1. Recent standards for teaching science say that students should be taught "The Law of Unintended Consequences" before they graduate from high school. The title combined with "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread" suggest my views on the subject.
Systems Dynamics is an approach that
applies to dynamic problems arising in complex social, managerial, economic, or ecological systems — literally any dynamic systems characterized by interdependence, mutual interaction, information feedback, and circular causality.
The field developed initially from the work of Jay W. Forrester at MIT. His seminal book Industrial Dynamics (Forrester 1961) is still a significant statement of philosophy and methodology in the field. Within ten years of its publication, the span of applications grew from corporate and industrial problems to include the management of research and development, urban stagnation and decay, commodity cycles, and the dynamics of growth in a finite world. It is now applied in economics, public policy, environmental studies, defense, theory-building in social science, and other areas, as well as its home field, management. The name industrial dynamics no longer does justice to the breadth of the field, so it has become generalized to system dynamics. The modern name suggests links to other systems methodologies, but the links are weak and misleading. System dynamics emerges out of servomechanisms engineering, not general systems theory or cybernetics.
System Dynamics has a chance of usefully handling the complexities of the Modern world. However, Auerbach reports stated about that time that only 15% of Analysts could use PSL/PSA (which Tom Demarco described as the best Automated Data Dictionary System available at the time). Systems Dynamics is inherently non-linear.
Newton developed methods to linearize things. Human thinking does rather well in a linear world. R. A. Fisher did some outstanding work concerning the Design of Experiments and tools for the analysis of experimental data. See http://dr2htay.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-design-of-experiments.html
Social scientists did a very poor job of understanding the system before the tried "to improve it". Several problems were presented in Jay
W. Forrester, "Counterintuitive Behavior of Social Systems",
Technology Review, Vol. 73, No. 3, Jan. 1971, pp. 52-68. See http://www.constitution.org/ps/cbss.htm
A complex system that works is invariably
found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system
designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You
have to start over with a working simple system. – John Gall (1975, p.71)
This
law is essentially an argument in favour of underspecification: it can be used
to explain the success of systems like the World
Wide Web and Blogosphere, which grew from simple to complex systems incrementally,
and the failure of systems like CORBA, which began with complex specifications. Gall's Law is said
to have strong affinities to the practice of agile software development.
Although the quote may seem to validate
the merits of simple systems, it is preceded by the qualifier "A simple
system may or may not work." (p. 70).
One of the first systems designers to
quote Gall's law was Ken Orr in 1981. Notable were the quotations of
Gall's Law by Grady Booch since 1991.
Systemantics (a change in typography and
underlining indicate that the title is better rendered as
"SystemANTICS") is a commentary on systems theory and general
semantics publications by such thinkers as Ludwig von Bertalanffy and Alfred
Korzybski.
3. Alfred Korzyski was the only one
above unknown to me previously. Following the link, I find William
Burroughs went to a Korzybski workshop in the Autumn of 1939. He was 25
years old, and paid $40. His fellow students—there were 38 in all—included
young Samuel I. Hayakawa (later to become a Republican member of the U.S.
Senate), Ralph Moriarty deBit (later to become the spiritual teacher Vitvan) and Wendell
Johnson (founder of the Monster
Study). I used S. I. Hayakawa's book Language in Thought and Action as an
undergraduate.
4. Wiki's 1st para on Korzybski:
"Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski ([kɔˈʐɨpski]; July 3, 1879 – March 1,
1950) was a Polish-American independent scholar who developed a field
called general semantics, which he viewed as both
distinct from, and more encompassing than, the field of semantics. He argued that human knowledge of the world
is limited both by the human nervous system and the languages humans have
developed, and thus no one can have direct access to reality, given that the
most we can know is that which is filtered through the brain's responses to
reality. His best known dictum is "The map is not the territory""
5.Willard Van Orman Quine
Quine's Ph.D. thesis and
early publications were on formal logic and set theory. Only after World War II did he, by virtue of
seminal papers on ontology, epistemology and language, emerge as a major
philosopher. By the 1960s, he had worked out his "naturalized
epistemology" whose aim was to answer all substantive questions of
knowledge and meaning using the methods and tools of the natural sciences.
Quine roundly rejected the notion that there should be a "first
philosophy", a theoretical standpoint somehow prior to natural science and
capable of justifying it. These views are intrinsic to his naturalism.
6. Karl Popper versus
Thomas Kuhn
I rejected Thomas Kuhn's
stuff that was contrary to German Idealism. I was in graduate school in
the 1960s. The Encyclopedia Britannica definition of "Physics"
was basically the Hegelian dialectic applied to theory and experiment.
