A Practical Philosophy    
    for all Fields of Research

Abstract:

• Mathematics: Dooyeweerd helps us avoid category errors, especially among the quantitative, spatial and kinematic aspects.
• Natural sciences: Dooyeweerd helps maintain clear distinctions, and understand relationships between, physico-chemcial and biological concepts, reveals when meaning is 'smuggled in'.
• Psychological sciences: Dooyeweerd clarifies the distinctions and interdependencies between psychical, conceptual, intentional and semiotic concepts.
• Design sciences: Dooyeweerd situates design sciences among others, as those with the formative aspect as core.
• Social sciences: Dooyeweerd offers grounds for clear distinctions and relationships between linguistic, social, economic and aesthetic concepts.
• Societal sciences: Dooyeweerd clarifies the distinction between juridical, ethical and faith issues, and how they depend on and influence each other.

In this way, Dooyeweerd helps each field maintain and develop its own dignity, responsibility and destiny, and can improve interdisciplinary research. As an exemplar, the lingual fields are discussed in greater detail.

Keywords: Integration of research fields; Interdisciplinarity; Meaningfulness; Aspects; Dooyeweerd's philosophy.

1. Introduction

Basden's attempt is only indicative; this article attempts to develop his initial suggestion. We follow Basden in employing a little-known philosophy, of Dooyeweerd (1955), as an integrating foundation. Dooyeweerd's philosophy is highly practical because its starting points are not extant philosophies but everyday experience in its diversity and coherence of meaning. Basden (2019a) believes that Dooyeweerd's philosophy respects what is meaningful in all those fields equally, which contrasts with most philosophies, most of which are applied only in certain fields (Habermas and Luhmann in the social, Marx in the societal, and Aristotle and Liebniz in natural sciences, etc.).

Without an overall view of research as such, reductions occur, often with arrogance. Economics is claimed to be the science of life (Knight 1924/2009) and evolutionist biology, psychology and sociology all claim to explain diverse human behaviours (language, culture, attitudes, beliefs, etc.), physics, to explain life itself and mathematics, to explain physics. Arrogance occurs. Carr (2003) shocked the information systems community with his claim that "IT Doesn't Matter" in business because it no longer offers competitive advantage, no more than street lighting and drains do. The implication in each claim is that we hardly need the other fields; their theoretical accounts can, in principle, be reduced to our favourite one. But on what basis may we discuss and critique reductionism?

Philosophy is the "discipline of disciplines" (Strauss 2009) and is thus the tool with which to paint a picture of all fields together. This paper develops one part of Basden's (2019a) use of Dooyeweerd's philosophy, that each field centres on a core aspect, and briefly discusses some practical implications.

2. Dooyeweerd

2.1 Dooyeweerd's aspects

Against the tendency to reduce diversity, he explored it and found fifteen irreducibly distinct aspects, interplay among which begets the enormous diversity we experience. (Aspects, as in architecture, offer distinct perspectives that cannot be derived from each other.) Each philosophical aspect is a meaning-kernel, as shown in Table 1.

Most scientific areas tend to focus on a different aspect, for example the physical sciences on the physical aspect and the social sciences on the social, and pose different kinds of research question, examples of which are shown in columns 3 and 4 of Table 1. (Here, "fields" and "disciplines" are specialised within areas, each focusing on a core aspect, or several if interdisciplinary).

Table 1 comes from Table 8.1 of Basden (2019a), where the alignment between scientific areas and aspects is noted. Basden (2019a) also suggests that, along with its core aspect each field or discipline tends to take account of neighbouring aspects to a lesser degree, as depicted in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Disciplines centred on aspects

This paper takes Basden's suggestion further by examining what each aspect finds meaningful and the implications this has for research in its corresponding fields. Since full discussion is beyond this paper, exemplars are offered, especially in a fuller discussion of fields centred on the lingual aspect.

2.2 Dooyeweerd's ideas

• All reality is meaningful in at least some ways, a meaningfulness that transcends human attribution of meanings, and potentially in all ways.

• Each aspect is a distinct sphere of the meaningfulness, each equally important, and also a sphere of law. The meaningfulness and laws of each aspect cannot be reduced to that of others (§3-2.3; §4-3.8);

• The meaningfulness of an aspect is better grasped by intuition than by theoretical definition or discussion (§4-3.13).

• Not only are aspects irreducible to each other, there is inter-aspect coherence, of several kinds (§3-2.4). (a) No aspect conflicts with others. (b) Each aspect contains analogical echoes of others (e.g. of physical causality). (c) Each aspect depends on others, as follows.

