The Unlimited Community: A Study Of The Possibility Of Social Science by Julius W. Friend
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A Systems Theory of Measurement

Julius Friend has a very particular issue in mind throughout The Unlimited Community: Nominalism, in both its linguistic and metaphysical varieties. Nominalism denies the existence of ‘universals’ - essentially all but proper nouns which designate individual things - and ‘abstractions’ - purported things which can neither be pointed to nor physically ‘kicked’ to demonstrate their existence.

Nominalism is of central importance to Friend because it denies, among other things, the existence of the very thing he most wants to discuss, namely communities of inquiry, that is to say, science. Friend sees Nominalism around every corner: for him most scientists are Nominalist (although science itself opposes it); as are Protestants, mystics, and the Ancient Greek sophists. Thomas More was a nominalist, as were Descartes, Galileo, Newton, and even, on occasion, Thomas Hobbes. Immanuel Kant, Friend says, is the philosophical figure in which all the threads of Nominalism are joined together, the Mother of All Nominalists, to coin a phrase. So Nominalism doesn’t imply ignorance or evil intention.

But Nominalism can create devastation. Bullies tend to be nominalistic and push their way to their preferred outcomes by simply denying their opponents the chance to defend what they are most concerned about - social relations. Margaret Thatcher pursued her conservative agenda in Britain by simply insisting that “there is no such thing as society” and then challenging her foes to demonstrate that she was wrong by pointing to where it was hiding. Donald Trump is a consummate nominalist who simply denies any knowledge of white supremicists, climate change, racial prejudice, and social ethics. Nominalist are indeed socially dangerous.

Nominalism is also Whig in its outlook: What is has good reason to be so and should not be questioned. “The nominalistic metaphysics which makes the actual the only real thereby posits the historic order as the only existing order.” Nominalism therefore frustrates inquiry by inhibiting imagination and prospective thought. “At bottom“, Friend believes, “the removal of reality from universals allows anything to be believed.” Ultimately, therefore, “Philistinism, the belief that the current order of things is the last appeal of truth” and that “God hallows whatever succeeds” is the most common form of Nominalism’s social expression. Nominalism is not just socially debilitating, therefore, it also destroys the soul. Once again Trump provides an example.

For Friend, the great fighter against the general historical trend in favour of Nominalism is the 19th century American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. It was Peirce who had first formulated the idea of science as an unrestrained community of interpreters in the mid-19th century. Peirce’s focus on science is important because it meant that he was particularly worried about the effects of Nominalism on scientific measurement. If numbers and scientific scales for measurement were not real things then all of science was nothing more than a scam. Scientists were doomed to interpreting the world and each other as mere fantasy.

This problem with scientific measurement also had much wider social implications. If measurement was suspect, the idea of value itself was in peril. “The term values can only mean amounts of value, quantitative not qualitative differences.” Value is necessarily something that involves a scale; whether that scale is one of feet and inches, pounds or pence, or aesthetic worth doesn’t matter, they all rely on the existence of a reality which is immaterial and therefore can’t be touched, kicked or empirically proven as ‘there.’

Friend extends Peirce’s ideas significantly, particularly in the analysis of the reality of value. He takes a position that seems extreme but has some very interesting consequences. For Friend,

“The [extrinsic] value of any existent is the degree to which it affects or is affected by, attracts or is attracted by, other existents. It is the power of affectability, the expression of the fact that existents belong together in a certain order. Values can be best understood as affectability by returning to the ontological hypothesis that finite existence is infinite unity broken into unities, which unities ipso facto exert their real togetherness is a certain order. [This is] the principle of natural election.”

Natural election, an implicit orderliness of the universe in terms of extrinsic value, at first glance might appear as some sort of absolutist thought, the purpose of which could be to establish some tendentious hierarchy. But this is not Friend’s intention. Rather he recognises that there is no fixed structure of extrinsic value for any partial unity independent of its place in natural election: “[N]o actual has constant values, each exists in a state of flux.” My interpretation is that the smaller the partial unity considered, the more variation it’s value may have from that of its place in the order natural election.


Evaluation, the estimation of value (of which scientific measurement is an example), is the ascription, accurately or inaccurately, of value to existents...Evaluation does not alter or in any way influence values.” Written in 1936, it might be that Friend had not assimilated the implication of contemporary Quantum Theory since the last assertion at first glance appears possibly in conflict with Heisenberg Uncertainty. But his further comments on evaluation clarify his point. “When evaluations are so inaccurate their inaccuracy comes to be recognised, the existence of values independent of evaluation become plain.” I take this to mean that the conflict between evaluations provokes the presumption of an ideal which is the ultimate arbiter of the conflict. The ideal, of course, need not be determinate; the mere presumption that it exists and eventually can be approached is sufficient to establish its reality. This applies even to the strangeness involved in measuring quantum events.

