The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness

A map is not the territory; a number is not a quantity; a law of motion is not the motion itself. These seem obvious, but Whitehead argues that the Western scientific tradition since Newton has repeatedly confused its own highly selective abstractions with the full richness of nature. When physics says that a red apple is "really" a collection of colourless particles whose interactions cause the sensation of redness in a mind, it has taken its own useful abstraction — the mechanistic model — and declared it more real than the directly experienced apple.

The fallacy leads to what Whitehead calls the "bifurcation of nature": the splitting of the world into the real physical world (particles, forces, quantities) and the apparent world of experience (colours, sounds, meanings, values). Nature is cleft in two, and the experiential half — the world as actually lived — is demoted to mere appearance. This move, Whitehead argues, creates insoluble problems for philosophy of mind and severs science from the qualitative dimensions of experience that give it human significance.

Whitehead's remedy is not to abandon science but to reform its metaphysical assumptions. Nature should be understood as including experience, value, and quality — not as secondary properties added to a value-free mechanism, but as features of reality in their own right. The abstractions of physics are enormously useful; the error is only in forgetting that they are abstractions. Keeping this distinction in view allows a science that is epistemically humble about its own methods while remaining scientifically rigorous.

The fallacy of misplaced concreteness is introduced in Chapter III of Science and the Modern World ("The Century of Genius") and elaborated throughout. It has been widely adopted in philosophy, social science, and theology as a tool for diagnosing conceptual confusions.