The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
October 2002
Geoffrey Vickers
Rationality and Intuition
in Judith Wechsler (ed) On Aesthetics in
Sciences
MIT Press,
Index
Perception, Cognition and Recognition
Some Epistemological Implications
Design as the Resolution of Conflict between Norms
Giftedness in Rationality and Intuition
The Dynamics of Change in Normative Systems
Sir Geoffrey argues that all knowing is based on
a form of conceptual architecture and depends, like other skillful doing, on
the ability to impose, recognize, and combine forms.
He distinguishes this mental capacity from the capacity for logical
deduction and analysis and argues that it is underrated and even ignored only
because of our unwillingness to admit the existence of mental activities which
we cannot fully describe, a reluctance which is itself a product of recent
Western culture. He follows this
line of thought from the simplest forms of perception and cognition to
deliberate physical and social design. - J.W.
Why not “aesthetics in science”?
Whence comes the implication that to
find aesthetics in science is like finding poetry in a timetable?
The answer lies in the sad history of
Western culture which, over the last two centuries, has so narrowed the
concepts of both Science and Art as to leave them diminished and
incommensurable rivals - the one an island in the sea of knowledge not
certified as science; the other an island in the sea of skill not certified as
Art.
This debasement is relatively new.
In medieval universities all fields of
knowledge open to organized study were scientiae, and all fields of skill open
to organized acquisition were Arts. Rhetoric
and astronomy were equally scientiae; but the title accorded to the student
who satisfied his examiners in these and the other recognized scientiae was
that of a Master of Arts. Similarly,
Art was not separated from technology; there was an Art and Mystery of
Bricklaying. Cellini made a splendid
pair of front doors. Where was the
boundary between art and architecture, mason, carver, builder, and architect?
Moreover the two words “Ars” and “Scientiae” not
only embraced virtually all skill and knowledge, but also overlapped each
other’s territory without offense. Everyone
knew that knowing was a skilled activity, an Art.
Both words connoted both product
and process - on the one hand an accumulating store of knowledge and
artifacts; on the other hand a growing heritage of transmitted skills and
standards of skill and excellence in knowing and doing.
Science acquired its present limited meaning
barely before the nineteenth century. It
came to apply to a method of testing hypotheses about the natural world by
observations or experiments which might give results inconsistent with the
hypothesis to be tested. Thence it
came to comprise the growing body of related hypotheses which had survived
these tests. The method never
explained wholly and often failed to explain at all how the hypothesis
originally emerged. But this fact
was not generally ac-
This paper is a greatly extended version of a
lecture which I gave at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in April,
1974. It embodies and expands parts of
a longer unpublished paper called “The Tacit Norm,” prepared for a symposium
on The Moral and Esthetic Structure of Human Adaptation held by the
Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research at Burg Wartenstein in
July, 1969 on which I drew for the original lecture.
143
knowledged until this century.
Even now it courts opposition to
describe a scientific theory as a work of art, largely because of the
corresponding narrowing of the concept of Art.
Yet few would deny that a scientific hypothesis,
a technological invention, a plan for a new city, a painting, a musical
composition, and a new law are all human artifacts, skillful making by
human minds of designs for ordering or explaining some aspect of what we
experience as reality. And few would
deny that all such designing involves the creation, imposition, and
recognition of form.
Equally, few would deny that particular
achievements such as these are episodes in a process of change which proceeds
continuously, though slowly and often unconsciously, for example, in the kind
of explanation which scientific minds find acceptable, in the kind of methods
by which technologists approach their problems, in the aesthetic idiom in
which artists express themselves, and in the ethical standards which lead
societies to change their laws and customs. History
reveals in retrospect the presence of standards in all these fields which
guide those who work in them and those who criticize their work and which are
themselves changed both by the creations which they guide and by the
controversies which they provoke.
I am not denying in the least that there are differences between the different fields in which these “arts” are practiced. Indeed, if I had space to pursue the theme, I would insist that these differences are much greater than are usually admitted either by scientists or by any of those who use the word “science” as a generic term. I would insist that different fields of possible knowledge (scientiae) admit such different kinds as well as degrees of knowledge that it is confusing to class as “science” even all those fields which aspire to the name. There are important differences between the natural sciences and the logical sciences which include all the branches of mathematics and symbolic logic. There are even more striking differences between the natural sciences and what Herbert Simon
1 has called the sciences of the artificial, by which he means the fields of knowledge of which the subject matter is partly man-made. Virtually our whole environment, he insists, is partly artificial in this sense. Not only tools, machines, and buildings but also institutions, languages, and cultures are human artifacts. What “scientific” knowledge, he asks, is possible about a subject matter which might be other than it is?
I do not find his answer adequate, even on a
very limited definition of “science,” but I warmly approve of the distinction
which he draws. The regularities to be
found in the “artificial” world are different in origin, kind, and reliability
from those to be found in the natural world. The
“laws” of
144
notably a knowledge of human history which is
open to us only because we ourselves are human.
I do not propose to pursue these differences
here because I am concerned to explore the mental processes which are common
to them all and especially the element connoted by the word aesthetics in the
title to this book. My thesis is that
the human mind has available to it at least two different modes of knowing and
that it uses both in appropriate or inappropriate combinations in its endless
efforts to understand the world in which it finds itself, including its fellow
human beings and itself. One of these
modes is more dependent on analysis, logical reasoning, calculation, and
explicit description. The other is
more dependent on synthesis and the recognition of pattern, context and the
multiple possible relations of figure and ground.
The first involves the abstraction and
manipulation of elements, irrespective of the forms in which they are
combined. The other involves the
recognition or creation of form, irrespective of the elements which compose
it. Both are normal aspects of the
neocortical development which distinguishes man from his fellow mammals.
