The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
2nd Draft March 2005
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Epithet
Noösphere (from
Greek noös, “mind”), in theoretical biology, that
part of the world of life that is strongly affected by man's conceptual
thought; regarded by some as coextensive with the anthroposphere. The
noösphere, as proposed by scientific theorists Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,
Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky, and Édouard Le Roy, is the level of the
intellect, as opposed to the geosphere, or nonliving world, and the
biosphere, or living world. Encyclopedia
Britannica, 2003 Ultimate CD Reference Suite |
1. On one level, knowledge can be meaningfully categorized as a Monad, i.e., an indivisible unit of being (OED, monad, n & a, 2a). The term ‘Monad’ carries a great deal of philosophical and metaphysical baggage accumulated overtime by Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Synesius, Bruno, Spinoza and especially Leibnitz, co-discoverer of calculus (Catholic Encyclopedia, Monad, 1911).
2. As with all disciplines of thought, philosophy has engaged in heated intra-disciplinary debate over the meaning of the term. For my purposes I take its original Pythagorean event horizon “as the name of the unity from which, as from a principle (arche), all number and multiplicity are derived” (Catholic Encyclopedia, Monad, 1911). It is in this sense that I will subsequently derive other MDTQ model components including the Dyad (two), Triad (three) and Qubit (four). The Qubit is my updating of the ancient Pythagorean tetrad.
3. In the first instance, however, TDI revealed knowledge (at least in English) as a Monad, as a Platonic abstract idealized noun like Beauty, Truth, Justice, etc. It has an ‘awe’ factor, or what in analytic psychology is called ‘numinosity’ (Sharp 1991). This unity of knowledge can be seen in four of its observable characteristics:
· it is the end product of an elemental, undifferentiated, biological, human need to know;
· it is, unlike the bits and bytes of information theory, immeasurable in quantitative terms;
· it is incommensurable in that one can speak of knowledge of a pirouette in ballet or knowledge of a hybridomas in genomics but all one can meaningfully say is that both are knowledge; and,
· it finds general expression through inherently limited and biased human language including mathematics (Boulding 1955).
1. Knowledge literally begins with the dawn of human consciousness. It arrived in a phylogenetic instant of self-awareness with the appearance of our species homo sapiens (literally ‘the man that knows’) some 300,000 years ago and of our sub-species homo sapiens sapiens (the man that knows that he knows) about 20 to 30,000 years ago. Subsequently each of us experiences an individual ontogenetic instant, repeated generation after generation, when we emerge out of infancy into self-reflective consciousness. ‘To know’ is the defining characteristic of our species, a characteristic rooted in our subjective, individual, biological nature then shaped and directed according to the institutional, moral and social norms of a specific human society. And, as will be seen, the need to know invokes many different faculties, not just reason and logic and operates in many distinct domains.
2. The biological imperative ‘to know’ is apparent in at least four ways:
first, ultimately only the individual human being can ‘know’. Books and computers do not know that they know, nor does any other species, at least on this planet. Companies, corporations and governments or, in Common Law, ‘legal persons’, cannot know. Only the solitary flesh and blood ‘natural person’ can know; [A]
second, being organic, knowledge mutates, flows back and forth, selectively feeding on itself, growing and developing. Thus when two different streams of knowledge meet in a single individual they tend to interact mutating into new knowledge or connexions;
third,
osmotic pressure forces high concentrations of knowledge from one domain across
semi-permeable social and institutional membranes into other domains. Two examples demonstrate. To monitor scientific experiments German
physicist Ferdinand Braun developed the first cathode-ray oscilloscope in 1897. Industry quickly adopted it to monitor
production activities. In turn, industry
converted it into the ubiquitous television set that occupies our living room
and connects us to the wider world. A
second example is from theology. After
the fall of
fourth, given the biological imperative one faces a wickedly complex set of questions. How do we know in terms of neuron bundles and pathways? Who, in a psychiatric sense, knows when ego consciousness does not? What is the difference between knowing in the subjective sense of aesthetic, moral and religious values and in the objective sense of the angular spin of electrons or the genetic alphabet of life? Where in the modularized brain do we know, e.g., in a specific part of the brain stem or transcendent to its component parts?
3. The questions continue. What is the relationship between knowing and memory? Where does knowledge go when not in thought? Does what we know correspond to an external, eternal truth or reality? Or is what we know relative and subjective; is it contextual to time, place, culture and person? How does the knowledge of the individual coalesce into human culture?
1. The immeasurability of knowledge can
be demonstrated in the distinction between information and knowledge management
(Bouthillier & Shearer 2002) or between ‘bits’ and ‘wits’ (Boulding 1966).
Information theory involves storage and transmission of human knowledge
in electronic rather than hardcopy or analogue format. These remain the domain of library science
and the Dewey Decimal System. Storage involves audio-video discs, tapes,
databases, hard drives, e-books, etc.
Transmission and reception requires hardware such as computers, radios,
television sets and the Internet.
‘Analogue’ content is digitized for storage and transmission then
reconverted into human-readable analogue format, e.g., sounds, pictures
and words. The unit of digitization is
the binary on/off ‘bit’: 0, 1.
