The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
2nd Draft March 2005
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3.0 Methodology
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Epithet The desire of knowledge is first stimulated in us
when remarkable phenomenon attract our attention. In
order that this attention be continued, it is necessary that we should feel
some interest in exercising it, and thus by degrees we become better
acquainted with the object of our curiosity. During this process of
observation we remark at first only a vast variety which presses
indiscriminately on our view; we are forced to separate, to distinguish, and
again to combine; by which means at last a certain order arises which admits
of being surveyed with more or less satisfaction.
The Theory of Colours, 1810. |
1. Methodology is the organized means
by which knowledge about something is acquired. That ‘something’ may be
the subatomic foundation of a chemical reaction, intellectual property rights
among Fourth World peoples, altered states of consciousness, the history of the
automobile, echoes of the Big Bang, or the meaning of truth, love, beauty,
destiny or justice. The organized means to know about something varies
according to the object under investigation as do the rules of evidence and the
accepted instruments for its collection. When that ‘something’ is
knowledge itself, however, one faces a meta-methodological dilemma.
Understanding a system or thing requires a perspective or vantage point higher
than or conceptually above the object under investigation (Loasby 1971, 863). [A] How can one attain a position that transcends
knowledge? How can one know all its domains and forms or all its
faculties of acquisition? Such questions border on metaphysics, itself,
of course, a discipline of thought.
2. Given the inadequacies of the Standard Model and the thinness of public policy debate concerning the knowledge-based economy, a methodology is required to reach out beyond the disciplinary frontiers of economics to collect, compile and collate ‘knowledge about knowledge’. My solution is ‘Trans-Disciplinary Induction’ or TDI used to harvest knowledge about knowledge from the event horizons of five disciplines of thought and interdisciplinary fields of study including sixteen of their sub-disciplines plus etymology, i.e., the origin and meaning of words. I will first define TDI (phrase by phrase) then outline its weaknesses and strengths.
1. I begin with the prefix ‘trans’ which derives from the Latin meaning “across, to or on the farther side of, beyond, over”. In biochemistry and biology, it has the additional meaning of ‘transfer’, e.g., of genes across species, i.e., trans-genetic (OED, trans-, prefix, 10. Biochem. and Biol.). In addition, as an adjective, trans- conveys the sense of ‘beyond, surpassing, transcending’, as in trans-human. I use the word in the sense of transferring ‘knowledge about knowledge’ across disciplines in the hope of attaining a transcendent understanding or overview of ‘knowledge about knowledge’.
2. Trans-, however, must be contrasted
with ‘inter-’ as in Jean Piaget’s 1973 Main Trends in
Inter-Disciplinary Research.
‘Inter-’ too is a prefix deriving from the Latin but meaning “between,
among, amid, in between, in the midst” (OED, inter-, prefix, etymology).
In this sense, inter-disciplinary means standing between disciplines and
sharing, not transcending, their observations and findings. Piaget also restricts to inter-disciplinary
studies to the natural & engineering or experimental sciences with but a concluding
extension to the ‘human sciences’. He
thereby excludes the Arts and the humanities.
Furthermore, his analysis is rooted in the ‘positivist’ tradition of
Logical Empiricism in which empiricism is defined in linguistic terms as the
common rules of grammar, vocabulary and syntax used by different disciplines to
‘prove’ their findings. This excludes,
of course, non-linguistic, non-codifiable forms of
knowledge such as the aesthetic experience, which disappears under
analysis. It also ignores what David
Baird calls ‘thing knowledge’ (Baird 2004) or what
I call ‘tooled knowledge’, i.e.,
knowing through the existential phenomenological extension of our physical selves
using sensors, tools and toys.
1. The word ‘discipline’ derives from
the Old French meaning “instruction of disciples”. Discipline is concerned with the practice or
exercise of a disciple in contrast to ‘doctrine’ which is “the property of the
doctor or teacher” who is concerned with abstract theory or dogma (OED, discipline, etymology). Put another way, discipline concerns what is
practiced and doctrine concerns what is taught and thought, i.e., a body or system of principles or
tenets. How it is taught is pedagogy, i.e., “the art or science of teaching”
(OED, pedagogy, 1).
2. For my immediate purposes, discipline will be defined as “a department of learning or knowledge; a science or art in its educational aspect” (OED, discipline, n, 2). Such departments tend to be institutional, not just abstract. Since Plato’s Academy they have been reified as organizational and physical structures.