Both are needed and both are used in
most normal mental operations.
They are often referred to as rationality and
intuition, and the names would serve as well as any other, were it not that a
difference in the character and function of the two capacities has attached to
intuition, in our contemporary culture, a load of mischievous and misleading
connotation.
The main difference to which I refer is that a
rational process is fully describable, whereas an intuitive process is not.
Because our culture has somehow
generated the unsupported and improbable belief that everything real must be
fully describable, it is unwilling to acknowledge the existence of intuition;
and where it cannot avoid doing so, it tends to confine it to the area where
the creative process is least constrained and most in evidence - namely the
narrow contemporary concept of Art - so much so that when this ubiquitous
faculty appears in the practice of “science,” it is greeted as a strange
incursion from a foreign field called “aesthetics.”
But in my view this approach half
accepts the cultural confusion which I wish to contest.
The theory of biological evolution is a convenient example. For a century before Darwin and Wallace the fact of biological evolution had been forcing itself into the consciousness of Western man. It was opposed by the strange belief, accepted for more than a thousand years, that each and every possible biological form had been specially created by a divine demiurge so obsessively creative that he could not leave any conceivable form unrealized. Lovejoy
2 has documented, in fascinating detail, the history of this theory and its eventual decay.
145
The main agent in its decay was the discovery of
the fossil record. Here in
sufficiently exact chronological order was a sequence of biological forms
which exhibited continuity and discontinuity through change with time.
Eohippus was a far cry from the
favorite contemporary racehorse, yet the development of one from the other was
clear enough.
Why was it clear?
Measurement played no significant part
in these acts of recognition. They
were exercises in the human capacity of appreciating, comparing, and
contrasting form. They threw no
light on how these developments took place or why some died out.
That had to await a theory.
But the apparent fact arrested
human attention before there was a theory to explain it and provided the
driving power to seek a theory. Without
it there would have been no theory of evolution, for there would have been
nothing to explain.
This intuitive sense of form entered also into
the theory, the exp1ication, no less than into the explicandum.
The theory of natural selection
implied a theory of particulate inheritance which did not exist in
Are we to identify
It is, of course, perfectly reasonable to
mistrust a faculty which is not fully describable (even though we cannot
do without it), since its obscurity makes it hard to verify.
We should expect then that the main
function of the rational process would be to critize and test so far as it can
the products of the intuitive process. And
this is, of course, precisely what it does, as the history of science so
clearly shows. It can do so only in
varying degrees and the less it can do so the more trust we have to repose in
other tests by which we come to accept or to change the product of our
intuition.
The history of the natural sciences is full of
once accepted intuitions (such as the “ether”) which were later found to be
unneces-
146 Index
sary or wrong. Some of them held up the progress
of science for centuries. Such was the
intuitive belief that the paths of the planets must be circular.
Some proved useful though wrong.
Such was the original atomic theory.
For two thousand years science
proceeded on the unverified assumption that all material forms must be
constructed of basic individual elements, capable of countless combinations
but not themselves further divisible. Within
a few years after the existence of atoms was first actually demonstrated, it
was found that they lacked both the characteristics with which they had been
credited. They were neither
indivisible nor indestructible. Yet
atomic theory, so far from receiving its death blow, took off into the new
world of subatomic physics. One
of the first dividends was an understanding of at least some of the forces
which enabled atoms to combine, a fact predicated in the original theory, yet
wholly inexplicable if atoms were, in fact, no more than elemental billiard
balls.
I have therefore avoided so far as possible in
this paper the use of the expression “science and aesthetics.”
I have chosen instead to concentrate
on the relation between rationality and intuition.
This is, indeed, well exemplified in
the recent development of physics and mathematics to which this book is
largely directed. But it is not
confined to that context. I regard the
creation and appreciation of form by the human mind as an act of artistry,
whether the artifact be a scientific theory, a machine, a sonata, a city plan,
or a new design in human relations. And
I believe and seek to show that in all these acts of artistry, intuition and
rationality are always involved, usually in the roles of creator and critic.
In the next section I explore the basis for this
dualism. We know something about
the processes of perception, cognition, and recognition.
We know that we come to recognize
repetitions and regularities in the physical world long before we have any
theories about why these should be. We
know that unsupported toys fall from our cots before we know anything about
the law of gravitation. We know the
reliability or otherwise of mother’s behavior long before we know any
psychology. Our knowledge is
contextual before it extends to causality; and it grows in both dimensions
half-independently. We learn to
distinguish more subtly differentiated contexts, just as we learn to
distinguish the operations of more generalized laws.
And equally, we learn to envisage and
create new contexts, just as we learn to detect new causal relations.
The technological innovator is a
creator of new contexts, just as the scientific innovator is a discoverer of
new causal regularities often based on his discovery, or even creation, of new
conceptual entities such as elements or particles.
Synthesis and analysis, contextual and
causal explanation are distinct though insepar-
147
able aspects of human mental process in all
mental activities. It need cause us no
surprise that they are equally manifest in physics and mathematics.
I stress the tacit nature of the standards which
we develop to guide our intuitive processes because this has become a
stumbling block to the “rational” understanding of “intuition,” an aspiration
which is obviously not fully attainable if the two are complementary
capacities of the human mind.
In a later section I examine a process of design
where the imposition of form on experience is more conscious and more obvious.
I seek to show that in this case also
the choice between possible forms is not governed by criteria which are fully
describable and for the same reason.
In a brief last section I summarize the
epistemological conclusions to which these reflections lead.
They may not yet be orthodox, but they
are far more constant with the thinking of our time than they would have been
even a decade ago.
