Browsing: functional

Introduction. One of the unfulfilled ideals of the modern mind is that of “unity of science”. It is, at the core, a reductive ideal. A key part part of its reductive approach consists, most often, in finding matches between the kinds one employs to theorize about certain processes and unique types of entities on a lower level in a mereological scale. This is widely assumed to provide reductions of the theory on the upper level to that on the lower one, and ultimately to the most basic, namely that of physics. Nevertheless this ideal, according to which every type of entity has to be shown to be ultimately equated with a definite type of microstructure, has been vehemently challenged.

Aim of the study. The paper examines a few methods for drawing categories that can be employed in special sciences. By examining some of the core phenomena that laid the basis of the most prominent approaches to typing in special sciences, it shows that we must accept a novel approach to delineating scientific kinds. Its peculiarity is that makes the latter parts of an array of structures, rather than possessing a fixed one. This can provide with a useful principal line of approach the leaders attempting to organize complex and evolving phenomena.
Keywords: concepts, special sciences, epistemology, evolution, functional, organization