Even Descartes conceded context tangle defeats his own reductive method

Evidence

Although Descartes’ plan for reducing complexity in the universe to a structured order was comprehensive, he discovered that the very problem that Aristotle had perceived in the method of Plato was inherent in his own scheme. That problem was the intrinsic difficulty, if not impossibility, of successfully abstracting the form or structure of reality from the tangled web of its physical, material, environmental context. Structures are in fact not independent of their contexts, as this third assumption stated, but integrally tied to them. In fact, Descartes was forced to admit, “the application of the laws of motion is difficult, because each body is touched by several others at the same time… . The rules presuppose that bodies are perfectly hard and separable from all others … and we do not observe this in the world.” The enormous complexity of things thus inhibits the analysis in terms of simple elements. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 863

Categorization

• XREF: Could fuel a polyad essay on the limits of reductionism against ecological interdependence — pairs with the planters/organic threads. — connects to: Descartes’ certainty program reduced nature to quantifiable primary qualities — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 795; Method can fail through either dogmatic generality or atomistic localism; Relying on isolated phrases ripped from context commits a fallacy — Ruggero J. Aldisert, Agatha D. Aldisert, Logic for Lawyers- A Guide to Clear…, 1232
• DEEPTHINKING: The admission by mechanism’s architect that context is irreducible sits at the root of both ecology’s challenge and the book’s whole thesis.

Broader Connections

• Relying on isolated phrases ripped from context commits a fallacy #corroborates (0.80) — Ruggero J. Aldisert, Agatha D. Aldisert, Logic for Lawyers- A Guide to Clear…, 1232
• Method can fail through either dogmatic generality or atomistic localism #expands (0.78)