According to the view put forward here, knowing
and designing are not separate or even separable activities, since our whole
schema for knowing is a design, a model of reality consciously and
unconsciously made, and constantly revised. Moreover
it is a selective model made in response to our concerns which alone determine
what we regard as relevant enough to be worth modeling.
The design produced by the natural and
the logical sciences is more conditioned by independent variables which it
cannot “redesign.” But it is a design
for all that and a design that is intimately connected with the concerns that
drive us to make it, concerns that notably include aesthetic satisfaction.
Perception, Cognition, and
Recognition
Professor Christopher Alexander, in his book Notes on the Synthesis of Form,
4 says, in effect, that design does not consist in the realization of form but in the elimination of “misfit.” The designer approaches his task with a set of tacit criteria, which appear only when some specific design is found to be inconsistent with one of them. The norm is known only negatively, when it is infringed. For the state of “fit” we have no evidence, except the agreeable absence of misfit. We have scarcely even a vocabulary for it - how vague and how numerous are all the antitheses to pain! Alexander observes that this elusive quality of the norm has been noted in other fields also; he instances the difficulty experienced by doctors when they try to define “positive health,” and by psychiatrists when they try to define psychological normality. 5
I believe that Alexander’s insight is of great
generality and importance, and I shall develop it in ways which go beyond his
148
statement and with which he might not agree.
I shall postulate, as the basic fact
in the organization of experience, the evolution of norms by which subsequent
experience is ordered, and which are themselves developed by the activities
that they mediate. I shall suggest
that this evolution of norms is a fundamental form of learning; that it
provides the criteria not only for ethics and aesthetics, but also for all
forms of discrimination (including those used by the various sciences), and
that the norms so developed are tacit by logical necessity.
Suppose, for example, that I say, “That is an
ash tree.” If you ask why I think so,
I can only reply, “Because it looks like one.”
If you are not satisfied, we may approach the tree, examine its leaves
and the character of its bark and its seeds, if it happens to be seeding.
This analysis may or may not confirm
my initial judgment but it played no part in making that judgment.
The tree was too far away for me to
see these details.
If I had said, “That is a beautiful ash tree,”
you would have regarded my judgment as “aesthetic” and we might have discussed
the basis for my judgment that the tree was beautiful.
Did I, for example, mean merely that
is was an exceptionally fine specimen of its kind?
It is less common to class as an
exercise of aesthetic judgment the ability to classify it correctly as an ash
tree, irrespective of my emotional response to it.
This, nonetheless, is the wide sense
in which I am using the words “aesthetic” and “intuitive.”
The recognition of form is an exercise
of judgment made by reference to criteria which are not fully describable
because of the subtle combination of relationships in which they reside and
equally because of their dependence on context.
I use the word “norm” in an unusually wide sense, to cover the criterion for every judgment which classifies, whether it seems to involve a judgment of fact or of value. This distinction itself I regard as outmoded for more reasons than I shall have space to include. Professor Pitkin,
6 in her book Wittgenstein and Justice, has shown that the many different forms in which this antithesis is expressed (the “is” and the “ought,” descriptive and normative, and soon) have very different meanings. I shall stress that the concern of a human mind is necessary to define any situation and perhaps necessary to define even what we call a fact, since a fact wholly irrelevant to any human concern would not be knowable.
The norms which are best understood
scientifically are those which turn visual sensory input into perception.
The child learns to recognize and to
name, partly by being often exposed to the same stimuli, partly by its own
inner activity of ordering its experience, and partly by the persuasion of
other human beings, exhorting, encouraging, correcting.
In some way not yet fully understood,
his central nervous system develops readiness to group
149
together, attend to, and recognize aspects of his surround - faces, places, belongings, relations - which recur and are of interest to him and to organize his accumulating knowledge by classifying it in an increasing number of overlapping categories
. 7
These “readinesses to classify” are commonly
called schemata. The word “schema” is
important for my purposes because it is the only accepted word in a class much
wider than that in which it is commonly used.
We clearly develop “readinesses to recognize” not only perceptual
gestalten but also situations of great generality and complexity (such as
illness and revolution) and concepts of great abstraction (such as entropy and
the British constitution). We develop
schemata, perceptual and conceptual, partly by being exposed to countless
particular examples from which we abstract what they have in common for our
purposes (as a doctor does in a hospital or a lawyer in the courts) and partly
through the “open-endedness” of language, introducing us to abstractions which
later examples make real (like a doctor with his textbook of physiology and a
lawyer with his textbook of jurisprudence). It
is commonly recognized that a combination of the two is the best way to
develop those readinesses to recognize which it is the business of education
to teach and of all ages to learn.
The duality of this process, though familiar to experience, has long been an offense to the Western scientific mind and has given rise to a long-drawn controversy whether the mind identifies the familiar by checking a list of characteristics which define its identity or recognizes it by fitting some kind of perceptual gestalt to some kind of mental template. Adherents of either view can find plenty of weaknesses in the other,
8 but neither party, until recently, seems to have conceived the possibility that the brain might be capable of both processes and might use them in appropriate - or sometimes inappropriate - combinations. This, nonetheless, seems to be the fact. Brain scientists are much concerned with the neurological basis for this in the difference of function between the two hemispheres of the neocortex. I am not concerned with the problems of location which engage them, but I am intensely concerned with their finding that the human brain is indeed capable of what Dr. Galin 9 calls “two cognitive styles” of activity.
The child learns to see.
So does the beneficiary of corneal
grafting. So does the doctor learning
to diagnose; the radiologist learning to read a radiograph; the stockbreeder
and forester learning to distinguish a good specimen from a poor or sick one.
