[Kb-complexity] RE: Kb-complexity Digest, Vol 1, Issue 6

["Glenda Eoyang" <geoyang@hsdinstitute.org>]

Carol,

Thanks for your historical view.  It does help to give ourselves context as
we wrestle with these difficult questions.  Within this historical context,
I take a slightly different view.   I see complexity as providing us ways to
think and talk about the paradoxes of being/not being and knowing/not
knowing that were not resolved by Kant, but documented by him in his his
antinomies (http://www.friesian.com/antinom.htm).  Through the methods and
metaphors of complexity, we can begin to engage productively to talk about,
understand, and act across the messy lines of finite and infinite space and
time; parts and wholes; freedom and causality; necessity and accident.
Rather than needing to separate neumenal from phenomenal, process from
entity, part from whole, I think complexity lets us explore each in the
context of the other to enrich our options for understanding and taking
action in both.

Here's an example. . . 
A non-profit I work with thought they were going to get about $100,000 for a
planning grant for a $5,000,000 project.  A pattern of consideration and
decision making emerged that included the positional and technical leaders
within the organization.  Who they were, what the challenge was, and how
they related to each other shaped their decisions, actions, and outcomes.
Over time, the project conditions changed--more money became available for
planning, more for program, media coverage expanded, the vision became
global and crossed insititutional and disciplinary lines, relationships
developed, the parent company was acquired, and so on.  All of this happened
in the space of six months.  Individually and collectively, as the project
definition shifted, so did the relationships and structures that provided
infrastructure for the emerging conversation.  The group did not see it as
breaking old patterns and forming new ones. They didn't talk about their
reality changing. They didn't worry about what was true and for how long.
They recognized they were working in a complex, self-organizing system and
they used simple, iterative questions to shape their work together:
What happened?
So, what does it mean to us and this work?
Now what should we do about it?

Complexity allowed them to enter their knowing/being as a dance with each
other, with their collective and individual pasts, and emerging
environmental factors.  Kantian distinctions became irrelevant, I think, as
this adaptive engagement emerged.  I think we were working in a different
dynamical space.  Maybe not.  What do you think? 

Glenda
 
   

