The Psychological Foundations of Culture

Abstract

Abstract Disciplines such as astronomy, chemistry, physics, geology, and biology have developed a robust combination of logical coherence, causal description, explanatory power, and testability, and have become examples of how reliable and deeply satisfying human knowledge can become. Their extraordinary florescence throughout this century has resulted in far more than just individual progress within each field. These disciplines are becoming integrated into an increasingly seamless system of interconnected knowledge and remain nominally separated more out of educational convenience and institutional inertia than because of any genuine ruptures in the underlying unity of the achieved knowledge. In fact, this development is only an acceleration of the process of conceptual unification that has been building in science since the Renaissance. For example, Galileo and Newton broke down the then rigid (and now forgotten) division between the celestial and the terrestrial-two domains that formerly had been considered metaphysically separate-showing that the same processes and principles applied to both. Lyell broke down the distinction between the static present and the formative past, between the creative processes operating in the present and the geological processes that had operated across deep time to sculpt the earth. Maxwell uncovered the elegant principles that unified the many disparate electrical and magnetic phenomena into a single system.

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