So does the connoisseur of Chinese
ceramics. All these people, later, can
write books about the criteria they use, but they cannot express these fully
in a rule which the inexperienced can apply. The
future mas-
150
ter must make these schemata his own by frequent
use; and these schemata are also criteria, instruments by which specific
misfits are detected, though they themselves cannot be specified.
Professor Woodger
10 instances the novice looking through a microscope for the first time. He has a visual experience, but he does not perceive anything because he has not yet built up the schemata by which to recognize the inhabitants of this elfin world. Cognition is the result, as well as the precursor, of recognition. G.H. Lewes 11 expressed this elegantly and generally as long ago as 1879, “… the new object presented to sense or the new idea presented to thought must also be soluble in old experience, be recognized as like them, otherwise it will be unperceived, uncomprehended.” (italics added)Woodger has no use for the distinction between percepts and concepts. A percept is a concept. The link with the primary world of sensory experience is always tenuous and selective. A rabbit to an anatomist is a different bundle of abstractions from a rabbit to a cook - even if it be the same rabbit. Bruner, Goodnow, and Austin
12 agree with him that in perception, no less than in the most abstract thinking, the categories we use are our own invention; the order which we discover is imposed by ourselves and validated by its practical convenience to ourselves.
This is not to say that there is no order to be
discovered in the natural world; on the contrary, the confirmation of
experiment by the scientist and the less rigorous confirmation of the ordinary
man’s experience is taken as evidence that the order devised by the mind bears
some valid relation to the order inherent in the “real world out there.”
We have at least constructed in our
heads a viable analogue. But its
viability is measured not only by its conformity with other experience of our
own. It must also be sufficiently
shared to mediate communication with others. Radical
innovations in thinking take time to percolate into other minds and until they
have done so, they are impotent and precarious.
Further, the validity of our chosen “order” is measured also by its power to make our own experience acceptable to ourselves. For this it must be sufficiently concordant with the rest of our organizing concepts; and it must also create a world in which we can bear to live. Rokeach,
13 referring to “belief systems” (which correspond closely to what I have called ‘appreciative systems”), writes, “Such systems... serve two opposing sets of functions. On the one hand, they are Everyman’s theory for understanding the world he lives in. On the other hand, they represent Everyman’s defense network, through which information is filtered in order to render harmless that which threatens his ego… a belief system seems to be constructed to serve both masters at once; to under-
151
stand the world in so far as possible and to
defend against it in so far as necessary.” This
defensive function is not necessarily pathologic, though it always has a cost.
Thus, the world of reflective consciousness-I will call it the appreciated world - in which each of us lives, is structured by readinesses to conceive things and relations in particular ways, readinesses which are developed in our brains by experience, including experience received through human communication. I will extend the word “schemata” to cover all such readinesses, since it is free from the normative implications of such words as “standard,” “criterion,” and “norm” itself. Nonetheless, such schemata do function as norms, standards, and criteria, even in the most purely factual acts of discrimination. Screening experience, they classify what “fits” and reject “misfits.” And they do so equally whether they define a state of affairs in my surround - “That is a bull,” or its implications for me – “That is a threat,” or a situation accepted by myself or others as requiring a particular response - ”That is an obligation.”
14
Some Epistemological Implications
I labor these familiar points because I want to
rescue from their normal oblivion three facts which I believe to be highly
important: First, facts are not data. They
are mental artifacts, selected by human concerns and abstracted from
experience by filtering through a screen of schemata.
Second, this screen is necessarily
tacit; we infer its nature only from observing its operations, but our
inferences can never be complete or up to date.
Third, the screen is itself a product
of the process which it mediates and, though tacit, can be developed by
deliberately exposing it to what we want to influence it.
(This is the essence of education.)
These schemata do not exist in isolation. They develop within the multiple contexts of experience. I find it convenient to think of these contexts as ordered by a three-dimensional matrix. What we notice is selected by our concerns, and our concerns are excited by what we notice. I will call our concerns our “value system” and call our organized readinesses to notice our “reality system.”
15 I think of these as forming two sides of the matrix. The third is, of course, the dimension of time. Our reality system can represent the future and the hypothetical, as well as the actual present, and our value system can both evoke and respond to such constructions. Our most familiar mismatch signals are generated by the comparison of our expectations with our fears and our aspirations-that is to say, by comparing the constructions of our reality system and our value system when both are extended into the future.
152
I use and offer this simply as a convenient mental model. We are handicapped by lack of a realistic model of how our brains actually work, but communication science, by combining what we know of analogue and digital processes, can already provide us with a much more adequate picture than was possible even a few years ago, as Professor MacKay has shown
. 16
These schemata are systematically related; a
change in one will involve some change in others and will be resisted in
proportion to the extent of the change involved unless this resistance is
offset by the perceived benefit promised by the change.
The theory of biological evolution, for example, when first put
forward, was perceived by some as a hugely liberating idea, by others as
hugely threatening. Hence the intense
controversy which it aroused among laymen as well as scientists.
The impact of change will also be affected by
the ease with which the proposed change can be understood.
Biological evolution, however
acceptable or unacceptable, was widely understandable, at least in principle.
The theory of relativity was not.
This difference muted resistance in
some quarters and increased it in others.
T. S. Kuhn
17 in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has drawn a distinction between the normal course by which scientific knowledge grows by accretion and the periodic crises which call for a new “paradigm.” He has pointed out that minds attuned to the “normal” course seldom initiate the paradigm shift, though they unconsciously prepare the way for it. He has also observed that the same process is to be seen in art. So long as art worked within the paradigm of representation, its achievements were indeed cumulative. It progressively learned new ways to represent three-dimensional scenes on two-dimensional space. A new paradigm set new standards - not higher standards for the same kind of excellence but standards related to a different kind of excellence.
In fact, even what Kuhn calls “normal” science
does not proceed without minor shifts in “tacit norms.”
