Abstract
Natural philosophers and scientists have always struggled for the unity of the world believing that there is only one reality as the ultimate framework for the infinity of phenomena that can be observed. However, to this date there is no accepted unified view of this world, and it is unlikely that there will be one in the near future. Instead of one all-explaining science or theory, there are many scientific disciplines, and most of them have little, if anything, in common. But even worse, within one and the same discipline, the logical and semantical connections between different areas are not always clear, for example, in physics between the microscopic and the macroscopic domains, in biosciences between molecular biology and organic biology, in social sciences between sociology and economics. Each of these disciplines and sub-disciplines seems to have phenomena, concepts and laws (if there are laws recognized at all) of its own irreducible to and unconnected with those of other disciplines and areas. At the end it seems that there is not one world, but as many worlds as disciplines and sub-disciplines of sciences exist, let alone all those worlds of non-scientific experience.
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Notes and References
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See F.J. Ayala, T. Dobzhansky (eds.), Studies in the Philosophy of Biology, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974.
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See U. an der Heiden, G. Roth, and H. Schwegler, »Principles of Self-Generation and Self-Maintenance«, Acta Biotheoretica 34 (1985), 125–138; »Die Organisation der Organismen. Selbstherstellung und Selbsterhaltung«, Funkt. Biol. Med. 5 (1986), 330–346.
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For example, a combination of PET-scan tomography and NMR technique, see M.E. Raichle, »Neuroimaging«, Trends in Neurosciences 9 (1986), 525–529.
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Roth, G., Schwegler, H. (1990). Self-Organization, Emergent Properties and the Unity of the World. In: Krohn, W., Küppers, G., Nowotny, H. (eds) Selforganization. Sociology of the Sciences, vol 14. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2975-8_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2975-8_3
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