Follow-Up to "Forest and Trees" Exercise

The point of this exercise, as most of your recognized in one way or another in your comments and examples, was to make you consider how the whole is more than the mere sum of its parts, a view which is premised on the interrelated nature of reality, especially social reality. In this regard, I would say that missing the whole or big picture (the forest) by focusing on the details (trees) -- or looking at facts as separate and distinct -- is tantamount to misunderstanding. Let me cite a few statements (anonymously), from among all the comments posted, which I believe clearly support my point:
(1) "In college especially, I have come to realize that understanding the details of a subject is not helpful if you don't have an understanding of the subject as a whole and can see how the details relate to one another." (to which I would add, that those details only take on meaning in the context of that larger whole.)
(2) Understanding the body as a whole or system gives meaning to the various parts -- from major organs to minute genes, or organs and genes take on meaning in the context of the whole organism. As we'll see, some sociological theorists have suggested that, like the body, society is a whole or system comprised of many interrelated parts.
(3) "...often we unduly focus our attention towards a small aspect of society, while failing to appreciate its interconnectedness with other facets." This may be a problem when we attempt to address a social problem such as homelessness by endorsing a policy such as rent control as the solution ( a sort of "magic bullet") and not realize the impact such a policy may have on the housing market, or, I would also note, not treating other aspects of the problem of homelessness such as the often untreated mental problems homeless people often suffer from.
(4) Autistic children who tend to focus on the parts of objects rather than whole objects contributes to their lack of social skills because they are in a sense disconnected from reality or the whole.

Finally, let me go back to the example of "nutritionism," which I referred to earlier in illustrating the notion of IDEOLOGY. In this case, however, nutritionism is criticized as being based on REDUCTIONIST science. In his book, "In Defense of Food," Michael Pollan is critical of what he calls "nutritionism" because it 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 the context of the lifestyle.'" And, 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 these 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 the 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)

Unfortunately, I believe many sociologists also get sidetracked in "reductionist science" when they try to reduce that complex, interrelated social reality into a few variables and study (or seek to correlate) those variables in isolation from the whole.

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'll be reading near the end of the term) stresses about the nature of explanation. Prof. Ahrens says, "The essence of explanation is to say wht 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 incomplete and inadequate.
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PLEASE COPY OR PRINT THE ABOVE OBSERVATIONS AND INSERT THEM IN YOUR NOTES WHERE I FIRST ADDRESSED THIS ISSUE OF THE "FOREST AND TREES" IN THE TEXT.