Restoring realism: themes and variations

Abstract

In the critical tradition, environmental education discourse interrogates how knowledge constructs experience. But environmental education also emphasises perceiving, understanding and responding to “more-than-human” beings and processes. These two motivations are in tension. One problem is that the epistemological orientation driving the critique of knowledge seems to render access to something more-than-human a priori impossible. But environmental education squanders its promise and its dream if only ever permitted to talk about the natural world with scarequotes. Our field urgently needs to develop a realism robust against epistemologies that construct impassable barriers between humans and the rest of creation. I propose that this starts with radically reconceiving the nature and relationship between similarity and difference, interpreted in this article as the dynamic between theme and variations. Reworking Windelband’s distinction between idiographic and nomothetic research, I suggest that the relationship between theme and variation manifests a fundamental ontological pattern that pervades all things. “Theme and variation” proposes a unifying metaphysical duality in which the more-than-human reveals itself in how things suggest, conform to, modulate, and violate generalisation. Acknowledging and investigating this is part of restoring to other beings and processes their metaphysical, aesthetic, and ethical status, from the skies to the psyche.

Keywords:

• idiographic
• nomothetic
• realism
• environmental philosophy
• new materialism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For Kant, human faculties provided the conditions for the possibility of knowledge. Philosophical arguments that seek the conditions for the possibility for something are known as transcendental arguments. The realist reversal is also a transcendental argument, maintaining that the more-than-human is the condition for the possibility of even Kantian forms of constructivist knowing.

2 Transforming Aristotle’s (and then Kant’s (1918)) language, he insisted that the logical difference was that one is seeking “apodictic” claims while the other is seeking singular “assertoric” claims. The major difference between Windelband and Kant is that Kant used the word apodictic primarily to refer to necessary and universal nonempirical knowledge, such as that in mathematics. Winderband’s aim is to describe universally and generally repeatable patterns inducted from sets of experience, which is more akin to Kant’s (1918) synthetic a priori knowledge.

3 Windelband is therefore not a precursor to the subsequent distinction in research methods between quantitative and qualitative studies. Quantitative studies are not necessarily nomothetic because they usually involve ascertaining what is statistically common or significant across a population. This leads one to ignore that which does not conform to the general pattern. But nomothetic science is the study of what is necessary and universal across all particulars within a population. It is not a science of probability. For this reason, qualitative inquiry can be nomothetic, not merely in the case of something like grounded theory (e.g. Glaser 1992), but in the common approach to data analysis that codes for themes at the expense of paying attention to what is unique across instances. Conversely, there seems no necessary reason why numbers or mathematics could not be used in some branches of idiographic study (for example, examining a gene mutation’s effects on cellular development might involve considerable modelling even if not transferable to other contexts). Quantitative approaches might also be used to identify an interesting outlier which can then be explored idiographically.

4 And often is, though increasingly probability seen as a facet of the world and not merely a tool to identify generality.

5 A metaphysical universal refers to common aspects that persists across specific entities independently of humans. A logical universal is a universal constructed by knowing. Beings construct logical universals in attempts to understand and interact with metaphysical universals. In so doing, variations on metaphysical themes emerge. Metaphysical universals are temporally unfolding, and each new instant gives rise to a new version of the type. But the type is a dynamic process. The act of constructing logical universals is also a dynamic process. Once constructed, logical universals may appear abstract and timeless. This happens when universals are presented as propositions considered in isolation from the events that led to them and the ways the proposition might be subsequently altered or overthrown. When considered in isolation, a universal appears as a mental construct divorced from the world it emerged from and is in ongoing intercourse with. In both the process of generating metaphysical and logical universals, the universe is generating themes through each of its variations. For as long as they persist, universals can be experienced as themes, in the form of habits, rhythm, relations, and rationality. But these themes are themselves susceptible to modification or annihilation, so no universal is truly universal outside of specific timescales. The formation of logical universals is itself an ongoing interaction with the world. It can take on various characters, from their getting progressively calibrated and reconstructed by the resistance of the metaphysical universals, to more transactional encounters, where acting on the basis of logical universals changes the very metaphysical universals one is attempting to engage. In any case, the outcome is a collaboration, a dynamically performed fusion where the metaphysical and the logical home in on one another.

6 If some set of languages were found to be evolving in some similar way, this would be a nomothetic approach to thinking about evolution (the mode of change would not itself change across particulars. But one is still able to study each’s unique evolution despite being subjected to whatever common factor).

7 Of course, there may well be a set of “bird-cat” relations -the way cats and birds tend to co-evolve relationships together.

8 in fact, there is currently no evidence that any two atoms of an element are identical. The concept of an “equivalence relation” is a useful abstraction, it has never been empirically verified.

9 In cheeky defiance to trends in new materialism, I am deliberately putting these two words into unison without employing them in the way (or through the suite of terms) now becoming doctrinaire (and therefore in contradiction to the very evolutionary motivations of the Wizard who first coupled them).

10 I do not claim these are preset programmes encoded genetically, which is a homuncular explanation of the genesis of information. See Oyama (2000) for a materialist conception of how predictable or common “instincts” are repeatedly generated through webs of causal interactions between genes, cells, and environments.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ramsey Affifi

Ramsey Affifi is Lecturer in Science (Biology) Education and Environmental Philosophy.