Parts & Wholes Daniel Lerner (ed) MIT
The Free Press of Glencoe NY 1963
I first came across this last year, but reread it with pleasure. It's the proceedings of a colloquium at MIT, the third in a series dealing with common problems of concept & method in fields of modern knowledge. For example, particle physics, magnetism which depends on all or nearly all the electrons pointing the same way, how this changes with temperature and how they decide to do it even though they are all the same & indistinguishable. Which raises the spooky idea that electrons are as individual as humans if we only looked at them in the right way.
There's a lovely piece by Kuznets on parts & wholes in economics which I really wish I could have read when I was at college; instead of pretending that there was nothing arbitrary about the level of analysis & the consequent derivation of theory I might have understood that struggling with this was part of the charm of the intellectual challenge of economics instead of coming away with the belief that it was deeply intellectually dishonest.
The final piece has the disarming title "How Does A Poem Know When It Is Finished?" by IA Richards, which unfortunately does not live up to expectations
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