The simplest piece of induction is not
explicable or even describable in the way in which we can describe and
demonstrate the most complex deductive process.
Nonetheless, paradigm shifts are most
dramatically visible in the development of individual scientists and
individual artists when they occur suddenly and make a major difference.
Consider, for example, the story of
Kepler, transported with excitement at suddenly seeing in Tycho Brahe’s
calculations what Tycho himself could not see - that they were consistent only
with elliptical planetary paths, a concept banned from consideration by the
authority of Aristotle. Most dramatic
of all perhaps is the
153
story of Kekule, seeing in a dream or vision as
he dozed before the fire the benzene ring in the form of a whirling fiery
serpent eating its own tail.
Wertheimer
18 claims that his discussions with Einstein showed how critical was the moment when it first occurred to Einstein to question the conventional concept of time. And although Miller 19 has criticized Wertheimer’s reconstruction of Einstein’s thought processes, his own well-documented account in this book of those processes, not only in Einstein but in other leading minds who pioneered the amazing subsequent development of quantum theory, provides even more abundant examples of their paradigm shifts. It also reveals how closely these shifts are related to the personality and experience of the particular scientist involved. “Making sense” of the world is, it seems, a highly individual activity, even where the subject matter of our enquiry is the apparently independent fields of the “natural” and the “logical” sciences. Why else should Heisenberg, fully at home in a nonvisualizable universe, call Niels Bohr’s mathematics “disgusting” as described by Professor Miller in his paper in this book?
Similar shifts are seen in the development of
individual artists. The development of
Picasso’s art, as of many others, in other media as well as painting,
illustrates the self-generated shifts of paradigm which a creative mind can
achieve. The breakthrough comes
sometimes after a spell of inactivity either willed or imposed by the artist’s
incapacity to produce. Sometimes it
can be seen in retrospect as following a series of tentative struggles towards
what, for the artist, was still a hidden goal.
In either case, when it emerges it is unmistakable.
These dramatic shifts make visible with peculiar
clarity the structure of tacit norms, previously taken for granted, which they
assail and replace. I am equally
concerned in this paper with the process by which a system of tacit norms
changes gradually over time.
I will next examine an example of design of a
different kind, the redesign of an urban environment.
The effort is far more conscious. Nonetheless,
the norms involved remain only half revealed both in the process by which the
problem is, ultimately, defined and in the process by which one of many
possible partial solutions is chosen. And
the reciprocal effect of the effort on the norms by which it is guided, though
not fully detectable even with the wisdom of hindsight, is no less important
than in the example already examined.
Design as the
Resolution of Conflict between Norms
Consider a problem of urban planning.
Several criteria can be described in
general terms. Buildings must have
access to vehicular
154
and pedestrian traffic appropriate to the
activities which they generate; and the two types of traffic must be
sufficiently separated to preserve an acceptable level of safety.
Noise, air pollution, and interference
with light must be kept within acceptable thresholds.
And so on. But what in
each case is the level of the appropriate and the acceptable?
The policymaker may allot target
values in each case but he can be sure that, if he pitches them high enough to
be unquestioned, some at least, will not be capable of being realized.
He cannot even make an exhaustive
list, until an actual plan begins to emerge, so that its actual effect can be
envisaged in each of the dimensions of success.
He must wait for the planner before he
can clearly define the problem that he wants the planner to solve.
What of the planner? - in so far as his function
can be separated. Each of the
requirements which he has to satisfy (and which thus become his concerns) make
relevant, as possibilities or limitations, features of the physical site; and
these in turn suggest their relevance, for good and ill, to other
requirements. Hypothetical solutions
begin to shape themselves in his mind and in rough sketch plans; and these
engender often unsuspected meanings as they intersect with the various
requirements in which he is concerned or even suggest others with which he
ought to be concerned. One cell after
another in the matrix is activated by such intersections of concern and
opportunity; and from each intersection streams of further activation resonate
along all the dimensions of the matrix.
This exercise can easily lose itself in boundless complexity. The list of requirements and the facts relevant to each can be extended in number and time with no clear limit, and every extension multiplies their interactions with each other. Alexander, in the book already mentioned,
20 makes some valuable suggestions for keeping these many-factored problems under control by identifying those variables which can be grouped together in relatively independent clusters. But in any but the simplest problem, it is, I believe, vain to hope for a solution which will produce for every requirement a “fit” which would have been regarded as acceptable when the exercise began. Any solution will have to deal with some requirements in a way which will become acceptable only in the light of what it will make possible in other dimensions of success or, alternatively, of what is then seen to be the cost of making it any better, when this cost is measured in terms of the limitations it would pose on satisfying other requirements. 21
The designer, then, like the scientist, is
engaged in a synthetic exercise. He
must produce a single design which will be judged by multiple criteria.
Some of these reinforce each other;
some conflict with each other; most compete with each other for scarce
resources. All are affected in some
degree by any change made in
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the interest of one of them.
The number of possible designs, even
within given costs, is unlimited and unknowable, for it depends on
possibilities of innovation which cannot be known before they have been made.
The comparison of one with another can
be made only when both have been worked out and even then depends on the
relative value attached to disparate criteria within the framework of a single
solution.
However great the number of possible designs,
the number submitted to the policy maker is seldom more than one.
The resources demanded by large-scale
planning are too great to permit detailed alternatives.
Hence enormous importance attaches to
the rapid and often obscure process by which the basic lines of the proffered
solution are chosen, for these soon generate many vested interests, valid as
well as invalid. Not least of these is
that its sponsors, having grown familiar with its implications, can more
confidently exclude the possibilities of unwelcome surprise, which would lurk
in any alternative, until it had reached the same degree of elaboration.
