Selection and Speculation

Process and Reality ends with a warning: ‘[t]he chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence’ (PR, 337). Although this danger of narrowness might emerge from the ‘idiosyncrasies and timidities of particular authors, of particular social groups, of particular schools of thought, of particular epochs in the history of civilization’ (PR, 337), we should not be mistaken: it occurs within philosophy, in its activity, its method. And the fact that this issue arises at the end of Process and Reality reveals the ambition that has accompanied its composition: Whitehead has resisted this danger through the form and ambition of his speculative construction. The temptation of a narrowness in selection attempts to expel speculative philosophy at the same time as it haunts each part of its system.

At the origin of the ‘selection’ is a confusion between the methods of science and the methods of philosophy. The former have different modes and aims. ‘The field of a special science is confined to one genus of facts, in the sense that no statements are made respecting facts which lie outside that genus’ (PR, 9). The knowledge formed within this ‘field’ is termed a ‘specific knowledge’, and is possible only by way of a set of operations of simplification and selection that inscribe ‘facts’ into a space of reference. Beneath the seeming overtness of the statements of a specific knowledge, radical transformations of experience take place, the most obvious expression of which is the ‘bifurcation of nature’ that characterises the modern sciences.