There are other intriguing epistemological aspects to Friend’s ontology. He points out for example that evaluations which differ by no more than some arbitrarily defined amount are considered not as evaluations but as facts. This implies that an increase in the precision of measurement is in itself sufficient to undermine any fact. Consequently no fact can be expected to have such permanent status. All facts are temporary estimates which may be re-classified at any point in inquiry without jeopardizing the existence of ultimate truth.

Intrinsic value on the other hand is “value in relation,” value for someone, for some purpose. This is unexpected. Intuitively one expects ‘intrinsic’ to be a synonym with ‘inherent’, that is, independent of its relations. But inherency has already been covered by natural election. Intrinsic value therefore can only occur for a specific relation, at least one part of which has an intention. Evaluation will vary therefore depending upon the nature of the relation and the intention. Errors of evaluation will be a compound of bias of ‘perspective’ as well as errors introduced by evaluating any unity less than that of the entire natural election.

Intrinsic value is Friend’s interpretation of the classic philosophical idea of the good. “The good itself is not relative; but the amount of good in any actual is relative to the frame of reference”(thus alluding to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity). I interpret this somewhat confusing statement to mean that the metric or scale along which value is to be measured is not relative but an absolute which has a place in the order of natural election. That is, the metric of value exists as part of natural election. It cannot be considered relative, even though it is necessarily a choice from among many possible metrics, because it cannot be more or less accurate than any other metric.

“The absence of the good, or value in relation, is called evil,” he says (thus echoing Thomas Aquinas). He then makes the point of his distinctions clear: “There are no absolutely evil intentions, only differences in the scope of intentions.” In other words, no metric is inherently bad but it may be parochial in its partialness. An evaluation along any metric can be very low. This is by definition a lack of the good, and therefore evil. But he also recognises that the ‘scope of intentions’ captured by a metric can be more or less narrow. The implication is that there are better and worse metrics within the natural election which are available for discovery.

The consequence of this somewhat complex description is that intrinsic value approaches the extrinsic value of the natural election as the community of interpreters expands among any population of inquirers and as this population develops its interpretations of the real over time. Even time he says is a function of value, and therefore a metric in the order of natural election that is ‘visible’ everywhere. Each physical event occurs on the metric of time and therefore has a determinate extrinsic value. The order of natural election provides the broadest range possible of universals, both linguistic and metaphysical. Within this universe specific measurements are made possible.

It is at this point that Friend articulates what is clearly a prototype of modern systems theory. This is his summary position:

“In reasoning, the datum can be understood only in terms of something more inclusive. And to go further, that which is more inclusive can only be understood again in terms of something that embraces it as a related but subordinate part... In this manner, reasoning operates to resolve contradictions on one plane by referring them to another where they are seen as special cases...In the attempt to apprehend value... movement is from the actualization of the lower values to the actualization of the higher values in and through the lower, that is by the organization of the lower values.. Thus the total direction of activity may be seen as the integration of all existents in the logical order of their organization and value.”

The experience of evolution depends on the presumptive existence of something that does not evolve. “All appearance can only be explained in terms of that which does not appear,” Friend puts it succinctly. Hence the importance of the logical order of natural election. But, also, since no hypothesis or theory can ever be grand enough to encompass all of existence, this order can only be approached asymptotically.

The order of natural election constitutes our environment and includes all values, that is to say, all possible metrics of evaluation. Society itself requires the measurement of value in every aspect of its functioning, from the engineering of technology, to the estimation of the effects of social policy. Ethics, as the study of the metrics of value appropriate throughout society, is the progressive articulation of the logic of the good in the precise terms of these metrics.

Thus even the most basic act of measurement - of the drapes for the living room, of the distance to Alpha Centauri, of the important of a healthy diet to human life - are all ethically important. Part of the ethics of measurement is the constant striving, not necessarily for improved accuracy, but for a more inclusive metric on which measurement can be made.

Postscript: James Feibleman is the co-author of this book. Interestingly, he was a close friend of the author Walker Percy who included many of the philosophical perspectives advanced by Feibleman in his fiction.

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