3. Now, as then, entry and exit is controlled, initiates supervised and doctrine regulated. Once admitted, initiates rise up the hierarchy first teaching what once they were taught and then administering the organization and/or adding to the body or interpretation of doctrine. This corresponds to: “the system or method by which order is maintained in a church, and control exercised over the conduct of its members; the procedure whereby this is carried out; the exercise of the power of censure, admonition, excommunication, or other penal measures” (OED, discipline, n, 6a). Put another way, the organization of disciplinary knowledge is, by definition, institutional, with barriers to entry erected to screen admission and then supervise training, qualification and practice.
4. Disciplinary practice in the Church
took the form of doctrinaire monastic orders – Benedictine, Cistercian, Gregorian,
Franciscans, Jesuit, etc. (Cantor
1969). This changed with the arrival of
the self-governing university, independent of Church and State, during the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries of the Common Era (C.E.). At its beginnings, the university was an
incorporated association of teachers, as in
5. The medieval university was typically organized into three primary domains of philosophy (literally ‘the love of knowledge’): natural, moral and metaphysical. To these, the practices (applied knowledge) or self-regulating professions of law and medicine were added as distinct, quasi-independent branches of learning. Excepting the practices, the university taught the ‘Liberal Arts’, i.e., knowledge suitable for the edification of gentlemen and nobles. This included music, the only Art originally admitted to the university and which acquired its own home in academe, the Conservatory.
6. University departments were
paralleled in the ‘real world’ by guilds each of which practiced a distinct ‘mystery’
(Houghton 1941) of
the Mechanical Arts. To work with the
mind and the word was noble; to work with the hands, however, ignoble. Arguably, this bifurcation of
‘knowledge-for-knowledge’s-sake’ and ‘knowledge-for-practice’ is evidenced in
contemporary distinctions between science and technology and between management
and labour.
7. With respect to modern disciplines, natural philosophy broke out into the natural & engineering sciences while moral philosophy split into the humanities & social sciences. Nonetheless, the organizational structure and rituals of the medieval university continue to this day. Anachronisms include: the Bachelor & Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees; the robes; and, the positions such as chancellor, dean, provost, etc. The word ‘anachronism’ highlights a salient characteristic of knowledge, i.e., it exists in overlapping “temporal gestalten” (Emery & Trist 1972, 24) or ‘epistemes’ (Foucault 1973).
8. Picture a graduating PhD on stage
receiving a diploma in 21st century genomics wearing robes designed in the 12th
or 13th centuries and a mortar board, square or trencher cap from 17th century
9. As pointed out by Foucault (1973) with his epistemes, different periods of history are characterized by different dominant strains or patterns of thought including the history of science. Idhe (1991) compares Foucault’s epistemes to Kuhn’s ‘paradigms’ that define ‘normal science’ in non-revolutionary times (Kuhn [1962] 1996). Epistemes are artifacts of another age that continue to function in the contemporary world. Thus the Scholastic Period of western thought was rooted in analogy as a mechanism of thought, i.e., if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it must be a duck! While reduced in stature by the experimental method, knowing by analogy continues to operate in the natural & engineering sciences and throughout the rest of society. Like old philosophies, epistemes tend to persist. And as with Kuhn’s loss when there is a loss of some parts of an old paradigm in the shift to a new one (Fuller 2000), the transition between Foucault’s epistemes exhibits loss as well. However, such losses are less final or definitive than in the natural sciences. Old epistemes continue, often underground, contributing to the “overlapping temporal gestalten” identified by Emery & Trist (Emery & Trist 1972, 24).
10. What differentiates modern disciplines
from medieval ones, however, is emphasis on additions
to rather than interpretation of
existing knowledge. This change became
embodied in the ‘research university’ which appeared first at the
11. This process of the splitting off (the
Latin meaning of ‘science’) is an example of the division and specialization of
knowledge in action. It has the benefit
of ever more detailed examination of a phenomenon but at the cost of increasing
incommensurability, i.e., the
inability to communicate knowledge to the uninitiated. It also has the associated costs of resistance
to heterodox approaches and external audit, e.g.,
inter-disciplinary studies. In a manner
of speaking, what is gained in depth and detail is lost in breadth of
vision.
1. In logic, induction refers to
reasoning from the specific to the general in contrast to deduction which
refers to reasoning from the general to the specific. The word ‘induction’ derives from the French meaning,
among other things, “the action of introducing to, or initiating in, the knowledge of something” (OED, induction, 2). It is in this
sense that trans-disciplinary induction involves introducing, in my case,
economics, to arguments and evidence from other disciplines of thought.
