John Dupré: The Disorder of Things

(book review by Katalin Turai for ’Science and Society’)

John Dupré’s The Disorder of Things is an ambitious book. The author sees the potential
significance of his work in altering our approach to science, namely, he would like us to
reconsider the authoritative status we grant science, to alter the ways scientific inquiry is
encouraged and to warn against so-called scientific findings having an uncontested say in the
ways we carry on our lives. (p.244.)

The upshot of Dupré’s book is that a misguided conception of science – based on the
pernicious metaphysical dogmas of essentialism, reductionism and determinism -
compromises our wellbeing since by tipping over the age-old nature versus nurture debate
and emphasizing the dominant role of a nature, it instigates us to feel less and less responsible
for our actions and for the shape of the world we live in.

His first and foremost contention is that science is not a unified field, neither its methodology
nor its content could be defined by a set of characteristics valid for all. Rather the concept of
science is what Wittgenstein would call a ’family resemblance concept.’

Furthermore Dupré claims that science is not and can not be unified because our reality is not
unified either. Dupré describes our world as ’promiscuous reality’, we have bodies of
knowledge based on our various experiences of reality, but these experiences are so
heterogeneous that they cannot be connected into forming a grand system, where everything
would fall in place. Nevertheless, he does see scientific practice as founded on the various
empirical realities yielding various bodies of knowledge whose reliability can be tested and
certified also to a varying degree. According to Dupré’s metaphysical assertion there are
countless kinds of things, subject each to its characteristic behavior and interactions and
strategies of investigation for dissimilar kinds are also dissimilar, yet, these various
investigations can be ranked as having more or less epistemic virtues. In sum, he holds that
science is best seen as a family resemblance concept referring to bodies of knowledge which
possess epistemic virtues, though not necessarily the same virtues and not necessarily to the
same degree. The virtues he has in mind among other are: „sensitivity to empirical fact,
plausible background assumptions, coherence with other things we know, exposure to
criticism from the widest variety of sources.” (p.243.)

Obviously, the foremost question for any reader is, how successful is Dupré in establishing
his claims. Dupré seeks to convince us by demonstrating the falsity of a number of
interrelated metaphysical claims underlying present conceptions of science. He observes that
while scientific practice has always relied on theoretical assumptions that do not come from
empirical research, yet, enable its framing, these assumptions should not be looked upon as
metaphysical truths – as they commonly are, but only as „sets of assumptions that proved the
most fruitful in history in suggesting strategies of investigation and in interpreting the results
of those investigations.” (p.2.)

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The three dogmas he endevours to uproot are essentialism, reductionism and determinism, to
which he dedicates almost three quarters of his book.

Essentialism is attacked on the bases that there is no ultimate way to classify things rather
„there are many equally legitimate ways of dividing the world into kinds” (p.7.) If
essentialism were true than we could always declare of a thing that it is a member of a
particular natural kind since it possesses a certain essential property both necessary and
sufficient to belong to that kind. However, as Part One of the book - featuring biology as a
model science - aptly demonstrates, biological organisms do not have any essential properties
that would make them fulfil the above requirement. It remains to be seen whether other
constituents of our universe, like the materials of the periodic table or particles are also devoid
of an essence - thus it is not clear how we get from biology to everything else – still, Part One
is a thoughtful presentation against the essentialist case concerning living organisms. Its
culminating chapter discusses classificatiry problems of biological sex and highlights the
fallacy of expecting a certain behavior to follow lawfully and necessarily from a supposedly
given nature. Against essentialism Dupré advocates ’categorical empiricism’ an approach
which would leave it entirely to empirical investigation how homogenous or different the
members of a certain kind prove to be. Homogeneity is not an a priori, but an empirical
question insists Dupré.

Analogous to the fallacy of believing that an essence should determine the behaviour of an
object, is the fallacy of believing that understanding constituent parts would lead to
understanding the operations of an entity as a whole. Reductionism is the theme of the second
part of the book dealing with ecology, genetics and psychology, fields where reductionism
spectacularly does not work.

Dupré’s attack on essentialism and reductionism leads him conveniently into challenging
conceptions of determinism. Since a central idea behind essentialism is that: „the essence of a
thing will determine to which laws of nature that thing is subject” (p.171.) and since Dupré
takes it to have demonstrated that things do not have essences, the question opens up on what
will it hinge that the behaviour of a certain entity depends on a certain law. Dupré believes
that the prevalence of causal order in nature is much less characteristic than we suppose and
that the degree of causal structure in different parts of the world may be quite variable.
(p.174) His main argument for this is based on so-called probabilistic laws which can only
give a probabilistic account of what a certain entitity might do, e.g. we can never determine
with precision where a given electron can be found in space around a given nucleus, we may
only make an estimate. Dupré points out that causally determined objects always interact with
objects whose behaviour is indeterministic, thus looking at nature as a whole indeterminacy
will be the rule.

My general observation is that Dupré is more successful in demonstrating his epistemiological

thesis than his ontological claims. While it can be well demonstrated that scientific research is
unable to unravel the causes of a certain event, it does not follow that the age old intuition that
everything has a cause is incorrect. Only, it remains to be a disquieting question what might

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count as a cause. As for promiscuous realism being an ontological thesis, I think what Dupré
does is more a redefinition of what counts as real for us than an ultimate thesis on what there
is.

I find that Dupré’s outlook against the backdrop of a wide array of contemporary scientific
examples, is philosophically still not much more than a reinterpretation of Kant’s notion of
science relying on regulative principles, principles which by definition function to help us
systematize nature as if it were unified while the ultimate nature of reality remains to be
unknown. Nonetheless the timeliness of such a reinterpretation is considerable.