Seemed great to me. I thought my rejection of Kuhn meant that I agreed
with Karl Popper. I'm revisiting this now. What I thought
agreed with Karl Popper on was that assertions should be backed
by (independently) verifiable evidence. I have always been more
interested in Metaphysics than "physics." I never shared
the Logical Positivist's desire to do away with Metaphysics. I am
learning that Popper's focus was on distinguishing science from pseudo
science. That has not been a problem for me. Physics,
systems, and/or economics is the real world science and mathematics is the
logical science.
7. Charles S. Peirce
September 10, 1839 – April
19, 1914) was an American philosopher, logician,mathematician, and scientist who is sometimes known as "the
father of pragmatism". He was
educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for 30 years. Today he is
appreciated largely for his contributions to logic, mathematics, philosophy,
scientific methodology, and semiotics, and for his founding of pragmatism.
Semiotics is closely related to
the field of linguistics, which, for its part,
studies the structure and meaning of language more specifically. A language-game (German: Sprachspiel) is a philosophical concept
developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Friedrich Waismann, referring to simple
examples of language use and the actions into which the language is woven.
Jean-François Lyotard explicitly drew upon
Wittgenstein's concept of language-games in developing his own notion of metanarratives in The Postmodern Condition. However, Wittgenstein's
concept is, from its inception, of a plurality of language games; their
plurality is not taken to be a feature solely of contemporary discourse.
Lyotard's discussion is primarily applied in the contexts of authority, power
and legitimation, where Wittgenstein's is concerned to mark distinctions
between a wide range of activities in which language users engage.
Michel Foucault frequently lectured
outside France, particularly in the United States, and in 1983 agreed to
teach annually at the University of California at Berkeley. An early victim of
AIDS, Foucault died in Paris on June 25, 1984.
Since its beginnings with
Socrates, philosophy has typically involved the project of questioning the
accepted knowledge of the day. Later, Locke, Hume, and especially, Kant
developed a distinctively modern idea of philosophy as the critique of
knowledge. Kant's great epistemological innovation was to maintain that the
same critique that revealed the limits of our knowing powers could also reveal
necessary conditions for their exercise. What might have seemed just contingent
features of human cognition (for example, the spatial and temporal character of
its objects) turn out to be necessary truths. Foucault, however, suggests
the need to invert this Kantian move. Rather than asking what, in the
apparently contingent, is actually necessary, he suggests asking what, in the
apparently necessary, might be contingent. The focus of his questioning is
the modern human sciences (biological, psychological, social). These
purport to offer universal scientific truths about human nature that are, in
fact, often mere expressions of ethical and political commitments of a
particular society. Foucault's “critical philosophy” undermines such claims by
exhibiting how they are just the outcome of contingent historical forces, and
are not scientifically grounded truths.
Foucault left clear
instructions that there should be no posthumous publication of his writings
that he had not published in his lifetime. His estate has obeyed, with one
major qualification. Foucault is deemed to have published lectures that he
allowed to be taped. This has, in particular, allowed print editions of the
annual courses of lectures that he delivered at the Collège de France from
1970–71 through 1983–84 (except for a sabbatical year in 1980–81). This has
made an enormous body of important material available. Some of it covers
(although in a different way) material later published, but some presents ideas
(for example, on ancient philosophy) that appear nowhere else.
9. Jurgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas is a German
sociologist and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory
and pragmatism. He is perhaps best known for his theories on
communicative rationality and the public sphere.
The Theory of Communicative
Action (German: Theorie des kommunikativen
Handelns) is
a 1981 book by Jürgen Habermas, in which he continues his
project set out in On the Logic of the Social Sciences[1][2] of finding a way to
ground "the social sciences in a theory of language."[1] The two volumes
are Reason and the Rationalization of Society (Handlungsrationalität
und gesellschaftliche Rationalisierung)[3] in which Habermas
establishes a concept of communicative rationality,[4] and Lifeworld
and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason (Zur Kritik der
funktionalistischen Vernunft),[5] in which Habermas
creates the two level concept of society and lays out the critical theory for
modernity.[4] After writing The
Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas expanded upon the theory of
communicative action by using it as the basis of his theory of morality, democracy, and law.[6] The work was the
subject of a collection of critical essays published in 1986,[7] has inspired many
responses by social theorists and philosophers, and in 1998 was listed by
the International
Sociological Association as the eighth most important sociological book of the
20th century.[8]
