimulate original work in philosophy, and promote interest in philosophy as a living, engaging, and expanding human endeavor.