Topics Existence

Question This is a two part question. I have for some time been fascinated by the idea of holism, the idea that systems must be understood as wholes rather than collections of parts. Some have interpreted this to mean a subsuming of the parts into their relations; I believe this is not the case, rather that the individual parts must be placed within the context of the whole in order to understand them fully. Could clear up the definition between these views, and elaborate? The second question is, could it be evidence for holism that things seem to be defined as wholes? E.g., when something is broken, it is because it no longer functions as a whole, or human bodies being defined as wholes (albeit a human being is arguably more than their body so as to avoid any kind of discrimination). I hesitate because it seems that I have heard of a logical fallacy of this kind, but I don't remember what it was.

Accepted:
June 26, 2014

Comments

Holism is a pretty puzzling concept.

I'm not sure the bit about "defined as wholes" necessarily gets it. Suppose I have a chair and I break one of the legs. Then I can't use it as a chair anymore, but if there's a holism here, it seems to be a thin variety. Unless we insist that spatial relations are automatically holistic, then for something to be a chair, it suffices for it to be made up of parts that have a certain spatial configuration. Of course, we single out chairs among various possible configurations because they suit certain of our purposes, but an intact chair seems to me to be no more or less a "whole" than a chair with a missing leg. The broken chair isn't a whole chair, but there doesn't seem to be much metaphysical significance there.

Here's the only case I can think of that seems to me a clear case of holism. In classical physics, the state of a whole physical system is just the aggregate, so to speak of the states of the parts. If we're given the position and the momentum of each part of a classical physical system, we are thereby given the state of the whole. We might say that states like this are "conjunctive." In quantum mechanics, there's a different possibility. There are states of two quantum systems that aren't determined by the parts in this way. From the state of the whole, you can infer states for the parts, but from the states of the parts, you can't infer the state of the whole. These states are "entangled" in the argot of quantum theory, and they are ubiquitous and important. (Without them, chemical bonds wouldn't exist, for example.)

This brings us to a more general way of thinking about holism: the idea of supervenience. As an example: suppose you look at a computer screen and see an image. The state of each pixel completely determines what image will be on the screen. That means the facts about the image supervene on the facts about the pixels. One way to think about non-holism is to say that we don't have holism when the facts about the whole supervene on or are fixed by the facts about the parts. If this kind of supervenience breaks down, then, we have holism. That's exactly what the case of entangled quantum states comes to. The state of the pair of systems (or larger collection) need not supervene on the states of the parts.

This is almost certainly not the only reasonable way to think about holism; systems with feedback mechanism are another case that some people describe as holistic. I'll leave it to others to judge whether they're as interesting metaphysically, but in any case, the quantum example seems to me to be a good one. I'm inclined to say that if quantum entanglement doesn't count as holism, then nothing does.