Natural Science Model

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Conceptual Overview and Discussion

The natural science model has had a beneficial impact on the development of knowledge across the disciplines. With modern natural science comes the affirmation of empirical evidence and the scientific method, as well as challenge to unsupported assumptions about human nature, race, and the origins of the universe. The experimental method continues to provide new insights as to elementary particles in physics, brain functioning, and natural selection, among other disciplines.

Yet conceptions of natural science are themselves subject to debate. Scientific discovery is the fruit of a circuitous path of insight, conjecture, skepticism, and persuasion. The variety of modes of discovery in natural science is often misrepresented as a straightforward linear narrative of hypothesis testing and experimentation by rational thinkers. This view omits any consideration of the stubborn persistence of prevailing paradigms that Thomas Kuhn described in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, or the roles of serendipity and metaphor in scientific investigations that Arthur Koestler describes in The Sleepwalkers. While hypotheses are indeed subjected to testing, as the idealized perspective mandates, investigators have derived their initial theories from religious inspiration, mathematical constructs, and hunches, as well as observation.

While enlightenment scientists identified universal natural laws with increasing confidence, recent developments in natural science have shaken deterministic thinking. The uncertainty quantum physics finds at the subatomic level combined with the surprising notion of local “singularities” where natural laws fail to apply, reinforce the more tentative spirit of pragmatist approaches and weaken deterministic models. On the other hand, some currents in social science remain trapped in outmoded conceptions of science. For example, the dogmatic core of neoclassical economics is founded on a confident accounting of economic law as derived from natural law. Many quarters in social science have followed neoclassical economics in this misappropriation of scientific certainties.

The controversies of scientific socialism as elaborated by Karl Marx, of social Darwinism as argued by Herbert Spencer, and sociobiology as defended by E. O. Wilson derive in part from the questionable extension of conceptions from natural science to the social sciences. In each case, dogmatism and distortion have weakened the argument. For example, Marx embraced the classical economists' confident assertions of natural laws. Herbert Spencer exaggerated the role of competition and denied the role of cooperation in natural selection so as to justify “survival of the fittest” as a law for society. E. O. Wilson found the answer in genetic determinism to myriad questions of human behavior despite enormous unexplained variance in culture and custom.

On the other hand, general systems theory, developed in the natural sciences by Ludwig von Bertalanffy and imported by Kenneth Boulding, Daniel Katz, and Robert Kahn and others into the social sciences, introduces pluralist conceptions of causality (equifinality) and admits of distinctions in the characteristics of systems in inanimate, organic, and human contexts. Thus it better accommodates the characteristics of human society, unlike social Darwinism and sociobiology. Boulding distinguished systems on eight levels of complexity and emphasized the care with which systems theory should be applied across disciplines and contexts. Despite flaws, systems theory suggests a nuanced vision of unity in the sciences.

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