Taking Apart the World and Putting it Back Together Again
The Footprint of an Elusive Beast.—Science does not begin with a blank slate, where concept formation occurs as a kind of epistemic creatio ex nihilo. On the contrary, we begin with naïve concepts, folk concepts, so hoary with age that their origins are unknown to us. Imperfect though they may be, these folk concepts are our first signposts of knowledge. Around them, we build a conceptual framework to takes us deeper into once inaccessible conceptual terrain—with each plunge penetrating further into the heart of reality, at times dredging up foundations once imagined to be beyond the scope of reason. Eventually, the conceptual framework we construct will be composed of much more precise and quantitative concepts than the folk concept with which we began, and so we undertake the rational reconstruction of the folk concept itself, displacing whatever irrational accretions still cling to that relic. Still, the science was formed around that imperfect folk concept, and its crude impression remains on the science like a footprint of an elusive beast; while unseen, its presence is felt. In the fullness of time, this science will enter into the constitution of other sciences, which have need of its specialized conceptions, and the complementary abstractions at play in multidisciplinary sciences will mingle and bring together once again, in a sublimated form, those primitive elements of the world that formed the original ground of knowledge. From this unlikely epistemic milieu there is the possibility of returning to the ultimate ground of knowledge. For folk concepts, whatever their fault (and these are many), preserve in themselves a relation to the world mediated by passion, not reason, and in activating a passionate engagement with the world, new perspectives on knowledge, and possibly even new sciences, may present themselves.