• There are two directions of inter-aspect dependency (§3-2.4.4). Retrocipation. Each aspect except the first depends foundationally on earlier ones for its fact-side actualization (e.g. social depends on lingual). Antecipation. Each aspect, except the final, depends on later aspects for the full opening up of its potential meaningfulness (e.g. lingual functioning is sterile if not used for social purposes).

• Aspects are modes of being. Though existing (meaningful) in every aspect, each type of thing is qualified by one aspect (§4-3.3; §4-3.4), for example pebbles are physical, poems, aesthetic.

• Each aspect offers a different rationality, a way of making sense or nonsense (§4-3.6). So each field reasons differently.

• Activity/behaviour is constituted in functioning in each aspect (conversation is lingual functioning, enjoying is aesthetic) and is constituted as response to aspectual laws (§4-3.8). Laws are determinative in early aspects and not for later. Every aspect contributes differently to reality's Good, and also defines each kind of dysfunction (negative functioning, evil) - disease (biotic), irrationality (analytic), injustice (juridical). Thus aspects provide fundamental norms that guide behaviour, which are deeper than social norms.

• Functioning in an aspect usually targets other aspects (uttering "The rose is red" functions in the lingual aspect and targets the psychical aspect (colour)). So most activity involves aspects in different ways.

• Aspectual functioning can be subject-object or subject-subject, with two kinds of objects, prior and generated (§4-3.9). Example: in writing to a friend, I am engaged in lingual subject-subject functioning, pen and paper are prior objects and the letter the generated object.

• Unlike most philosophers, Dooyeweerd conceives reality as showing two 'sides' (§4-3.8.1), a law-side which is the aspects, and a fact-side (or subject-side), which is all that actually occurs and exists. The law-side enables and guides the fact-side.

• Radical in Dooyeweerd is that occurrence, being and normativity together all derive from aspects and thus are fundamentally integrated.

• All activity is multi-aspectual functioning (e.g. conversation also involves psychical sensorimotor emitting and hearing sounds, formative construction of utterances, taking account of social situation, and so on). Thus almost all activity may be validly studied by different fields from different aspects, but full understanding requires interdisciplinary research. Everyday experience involves multi-aspectual functioning (§4-3.8.2).

• Research operates by abstracting aspects of full multi-aspectual reality (§6-3.2). The mandate of research in each science is to help humanity understand the laws of aspects and thus open up their potential, for the good of all (§4-3.8.3).

• Since what enables us to abstract aspects is itself a functioning in the aspects - analytic (reasoning), pistic (relying on a conceptual model), etc. - Dooyeweerd warns (1955,II, 556) that no suite of aspects can ever be final truth, but at best only a good guess (§9-4).

2.3 Dooyeweerd and research

• To gain research data, researchers abstract core aspects (and maybe neighbours) from reality (§6-3.3; §7-1.2).

• To generate new knowledge from research data requires reasoning according to the rationalities of the core aspect, its neighbours, and those of the analysis method (e.g. quantitative). This generates research findings, which are published. (§6-3.4; §7-1.3)

• Critique of findings by the community requires awareness of wider meaningfulness, i.e. further aspects (§6-3.5; §7-1.4), especially when a paradigm shift occurs, which usually involves recognition of aspects previously overlooked (§8-2.2).

Research methods differ for each field because they collect data from different aspects (core and neighbours) and are informed by different aspectual rationalities (§8-1.2). For example, linguistics takes account of the lingual aspect, the formative (sentence structure) and the analytic (in vocabularies) and, antecipatorily, the social (contexts).

Thus it is valid for a science to focus on one core aspect but harmful reductionism occurs when it presumes that aspect is the only one of importance, and/or that all else can be fully explained in terms of its aspect (§3-2.3).

3. Aspects and their fields

A full treatment of each aspect would include (a) what is meaningful as research focus, (b) links with other aspects, (c) which rationalities and methodologies are appropriate, (d) which fields or disciplines have this aspect as core, (e) philosophical discussion of what the field covers, (f) a review of the history of the (discourses in the) field seen through the lens of aspects as what each discourse finds meaningful. Space limitations however prevent full treatment so (f) is discussed only for the lingual aspect, to exemplify the rich capabilities of an aspectual perspective.

3.1 The mathematical aspects and their fields

The quantitative aspect concerns discrete amount, about which "more" and "less" are meaningful. Its rationality and functioning include the arithmetic operations. Arithmetic and statistics are quantitative fields. Research in this aspect can be about fractions, prime numbers, sequences, infinity and so on. What the amount is of (sand, cars, ideas, sides of triangle, etc.) is no concern of the quantitative aspect itself except as a target of its functioning.