The successful designer chooses what proves to
be a viable approach by a process which is much better than random and which
seems sometimes to be guided by uncanny prescience.
So does the technological inventor,
the scientific discoverer, the successful policy maker in government and
business, and those apparently ordinary mortals whose human relations are at
once richer, more varied, and more orderly than those of their neighbors.
I do not postulate any unknown mental
function - or, at any rate, any more unknown than they all are-when I describe
these gifted people as having (like the artist) unusual sensitivity to form.
But in thus grouping them together, I
do suggest that they have something in common in terms of cerebral organizing
capacity. I have no doubt that this
something is a specially happy combination of the “two cognitive styles”
mentioned by Dr. Galin in the paper already referred to - the one logical,
analytic, and explicit; the other (and, in these cases, the more important)
contextual, synthetic, and tacit.
Giftedness in Rationality
and Intuition
This tentative postulate seems to derive support from many sides. The capacity for sensory discrimination varies greatly between individuals. It is most easily charted in music because the sound patterns produced by musical instruments can be formally described,
22 even when they are immensely complex, as in concerted orchestral passages. It is demonstrable that people differ, not merely through differences in training, in their ability to recognize, for example, variations on a theme. It seems reasonable to
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suppose that this innate capacity for
discriminating musical patterns sets limits both to musical interest and to
musical achievement.
By discrimination in its most general sense I mean the ability to distinguish figure from ground, signal from noise
. 23 It is the basic limitation of any information system. It is distributed between individuals not only unevenly but selectively. Those concerned with the study of gifted children distinguish at least four kinds of giftedness, each of which can be described as unusual power of discrimination. The most familiar are the intellectually gifted, who can be identified with some confidence by tests of ability to recognize logical, including mathematical, relations. Distinct from these are the inventive, whose ability for practical innovation can coexist with quite limited power to handle abstractions. The aesthetically gifted are again a class apart. They are often impractical and sometimes unintellectual; and their gift for appreciating sensory form is highly selective. Aesthetic appreciation of nature may be dissociated from the appreciation of the fine and applied arts; and within these last, sensitivity to one medium may not extend to others.
In the categories of conscious experience, these
forms of giftedness cover a wide variety of gifts, but they are all mediated
by the brain and central nervous system. They
all involve discrimination, in some form, between figure and ground, signal
and noise; and they all depend on tacit criteria developed by experience
within the inherent limitations of the particular neural heritage.
Some students of human giftedness distinguish a
fourth type - social giftedness. These
are those who show unusual interest and ability in sensing, maintaining, and
creating relations with other people.
These gifts too would seem to depend on unusually high capacity for
discrimination. Students of human
dialogue can show that it involves each party in setting up an inner
representation of the other, and that the level of dialogue depends not only
on the accuracy and refinement of this model, but also on the attitude of each
to his inner representation of the other. G.H.
Mead insisted on the social importance of a variable which he described as the
ability and willingness to take the generalized role of the other.
Communication theory begins to make
this concept more precise.
I have distinguished two functions which in
practice are never wholly separated but which are, nonetheless, logically
distinct as two reciprocating phases in a recurrent process of mental
activity. One is the creative process,
which presents for judgment a work responsive to many explicit and tacit
criteria. The other is the
appreciative process, which judges the work by the criteria, tacit as well as
explicit, to which it appeals, and finds it good or wanting, better or worse
than another. The two phases of the
process may
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alternate many times in the course of producing
the work. The work may never be
finished; in a sense it can never be finished, for it is part of an ongoing
process. Even the individual works of
an artist are part of his “work,” which ends only with his death, or when he
has nothing more to say, and which continues even after that in the creative
and appreciative minds which it quickens.
In the example last given, the form of the work
was an urban design. An urban design
may be viewed as a creation in any of the four fields in which we exercise
judgment - scientific, technological, ethical, and aesthetic.
It may be viewed as a work of art,
appealing to aesthetic criteria, like a sculpture or a painting.
It may be viewed as an invention,
appealing to functional criteria of utility. It
may be viewed as a social creation, appealing to criteria of social need and
satisfaction. It may be viewed as an
intellectual creation, an expression of abstract relations, like a scientific
theory. Examples could be chosen which
would more clearly emphasise any one of these aspects, rather than another.
We may be right to distinguish sharply
between these different kinds of knowing and their related criteria.
Yet they have notable common features
which are likely to correspond to common features in the working of the human
brain or in the patterns which our culture imposes on it.
The Dynamics of Change
in Normative Systems
The common features I want to emphasize are the
following:
1. The form is produced by the activity of a concerned mind structured by tacit norms as well as by explicit rules. This concerned mind abstracts for attention what I will call a situation, by which I mean a set of related facts relevant to its concern. Part of this situation is seen as not modifiable by the agent; I will call this the context. The rest of the situation is the area to which form is to be given. I will call it the field
. 24
2. The form is specific.
It is to be realized in particular
terms, by arranging the field in particular ways, in relation to the context.
3. Both phases of the process by which form is
given to the field change the norms to which they consciously and
unconsciously appeal. The appreciative
phase changes them by the mere fact of using them to analyze and evaluate a
concrete situation, for this may affect both their cognitive and their
evaluative settings. The creative
phase affects them by presenting new hypothetical forms for appreciation.
The realization of the chosen form
still further affects the norms involved, for it affects the situation,
including its division between field and context.
It would thus alter the stream of match and mismatch signals generated
by the situation, even if it had not already altered the setting of the norms
themselves.
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This process of change is the focus of my
attention, for I believe it is the key to our understanding of our predicament
and of the scope of our initiative.
