John, you wrote in response to At de Lange:
>Thus, I find it difficult to understand what you mean when you vilify
>"pragmatism." Pragmatism, the philosophy of Dewey and, before him,
>William James, was fundamentally a philosophy of "What is true is what
>works." Thus, to reject a policy because it does not work is a very
>pragmatic viewpoint.
I don't know much about pragmatism, so may be I better keep my mouth
closed, but I have one concern with respect to pragmatism, which I would
like to express in this context:
My problems with pragmatism start, when the philosophy ("What is TRUE...")
passes its borders and enters ethics ("What is GOOD..."). Surely you will
agree, that although nothing can be good, that does not work, not all what
works can be considered as being good. "It works" is necessary, but not
sufficient for justifiing action. Impairing essentialities in order to
cause immergences works great.
Surely any ground of ideals or base of ethics need a pragmatic approach to
materialise. As such, we are facing a necessary condition. But the
inference from a necessary condtion to a sufficient condition is a logical
mistake. This mistake is usually expressed with the suffix -ism, be it
pragmatism, idealism, materialism or holism.
Lets take systems thinking as an example which is, as you stated before,
our founding (and surely pragmatic) discipline. There is no doubt, that
any system just works the way it does. So the pure pragmatic view would
ask: Why change? Ok, the system doesn't work the way you WANT it to work!
How than would you like the system to work? But this is a question, which
is out of the scope of a pragmatic viewpoint.
To answer this question for a goal, some sort of underlying ethics need to
be applied. If a specific set of "ethical truth" or gidelines for
goal-finding is claimed to be the only appropriate for the pragmatic
viewpoint, the helpful pragmatic viewpoint degenerate to pragmatism. (Here
I have to stress again, that I don't know enough about pragmatism. I don't
know of such undertakings and I don't want to purport that this happened
with the pragmatic viewpoint in the past!)
Lets assume, we have established a goal - now we need to know: How does
the system has to operate in order to support the goal and how do we get
the system to work in such a way? This question now has to be answered in
a pragmatic way - we want a solution that works - and systems thinking
provide a great set of tools, without which any suggested solution today
would be closer to a mere guess than a solution. If in the process of this
answering, new ethical questions arise, we need to go back and correct the
goal or restrict the allowed range of means etc.
To learn about entropy production is, in our sense here, the most
pragmatic thing one could do, because the law of entropy production,
together with the law of energy conservation, is the most fundamental
discription of how things work, which is available today. Chaos of
becoming depend on it as well as the emergence of order of being.
Liebe Gruesse,
Winfried
--"Winfried Dressler" <winfried.dressler@voith.de>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>