The spatial aspect concerns continuous extension. It introduces simultaneity (for example the three sides of triangle must occur together). Its rationality is geometric and topological (trigonometry transduces spatial to quantitative). Length, distance and area are quantitative functioning targeting the spatial, whereas concepts like inside or surrounding are purely spatial. Spatiality is continuous.

The kinematic aspect concerns movement, making concepts like route, divergence and rotation meaningful. Mechanics and animation are kinematic disciplines, which antecipate the physical and psychical respectively.

Zeno's paradox (Achilles-tortoise race) occurs when we try to reduce movement to a sequence of spatial points.

3.2 The physical aspect and fields

3.3 The organic-biotic aspect and fields

But what constitutes life? Evolutionist biology suggests reproduction, but Maturana & Varela (1980) argue for the wider notion of self-production (autopoiesis). This tries to explain organic-biotic functioning as physico-chemical but it 'smuggles in' meaning from the biotic aspect. Smuggling in meaning from later aspects is found in several fields. Dooyeweerd's idea of biotic functioning non-causally dependent on physical-chemical offers a sounder paradigm but it has yet to be explored.

3.4 The psychical aspect and fields

3.5 The analytic aspect and fields

3.6 The formative aspect and fields

3.7 The lingual aspect and fields

The fields of linguistics, semiotics and hermeneutics have gradually arrived at a similar conclusion, as have those of information systems and knowledge representation (Basden & Klein 2008), from which some of the following overview is drawn. Frege, a mathematician, asking how and why mathematical symbols can stand for (signify, express) anything, highlighted the difference between sense and reference. However, he could never properly define sense, linking it vaguely to "thoughts". Chomsky saw language as a (supervening) property of mental states that develops in the individual as internal I-language. Though acknowledging an external, social E-language, he believed only the I-language to be worthy of study. Morris and Skinner reduced language to behaviour: as stimulus and response of individuals.

Piaget was interested in cognitive structures, such as cognitive maps, a major application of which happens to be to language. Like the Chomskian perspective, Piaget focused on the individual rather than the group, but unlike it, was interested in the reader/hearer as well as the writer/speaker.

Peirce, Austin, Searle and Wittgenstein were interested in what language 'does' in everyday life. Peirce explored the relationship between sign, object signified and the (human) signifier as a whole. Austin and Searle developed Speech Act Theory (SAT), especially in fostering social interaction. Wittgenstein developed the notion of language games. Speech act theory enables us to differentiate between defective and successful speech acts by means of normative rules.

Whereas SAT focuses on single acts and individual utterances, the key notion of the Language-Action Perspective (LAP) (Goldkuhl & Lyytinen 1982) is that utterances are part of on-going conversations and cannot be understood properly apart from social/ communal activity and shared understanding of meaning. Its roots lie in Habermas, whose Theory of Communicative Action explores the conditions that make good conversation possible (truth, sincerity and appropriateness) the links between lingual and social functioning, five kinds of social action) and how these affect each other and types of rationality. "Rational" social action may be undermined by inability to obtain proper information, by subjective bias (including lack of understanding) and by distortions due to conflicts of interest, power relations or unjust social conditions (lingual, analytic, social and pistic aspects).

The Linguistic Turn in philosophy applied lingual concepts to philosophy. Gadamer was concerned especially with the hermeneutic cycle involved in interpreting texts, Derrida, with relationships among texts (intertextuality) and Ricoeur, with engagement with others via texts. They began to recognise that, as Derrida famously put it, "All is text": all reality is meaningful rather than meaningless. It was with this wider meaningfulness that Dooyeweerd (1955) began and which he explored, and such lingual objects as texts, words, speech acts and conversations operate within an "ocean of meaningfulness" (Basden 2019b), which is the coherence of aspects in which all other functioning also operates.

Whereas the above fields study linguality itself, the information systems (IS) Field studies the application of information technology. While many held the field to be "socio-technical," Lee (2004) drew attention to the aspect between them: the lingual (information). Others try to work out what information (in computers) is. Checkland & Holwell (1992) are typical in differentiating information from, and relating it to, data, knowledge and 'capta', and Jennings (2000) brings in the social. The field of knowledge representation, and its companion, knowledge elicitation, struggles with the challenges of expressing meanings in symbols as precisely and fully as possible.

Disparate discourses have arisen from the work of each of these thinkers. Yet, instead of a fragmented picture, we may employ Dooyeweerd's aspects (as diversity and coherence of meaningfulness) to understand the validity of each discourse and some of the relationships among them. Each is concerned with a secondary aspect alongside the core lingual aspect; these are shown in Table 2. The reason for interest therein is given in column 3, and the kind of inter-aspect relationship involved, in column 4.