I have argued that we know anything at
all only by virtue of a system of largely tacit norms, developed by individual
and social experience, which itself is structured by our individual concerns,
and that this system has the threefold task of guiding action, mediating
communication, and making personal experience meaningful and tolerable.
It can change only at a limited rate,
if it is not to fail in one or more of its functions.
Its failures at the level of the
individual can be studied in any mental hospital, and at the social level, in
all the more disturbed periods of history, notably the present.
Hence the importance of understanding
the process of change, its possible patterns, and its inherent possibilities
and limitations.
The system of tacit norms, which I call an
appreciative system, tends to be self-perpetuating.
Our mutual understanding and
cooperation, our powers of prediction and effective action depend on its being
widely shared and accepted. So any
challenge to it awakens protective responses.
Each generation has a powerful interest in transmitting it to the
next. Representing as it does the
accumulation of experience, it is supported both by authority and history.
In the social field it is also to some extent self-validating, since sanctioned mutual expectations tend to elicit the behavior which will confirm them. In the field of the natural sciences, where the variables are more independent, this conservatism is less likely to be self-validating though it may long inhibit change. Michael Polanyi
25 lived long enough to see the adoption in his lifetime of a scientific hypothesis formulated by him forty years before, but barred from acceptance in the meantime by its departure from the then most acceptable style of explanation. In his account of this experience he expresses his approval of this degree of inertia, even though it nearly cost him his scientific career.
On the other hand, such systems also contain
within themselves the seeds of their own reversals.
Each is a work of art, however
unconscious, and, like all works of art, attains form only by a process of
selection which excludes possible alternative forms.
These in time clamour for realization.
They are kept alive in the meantime in
those individuals and subcultures which are least satisfied by the accepted
systems; and they grow at the expense of the accepted system as soon as that
system ceases to command the confidence and authority of its heyday.
Furthermore and more conspicuously, the accepted
system is challenged by changes in the context, often brought about indirectly
by its own development which renders that context no longer appropriate.
These changes may be in the physical
or the
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institutional or the social or even the
intellectual context. All are
abundantly illustrated in the recent history of the Western world.
Physical exploitation has posed problems of pollution which turn growth
from a promise into a threat. Market
institutions, developing, have changed the nature of the market.
Democratic political institutions,
developing, have transformed the concept of democracy.
“Liberal” values have made a world
which increasingly rejects liberal values. Styles
of scientific thinking, pushed to their extremes, reveal their limitations and
subsume or are overwhelmed by their rivals. “ Teleology,” for example, a word
wholly unacceptable to science even fifty years ago, attained respectability
almost overnight as soon as it could be applied to manmade machines.
Finally, the accepted system may be challenged
by collision with rival appreciative systems.
This also is being illustrated by contemporary history as never
before. In a world where interactions
multiply on a planetary scale, inconsistent subcultures multiply by fission to
attest the passionate need of each individual for an apt and shared
appreciative system, however small the sharing group.
It is in no way surprising that
increased physical contacts across the world should have called into being not
“one world” but more mutually antagonistic worlds than ever before.
It may be objected that this, even though true
in those fields of scientia which are affected by human culture, is not
true of the natural sciences. The
world’s atomic scientists talk a common language, even though the world’s
politicians do not. I have argued that
this is true only as a matter of degree.
It seems to me possible, in the light of these
ideas, to arrange the different fields of potential knowledge in an order
which explains both the extent to which they are open to human knowing and the
extent to which our acceptance of our knowledge rests on its survival of
rational tests on the one hand and its congruence with tacit standards of form
on the other. This “order” does not
involve sharp breaks between “scientific knowledge” and “unsupported beliefs.”
It is generally recognized today that even in
the natural sciences the scientific method does not “validate” its hypotheses.
It can only test them and attach
increased credence as they survive those tests.
It is recognized also that credence
develops at least as much from the congruence of the theory with the existing
body of knowledge and from its facility in explaining facts other than those
which it was devised to explain and in generating further hypotheses which
depend on it.
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Less commonly recognized is the limited extent
of the knowledge confirmed even to this extent and the status of the
remainder. Even in the natural sciences theories rightly retain their power
even though well established facts show that they must be at least incomplete.
For example, the ascertained facts of
what is now (perhaps mistakenly) called extrasensory perception show that our
current ideas of sensory perception must be at least incomplete.
But in the absence of a theory to link
what we do not understand with what we do understand, these facts await
incorporation in the general body of knowledge, just as the evidence for
biological evolution had to await its explanatory theory.
Even an adequate theory may have to
wait long for acceptance, as Polanyi’s experience showed, for no better reason
than its departure from current fashions of explanation.
Equally often rival theories compete to explain
the same set of facts, as did Ptolemaic and Copernican astronomy.
The judgment that accepted the second
was not the result of “rational” testing. It
was not even a preference for simplicity. For
Copernicus, retaining circular planetary motion, had as much mathematical
difficulty in accounting for his observations as did his Ptolemaic
predecessors. Yet his theory, rightly
in my view, bears his name, rather than that of Kepler who first gave the
theory its manifest superiority in simplicity.
The situation is even more extreme in the field
which Herbert Simon has called the “Artificial.”
For example, it is sometimes objected
that most psychoanalytic theory is “unscientific” because it cannot be
disproved. This may be so, but we are
not therefore irrational in accepting it in so far as we judge it to serve our
need better than others or better than none. Human
motivation is complex and culture-bound. Why
should we expect to “understand” it completely or once and for all?
The example is also a disturbing reminder of the
relation between knowledge and design in the field of the “artificial.”
However unsupported these theories may
be deemed to be, countless families in the past seventy years have made them
true for them simply by accepting them.
And more generally they have become part of Western culture to the
extent that they have affected our basic assumptions about the areas in which
they operate.