2. If induction carries the sense of increase, then deduction carries the sense of decrease. In fact, the word ‘deduction’ derives from the French meaning “the action of deducting” (OED, deduction, 1a). Put another way, deduction involves simplification of the complex; induction involves the complication of the simple, in this case, of the word ‘knowledge’. Deduction serves as the basis of reductionism in the natural and engineering sciences as well as in the social sciences practicing ‘calculatory rationalism’.
3. Trans-disciplinary induction can be
expressed in two complimentary ways.
First, as in semiotics and analytic psychology, knowledge about a given
phenomenon - in this case about knowledge – can be seen symbolically. In effect, trans-disciplinary induction
involves a circumambulation around the question looking at it from as many
different perspectives as possible and interpreting specific disciplinary
findings as symbolic of a wider more numinous meaning (Neumann 1954, 7). [B]
4. Second, a discipline can be likened
to a black hole of complexity into which relevant evidence and argument flow
over an event horizon. Using this
metaphor, trans-disciplinary induction tries to capture, cream off, harvest or
otherwise pick off ‘knowledge about knowledge’ from the event horizon before it
is sucked into the black hole where it becomes enmeshed in often heated and
complex internalist debate specific to a discipline, e.g., the economics of Keynes vs. Keynesian Economics. To a degree, this skimming is only now truly
possible because of web-based research libraries such as JSTOR at the
5 For my purposes, and excluding etymology (the
origin and meaning of words which is used throughout the text), the event horizons
of five disciplines including economics, philosophy, sociology and
two ‘interdisciplinary’ fields of study - science and technology - were
surveyed (Exhibit 1). From sixteen of their sub-disciplines evidence and
argument was harvested.
Exhibit
1
Trans-Disciplinary
Event Horizon
|
Discipline/ Sub-discipline |
Economics |
Philosophy |
Psychology |
Science |
Technology |
|
1 |
Cultural |
Aesthetics |
Analytic |
Economics |
Economics |
|
2 |
Institutional |
Epistemology |
Cognitive |
History |
History |
|
3 |
Legal |
Phenomenology |
Gestalt |
Philosophy |
Philosophy |
|
4 |
Other |
Other |
Other |
Sociology |
Other |
1. Like any methodology, TDI has weaknesses as well as strengths. Its strengths lay in the breadth of vision it contributes. Its weaknesses, however, are many. First, it relies on language which can articulate some but not all forms of knowledge, e.g., so-called ‘tacit’ knowledge that by definition is not, or cannot be, codified (M. Polanyi 1962a). In this way TDI is like all linguistic-based methodologies and has similar difficulties in treating phenomenon such as the aesthetic experience, “works of technological intelligence” (Aldrich 1969, 381), ‘instrumental realism’ (Idhe 1991) and ‘instrumental epistemology’ (Baird 2004).
2. This limitation of language finds two specific expressions in this dissertation. The first instance is the language of the dissertation itself – English. Knowledge, in English, is, in fact, an etymological monad. Thus one verb, ‘to know’, veils four distinct meanings: to know by the senses, by the mind, by doing and by experience. In German, by contrast, there are four separate and distinct verbs to express each of these meanings.
3. The second involves disciplines and
sub-disciplines that use words with specific ‘disciplinary’ or ‘technical’
meaning. Such meaning sometimes differs
between disciplines. More often, however, it differs from ‘common sense’ usage. Accordingly, extensive, and to some readers
disconcerting, use is made of common sense definitions drawn from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED
2005). Consider the term ‘utility’. In common use it means “the fact, character,
or quality of being useful or serviceable” (OED utility, n, 1a). In economics,
however, utility, means the number of ‘utiles’ – a unit measure of pleasure/pain - carried by a
good or service. Utility is extracted by
the consumer to gain satisfaction or happiness expressed in the felicitous calculus of Jeremy Bentham.
Accordingly, except where otherwise noted, words are used in their
common sense or dictionary meaning throughout the text.
4. Second, TDI is akin to
sophistry: one builds the strongest case from supporting evidence and argument,
ignoring, deflecting but seldom refuting contrary evidence. TDI is therefore inherently subjective and
dependent on the experience, skill and ethics of its practionner.