This picture of the field is not complete, but may be taken as an exemplar of how aspectual analysis of discourses in a field may be carried out. The depiction here is more complex than in Figure 1 because, though the neighbouring aspects are important, so too are others, in making our real-life lingual activity what it is. We see the discourses gradually opening up the "coherence of meaning" of the lingual with other aspects.

3.8 The social aspect and fields

As Habermas recognised, the social aspect depends foundationally on the lingual: very little social functioning can proceed without lingual activity. Habermas verged on reducing the social to the lingual, but Luhmann recognised the irreducibility of the social to the lingual.

The social aspect introduces the possibility of social structures, raising the question of how this affects and is affected by individual agency (the macro-micro issue). Giddens' Structuration Theory has therefore proven useful. Basden (2018) suggests that it may be affirmed, critiqued and enriched using Dooyeweerd, but that has yet to be worked out.

Many in the social sciences quietly presume that all post-social functioning can be explained in terms of the social, but Dooyeweerd argues that economics, aesthetics, juridicality, attitudes and faith, though depending on the social, cannot be reduced thereto but their "sphere sovereignty" must be respected.

3.9 The economic aspect and fields

Currency is lingual expression of quantitative transduction of value; hence banking and finance. Production adds a strong formative aspect. Yet it may be the field of conservation that most closely expresses the kernel norm of this aspect, which implies that a Dooyeweerdian view might become increasingly useful in a resource-limited future.

3.10 The aesthetic aspect and fields

3.11 The juridical aspect and fields

Dooyeweerd was himself Professor of Jurisprudence and developed an extensive philosophy of law. Chaplin (2011) argues that Dooyeweerd's ideas can clarify and enhance contemporary concepts of the state and civil society.

3.12 The ethical aspect and fields

3.13 The pistic aspect and fields

4. Discussion and conclusion

1. It offers a basis for critique of claims made by fields, especially to reductionism, by clarifying the core meaningfulness of each field, and thus its limitations. Each reduction (to economic (Knight 1924/2009), evolutionist/biotic, sociological, mathematical aspects etc.) rightly draws attention to the meaningfulness of its aspect but needs to humbly acknowledge the equal importance of all others. Carr's (2003) claim that "IT doesn't matter" reveals (a) arrogant disregard for the dependency of the economic aspect on the lingual, (b) misunderstanding of the kernel meaningfulness of the economic aspect as competition rather than frugality.

2. It can reveal the value of ideas and where they fit. For example, Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action may be seen as an exploration of how lingual and social functioning depend on each other (antecipation and retrocipation) along with lesser dependencies on other aspects.

3. It helps researchers understand the relationship between their fields, in terms of core and neighbouring aspects. Example from above: Understanding the lingual aspect reveals a surprising link between linguistics and information systems. Cross-area fields like physiology have a twin-aspect core. Interdisciplinary research may be firmly grounded on common respect for the distinct meaningfulness of each aspect and on inter-aspect dependency.

4. The nature of mixed methods research might be clarified as aspectual qualifications of quantitative and qualitative methods (quantitative, analytical), both targeting the field's core aspect. This can clarify the role of each in research.

5. It can help researchers separate out the concepts they encounter, and understand the relationships among them. For example in Davis' (1989) classic research on technology acceptance, we can see the core formative aspect in usefulness, ease of use and intention to use, the economic aspect in productivity, the pistic aspect in attitude to technology, and the quantitative and analytic aspect in conceptualising, hypothesizing and statistically measuring and so on (see Basden (2019a)).

6. In several fields, objectivists and social constructivists have talked past, and denigrated, each other, to the overall detriment of the field. This may be explained by their arriving from different ends of the aspectual spectrum, along which predictability decreases, and complexity and normative implications increase, with each aspect. Understanding this can facilitate and encourage fruitful, non-traducing discourse between them.

7. It helps us understand the history of a field and how each of its discourses can contribute to the area's body of knowledge, in a way that integrates them. This has been illustrated for the lingual aspect.

Basden's (2019a) exploration of how Dooyeweerd's ideas apply across all fields may be seen as only a start, which this paper has begun to explore. It now behoves researchers and thinkers in all fields to critically take that exploration further. Taking account of the diversity and coherence of meaningfulness as expressed in aspects can help researchers not only clarify many things but also adopt the modest, self-critical, inclusive attitude that is conducive to improving the quality of research.

References

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See Description of FPR: Adventures.

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See also

For a fuller discussion of Dooyeweerd's aspects, see: "http://dooy.info/aspects.html".

See also Summary of Dooyeweerd for Researchers (In Any Fiels).

To contact us concerning this paper, see http://dooy.info/contact.html. Thank you.