It is a minor example of this, for Western
culture has been profoundly affected by the findings, the methodology, the
attitudes, and the outlook of scientists. It
is not wholly the fault of scientists that what has passed into the general
culture is grossly distorted in two critical ways.
One is the mistaken identification of
science with rationality. The other is
the exaggerated dichotomy between science and nonscience.
These two errors are nonetheless a
grevious threat to our understanding of our own mental processes,
161
for they ignore two basic facts of human
epistemology.
The first of these is that our basic knowledge
of the world, our neighbors, and ourselves is a set of expectations based on
exposure to the regularities of experience. Science
has vastly amplified and refined these expectations, but what lies outside its
reach is by far the greater part.
Second, the appreciation of form based on tacit
standards is as basic to science as to the much wider area of our tacit and
explicit assumptions. It emerges most
clearly from a study of the great innovations in science, but it is equally
important and far more common in conserving and securing general acceptance
for the common assumptions on which all our cooperative activity proceeds, not
least the cooperative activity of science.
1. Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the
Artificial (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1969).
2. A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966).
3. In fact I understand that the theory of
particulate inheritance has itself been so qualified by deeper understanding
of the interactions of the gene pool that genetic theory today is more similar
in its actual effect to that presumed in
4. Christopher Alexander, Notes on the
Synthesis of Form (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967).
5. Alexander, Synthesis of Form, p. 198.
note 21.
6. Hanna F. Pitkin, Wittgenstein and
Justice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972).
7. The evidence on the subject of perception is
conveniently summarized in M. L. Johnson Abercrombie, The Anatomy of
Judgment (London: Hutchinson, 1960). The
relation of cognitive capacity to neural development is of course the focus of
most of the work of Piaget.
8. This was the focus of contention especially in
the second decade of this century between gestalt psychologists (for example,
Koehler, Wertheimer) and holistic philosophers (for example, Bergson, Smuts)
on the one hand and traditional, analytic, reductionist science on the other.
As so often occurs, the manifest facts
on which the innovators were insisting were ignored because they were offered,
or at least construed, as an “either-or” choice in which acceptance meant the
rejection of equally valued insights on the other side.
The debate continues to be bedevilled
by the “either-or” disease even today when physics has blessed the concept of
complementarity. Let us hope that
neurophysiologists will prevail on the field on which psychologists and
philosophers battled almost in vain.
9. David Galin, “Implications for Psychiatry of
Left and Right Cerebral Specialisation,” Archives of General Psychiatry
, October 1974, vol. 31.
162
This paper also contains an extensive review of
the literature on this subject. For a
special study of its implications for pattern recognition, see Roland Puccetti,
“Pattern Recognition in Computers and the Human
Brain,” Brit. J. Phil. Sci. 25
(1974):137-154.
10. Woodger, Biological Principles (London
and New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929).
11. G. H. Lewes, Problems of Life
and Mind.
Quoted in M. L. Johnson Abercrombie’s Anatomy of Judgment.
12. J. S. Bruner, J. J. Goodnow, and G. A.
Austin, A Study of Thinking (New York: Wiley, 1956).
13. Milton Rokeach, The Open
and Closed Mind (New York:
Basic Books, 1960).
14. Professor Rhinelander, in his book/s Man
Incomprehensible to Man, expresses his opinion that this view is
“essentially accurate” even though it “is at odds with much current
philosophical theory and… bristles with controversial assertions and
implications.” (Portable Stanford, 1973, pp. 77, 78.)
15. I have developed this concept of interacting
reality and value systems elsewhere, notably in The Art of Judgment
(London: Chapman & Hall, and New York: Basic Books, 1965) ch. 4 and Value
Systems and Social Process (London: Tavistock Publications and New York:
Basic Books, 1968), ch. 9.
16. Notably in a paper “Digits and Analogues,”
published in the proceedings of the 1968 AGARD Bionics Symposium,
17. T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
18. See M. Wertheimer, Productive Thinking
(New York: Harpers, 1959) p. 214.
19. Arthur I. Miller, “Albert Einstein and Max
Weitheimer: A Gestalt Psychologist View of the Genesis of Special Relativity
Theory,” Hist. Sci. XIII (1975): 75-103.
20. Alexander, Synthesis of Form, ch. 5.
21. Well illustrated in the Buchanan Report on
Traffic in Towns (London: H.M.S.O., 1963, p. 16)
22. Jeanne Bamberger distinguishes the formal
structure of music from the (much less describable) figural structure imposed
by the performer and the hearer and has shown that young children impose a
figural pattern even on a sound sequence from which the performer has
eliminated all but formal elements. (“The
Development of Musical Intelligence I,” July 1975, unpublished.)
She is Associate Professor of
Education, Division for Study and Research in Education, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and Associate Professor of Humanities (Music) at the
same institution.
23. When I refer to “distinguishing signal from
noise” I do not wish to imply that there is necessarily only one distinction
to be made. Many alternative divisions
of figure and ground may be possible. Dr.
Hans Selye has described how, as a young medical student making his first
contact
163
with hospital wards, he was struck not by the
variety of the patients’ symptoms but by the similarity which distinguished
them all from the nurses and doctors around them.
They all looked ill.
He learned his appointed lesson,
which was to distinguish and diagnose their disease.
But he did not forget his initial
insight. It was later to inspire what
was to be his predominant life work as a researcher - the study of the body’s
response to stress of any kind - which he was to call the general adaptation
syndrome. Hans Selye, The Stress of Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956)
pp. 14-17.
24. I take this use of the word “context” from
Alexander (4).
25. Michael Polanyi, “The Potential Theory of
Adsorption,” Science 141, no. 3585, pp. 1010-1013.
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The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
October 2002