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> Today's Topics:
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>    1. Scientific Method --> Kant --> Systems Theories...? (Carol Webb)
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> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
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> Message: 1
> Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 04:21:06 -0800 (PST)
> From: Carol Webb <carolwebb75@yahoo.com>
> Subject: [Kb-complexity] Scientific Method --> Kant --> Systems
> 	Theories...?
> To: kb-complexity@list.knowledgeboard.com
> Message-ID: <20060310122106.37261.qmail@web51801.mail.yahoo.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
> 
> Dear All
> 
> Continuing the thread of conversation on systems
> thinking etc, for me I have to go back and consider
> all this in the light of 'where we came from'
> theoretically speaking, and this includes considering
> again what we think we understand by rationality, the 
> scientific method, Kant, systems thinking and theories from 
> there, and then how you integrate this with organisational 
> theory and an understanding of complexity science.
> 
> The concept of 'rationality' was central to the
> scientific method, which arose in the context of the 
> 'scientific revolution' in the 17th Century backlash against 
> religious doctrine and dogma, which had, until then, 
> dominated as the major resource for understanding the laws of 
> nature. The scientific method had particular implications for 
> the sciences of physics, astronomy, and philosophy, which 
> then began to emphasise the role of the individual scientist 
> in a capacity of objective observer, formulating and testing 
> what were predominantly causal hypotheses on the governing 
> laws of nature. Divergent schools of thought based on 
> differing epistemological and ontological perspectives arose 
> out of this endeavour. These included dogmatic rationalism, 
> or, the realist scientific perspective, and, radical 
> scepticism. In dogmatic rationalism, or, the realist 
> scientific perspective, reasoning individuals were seen to be 
> able to formulate hypotheses based on the nature of an 
> existing external reality that can be reliably observed as 
> truth. This was understood to be perceived through the mind, 
> the body, and its senses. In radical scepticism, proponents 
> suggested that all knowledge was relative and unreliable 
> because the mind was held to impose an order of its own on 
> the sensations coming from the external real world through a 
> series of accidental, repeat connections. In this sense, 
> intelligibility was perceived as reflecting the habits of 
> mind rather than the nature of reality. This pointed to the 
> constructed, relative and plural nature of accounts of the 
> world in which there is no truth, only many different stories 
> of equal worth (Stacey, 2003a). 
> 
> Kant then bridged these two perspectives through the
> dualistic postulation of his transcendental idealism
> in which he held that while we know what we know
> through sensations coming from the real world - or,
> that we know reality through the capacity of the mind,
> the mind also imposes some kind of order on this sense
> data so that we cannot know reality in a direct manner
> - or, the categories through which we know are given
> outside our direct experiences. This dualistic
> postulation, Stacey (2003a) argues, justified the
> scientific method and enabled Kant to develop a
> systems theory in which the development of nature
> could be explained with a theory of formative
> causality, and human action could be explained with
> rationalist causality. In later systems theories,
> reports Stacey, individuals became conceptually
> designated as parts in a system called a group,
> organisation, or society, where systemic phenomena had
> to be explained from the perspective of an individual
> outside the system - a system being a whole separated
> by a boundary from other systems, with an inside and
> an outside. Retrospectively, this systemic perspective
> has been associated with a mechanistic metaphor
> (Hatch, 1997), complementary with reductionist
> science, where a unit of analysis, or phenomena of
> interest, was seen as the sum of its parts, and where
> the focus was on the nature of the part rather than on
> the interactions between them (Stacey, 2003a). How
> this perspective made its way into recent
> organisational and management theory is seen in terms
> of developments that took place in science in general
> and in scientific management in particular over the
> course of the 20th century.
> 
> The mechanistic metaphor and reductionist approach was
> embraced by  early proponents of scientific management
> (Taylor, 1911; Fayol, 1916). Scientific management
> inherited the same philosophical assumptions as the
> scientific method and transferred them to the
> workplace so that leaders and managers were meant to
> stand in control as objective observers outside the
> immediate system, which could be represented by the
> mechanistic metaphor in that the organisation was seen
> as a machine and the employees parts of that machine
> (Hatch, 1997). 
> 
> The three main systemic theory strands - general
> systems theory (Boulding, 1956; von Bertalanffy,
> 1968), cybernetics (Ashby, 1945; Ashby, 1952; Ashby,
> 1956; Beer, 1979; Beer, 1981; Wiener, 1948), and
> systems dynamics (Forrester, 1958; Forrester, 1961;
> Forrester, 1969; Goodwin, 1951; Philips, 1950; Tustin,
> 1953) - developed over the course of the 20th Century
> and as the whole system came to be understood as more
> than the sum of the parts, attention was also placed
> on the interaction of subsystems in the way they
> formed systems, and in the way systems formed
> suprasystems (Stacey, 2003a). 
> 
> These views were adopted and integrated into
> organisational theory.
> 
> I then personally see Complexity Science (as a broad
> label), as presenting a dilemma. On the one hand it
> offers another set of theory which is coherent with
> systems theories, but on the other hand it also makes
> you stop and question them. 
> 
> I resolve this by accepting some ideas presented by
> the theory of complex adaptive systems, but then
> looking at the principles which stem from there (such
> as self-organisation and emergence, edge of chaos,
> diversity, etc etc), and trying to make sense of their
> meaning and implications somehow according to the way
> Stacey proposes in his complex responsive processes of
> relating (CRPR). CRPR isn't a systems based theory,
> it's a process based theory, based on a temporal
> metaphor, not a spatial one. Stacey argues that this
> resolves problems with boundaries (which don't exist
> in 'reality') between social and individual.
> 
> It's my feeling that this view offers a lot of food
> for thought and really challenges the way a lot of us
> perceive complexity science and then what it means. 
> 
> All comments welcome! Looking forward to developing
> this conversation further...
> 
> Best wishes, Carol
> 
> 
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> End of Kb-complexity Digest, Vol 1, Issue 6
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