5. Third, TDI, like medieval scholasticism, relies on authority. While evidence is gathered from experts, their contributions are generally subject to dispute and debate internal to their own respective disciplines. Such controversies are generally ignored using TDI. Furthermore, one gathers such evidence using one’s own ‘external’ reading using one’s own optic (Loasby 1967, 172-173). [C]
6. Fourth, each TDI researcher will be strong in some fields while weak in others. True polymaths are probably extinct. Experimenter expectation or bias can also be expected. But as Kuhn suggests, even the choice of which normal science puzzle to solve is influenced by a natural scientist’s culture, experience and language (Kuhn [1962] 1996, 128). To this degree, even the natural & engineering sciences are value-laden.
7. For all its weaknesses, TDI is, to
paraphrase Kenneth Boulding: “better than nothing” (Boulding 1966, 3). Furthermore, it offers breadth compensating
for the narrowness of disciplinary vision.
It also fosters induction – ex
poste – of a design, metaphor, pattern or theme that sums up the phenomenon
under investigation. Connexions
or parallelisms between different strains of knowledge may also appear as well
as splits and tears in the fabric of human knowledge.
1. In scanning the event horizons of sixteen sub-disciplines plus etymology a significant quantity of evidence was harvested. Given the wide ranging nature of this evidence some mechanism or model was required to organize and present it in a coherent and meaningful manner appropriate to the trans-disciplinary nature of the exercise.
2. Certain patterns did inductively emerge permitting construction of a simple four-level model. It is the methodological purpose and nature of induction that such patterns appear. The model is derived from arguably the oldest system for organizing knowledge in the Western world – the Pythagorean tetraktys or “fourness” implied by the numeric sequence 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10 which is also called the “perfect triangle” or “sacred decad” of numbers (Thesleff 2003). This in fact served as the pedagogic formula for Western universities until at least the Renaissance as the quadrivium of: (1) arithmetic; (2) music; (3) geometry; and (4) astronomy (Apatow 1999).
3. In this system “number is nothing but an extension of unity” (Apatow 1999). The sense of this concatenation, or chain of derivation, is captured in the medieval Axiom of Maria Prophetesta or “Maria the Copt”: One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the Third comes the One as the Fourth (Jung 1963, 249). The Axiom was used to explain, among other things, the Christian Trinity: 3 Gods in 1. It is used today to study the psychic ontology and phylogeny of archetypical figures and mythogems in the theory and practice of analytic psychology. Such figures, however, also find profitable expression in the global arts and entertainment industry.
4. I use the Pythagorean tetraktys and the Axiom for several reasons. First, Pythagorean recognition of a cognate relationship between number and matter arguably lead to the modern natural & engineering sciences as well as to Western music and indirectly, through the geometry of perspective, to the modern visual arts. Second, the psychological meaning of numbers contained in the Axiom has been revealed by analytic psychology to structure ‘knowing’ by human beings across culture and time in the “collective unconscious” (Jung [1918] 1970). Finally, I use it because it accommodates the wealth of evidence collected using TDI and permits its organization and presentation in a simple and hopefully effective manner.
5. The result I call the Monad, Dyad, Triad & Qubit or MDTQ model of knowledge (Exhibit 2). In brief, the MDTQ model first presents knowledge as a Monad (like the ancient Greek atom) that can, however, be split or fissioned into a Dyad - Science (knowing by reduction) and Design (knowing by pattern construction & recognition). Resulting knowledge then takes the form of a Triad consisting of personal & tacit, codified and/or tooled knowledge which, in turn, become inputs to the production process as codified & tooled capital, personal & tacit labour and toolable natural resources. These inputs are blended and combined to produce the final outputs of a knowledge-based economy - the Person, Code and Work. The content and context of these inputs and outputs, or their quality, is determined by the internal and external interactions of knowledge Qubits (or four-fold bits of information). The Qubit is, in effect, a modern variation on the ancient Pythagorean tetrad.
6. Beyond the tetraktys, however, lays the quintessence or the fifth element of medieval alchemy (OED, quintessence, n, 1). Five is the number of change and the quintessential element underlying the knowledge-based economy, as will be revealed, is the nation-state and, more specifically, its institutional incarnation, government playing one or more of five roles as custodian, facilitator, patron, architect and engineer of the national knowledge-base.
7. A former professor, Giles Paquet, once called an economist a tool-bearing animal with his or her head as the tool box. Tools, however, must be constructed before they can be used. I hope that in what follows additional tools of thought are constructed to more effectively open up and explore the knowledge-based economy. I will now present the model, component by component, and then apply it to determine the competitiveness of nations in a global knowledge-based economy.
