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i dont think this the distinction is a straightforward as you'd like to imagine.
since we're kinda vaguely alluding to euro-science since, say, the 18th century...think about the ways in which the assumptions behind basic classifications of the natural world and christianity intertwine--that objects are discrete one from the other, that they are endowed with essences is a transposition of the doctrine of the soul. that time enables a performance of characteristics already in a sense present at the register of a hardwired code from the outset is a consequence of putting the notion of essence into motion. that nothing is created in any strong sense in the world, that everything is already in a sense present such that one can focus on abstracting and comparing physical attributes of objects and not worry so much about systems or relations between systems....so an emphasis on things not pattern, not systemic relations---all further transpositions of the doctrine of soul/essence...that human beings are skull-bound, that they float about the social and natural worlds and their modes of interaction...that human beings interact with the world as detached spectators...that cognition is confined to the skull...that human beings enact will, which is more or less transparent....
it's strange to think about this, but in ecology folk weren't really thinking in terms of systems and system-level interactions until the 1950s. that systems tend to be formalized as objects, and so are understood as discrete, and that system characteristics can be inferred from descriptions of the operations of the parts---this assumptions are heavily ingrained and have only started to come apart quite recently.
it's easy to extend this kind of list.
so this very nineteenth century opposition (science/religion), treated it in a very 19th century way (two systems, discrete and opposed), enables one to play down the fundamental interconnectedness between western ways of knowing the physical and natural worlds and the conceptual frames that shape it, which were in the main dragged across from xtianity into the physical and natural sciences.
alot of quite recent work in embodied cognition/embedded cognition (take yr pick) is quite interesting both because it breaks with some of these basic assumptions (through the category of emergence, through that of complexity) AND because each of these breaks poses a pretty complicated second-order problem of how you go about generating descriptions that are not integrated back into this older way of seeing and thinking by the language which is used as a medium. in a sense, what happens is a variant of heisenberg's "uncertainty" principle--you cannot simultaneously know location and movement. this is a particular problem for english---if you read the sentences in this post (or any other one) and think about how the sentences stage what they purport to describe, you can see that the underlying features outlined above are symmetrical with how sentences operate (subject verb object....that each noun designates a discrete phenomena, the way in which linear time gets staged, etc.)
this seems to me a consequence of an institutional separation between the sciences and philosophy---but i digress...
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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