"Missing the Forest for the Trees"

The winners of the "missing the forest for the trees" contest are as follows:
Most creative: (tie) "Wedding Business" (Claire B.)& "Washing Dishes" (Matt E.)
Most sociological: (tie) "Judging a Person" (Lewis B.) & "Racism" (Jessica H.)

Each of the above-mentioned individuals will earn 2 bonus points for this exercise. I respect the decision of the class, although I have to say that "washing dishes" really misses the point.

The point of this exercise was to make you consider how the whole is more than the mere sum of its parts, which is premised on the interrelated nature of reality, especially social reality. In this regard, I would say that missing the big picture (the forest) by focusing on details (trees) -- that is, looking at facts as separate and distinct -- is tantamount to misunderstanding. This point is driven home in a book I used this past Interim, "In Defense of Food," by Michael Pollan. He is critical of what he calls "nutritionism," which is based on a reductionist science approach that focuses on nutrients in isolation from the foods which contain them. He makes a plea for us to focus more on whole foods and the context in which these whole foods are grown and marketed. Pollan comments:

"'The problem with nutrient-by-nutrient nutrition science,' points out Marion Nestle, a New York University nutritionist, 'is that it takes the nutrient out of the context of the food, the food out of the context of the diet, and the diet out of context of the lifestyle.'" then, a bit later --

"...if you're a nutrition scientist you do the only thing you can do given the tools at your disposal: Break the thing down into its component parts and study those one by one, even if that means ignoring the subtle interactions and contexts and the fact that the whole may well be more than, or maybe different from, the sum of its parts. This is what we mean by reductionist science." (p. 62)

Finally, the fact is: "...people don't eat nutrients; they eat foods, and foods can behave very differently from the nutrients they contain." (p. 63)

This general point about focusing on the whole and the system of relations that constitute the whole also underlies a point Prof. E. Ahrens (who we will be reading later on) stresses about the nature of explanation in the following commment:

"The essence of explanation is to say what things are and to define them in and through their relations to other phenomena or forms of phenomena."

So, in the final analysis, I would contend that any social theory which misses or ignores the forest for the trees is ultimately inadequate.

PLEASE COPY OR PRINT OUT THE ABOVE OBSERVATIONS AND INSERT IT IN YOUR NOTES WHERE I FIRST ADDRESSED THI ISSUE IN THE TEXT.