2. The
‘bit’, however, abstracts from the content of stored or transmitted
information. The same number of bits
could emerge from a telephone conversation between two teen-age girls in
3. Immeasurability,
however, has not stopped economists, among others. The ‘utile’ – Jeremy Bentham’s
unit measure of pleasure and pain – is the foundation stone of modern economic
analysis. We cannot, however, measure
the pleasure and pain of an individual, nor can we add it up across individuals
using felicitous calculus. The measurement problem, e.g., the greatest good for the greatest number, is finessed through
reification by proxy. That
is, let us assume the utile can be reified, i.e.,
made concrete and calculable, specifically as money. In this philosophy, one works (suffering
disutility) to earn income to buy goods and services to consume them, i.e., extract utility. The money price one pays on the market
theoretically reflects the utility that can be appropriated by the
consumer. Some day the ‘wit’ too may be
reified but at the moment, there is no obvious proxy on the analytic horizon.
1. Beyond immeasurability, there is the incommensurability of knowledge. Incommensurable is an adjective meaning “having no … common measure except unity” (OED incommensurable, a, 1b). Thus while we have knowledge about the arts, sciences and society there is no common measure other than the word ‘knowledge’ itself. The incommensurability of knowledge has been identified – explicitly and implicitly - by scholars in a wide range of disciplines including: Daniel Bell (sociology); Naom Chomsky (linguistics); Carl Jung (psychology); Thomas Kuhn (history, philosophy, sociology of science); Walter Lippman (journalism); Magorah Maruyama (psychology); Michael Polanyi (history, philosophy, sociology of science); and, Adam Smith (economics).
2. Incommensurability is emotionally
most evident in the Arts where the Art-for-Art’s-Sake Movement, a child
of the Industrial Revolution (
3. Noam Chomsky introduced to linguistics the analogy of language as a genetic but abstract organ. Like the physical organs of the body, the language organ develops through the life stages of the individual. Its capacity can be increased through exercise like the muscles of an athlete but genetic endowment and disposition can be taken only so far. [C] Chomsky uses post-Schonbergian music as a limiting case:
Modern music is accessible to professionals and may be
to people with a special bent but it's not accessible to the ordinary person
who doesn't have a particular quirk of mind that enables him to grasp modern
music let alone make him want to deal with it. (Chomsky 1983, 172)
This inaccessibility
reflects the incommensurability of knowledge.
4. Carl Gustav Jung, in analytic
psychology, explicitly uses the word ‘incommensurability’ to define the rupture
between reason and faith. While both
concern the same empirical world, their incommensurability represents “a
symptom of the split consciousness which is so characteristic of the
mental disorder of our day” and of modern society as a whole (Jung [1918] 1970, 285).
[D]
5. In his seminal work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn observed that specialization and puzzle-solving within the paradigm of normal science generates knowledge that is ‘incommensurable’ (Kuhn [1962] 1996, 103, 112, 148, 150) even to neighbouring specialties and, by extension to other knowledge domains, disciplines and society as a whole. Semi-permeable barriers or paradigms separate specialties fostering specialization has generated dramatic growth in our knowledge and control of the physical world. The very success of the natural sciences, it has been argued, rests on the axiom: “good paradigms make good neighbours” (Fuller 2000, 7). This specialization by paradigm led Price to coin the phrase ‘invisible colleges’ to describe the forty or fifty people in the entire world who can understand what is being said or written in any given specialty of the natural and engineering sciences (Price 1963). [E]
6. If the invisible college symbolizes the incommensurability of specialized knowledge, then public opinion represents “the insertion between man and his environment of a pseudo-environment” (Lippman 1922, 15). Knowledge of this pseudo-environment is incommensurable with immediate personal experience. In a complex society, one’s immediate surroundings are part of a much larger environment about which one can have only indirect knowledge or experience. Knowledge of this wider world is derived not through the senses but through what Walter Lippman called Public Opinion in his study of propaganda and the mass media during the First World War (Lippman 1922). In his introduction entitled “The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads’, Lippman uses the poignant example of a few English, French and German nationals living on an isolated island in 1914 where “for six strange weeks they had acted as if they were friends, when in fact they were enemies” (Lippman 1922, 3). [F]
7. Psychiatrist Magorah Maruyama whose work includes design of human space settlements coined the term ‘paradigmatology’ capturing the incommensurability of knowledge between different professional practices confronting the same objective phenomenon (Maruyama 1974). [G] Consider a social worker consulting a client family made up of an alcoholic father, a promiscuous mother and delinquent children. This is an objective reality that can be shared using a language that permits communication between the professional and the client. The social worker returns to an office where this ‘objective reality’ is discussed using another language with colleagues. In turn, the case worker reports to an administrative supervisor (in yet another language) who, in turn, reports to a ‘political master’ using yet another language. It is the same objective reality yet different paradigms come into play. And these paradigms exhibit varying degrees of incommensurability.
8. Michael Polanyi writes explicitly of incommensurability between what subsequently become known as codified and tacit knowledge in technical performance (1962a, 174). [H] Elsewhere he implies that: (i) knowledge obtained through belief defined by articles of faith and that derived through science are incommensurate; (M.Polanyi 1952, 217) and, (ii) scientific and technological knowledge are incommensurate reflecting:
the profound
distinction between science and technology [which] is but an instance of the
difference between the study of nature on the one hand and the study of human
activities and the products of human activities, on the other. (M.Polanyi 1960-61, 406)
9. Incommensurability is also implicit in Adam Smith’s argument that public education is necessary to mitigate the damaging, or what Marx would later call, the ‘alienating’ effects of the division and specialization of labour on workers’ minds. Of the worker, Smith wrote: “his dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues” (Smith 1776). [I] This is the shadow-side of the contemporary division and specialization of knowledge, a wraith that Adam Smith foresaw.
1. Trans-disciplinary induction can arguably accommodate the biological imperative to know as well as the immeasurability and incommensurability of knowledge. It cannot, however, escape the meta-methodological dilemma of language. Excepting tacit and tooled, knowledge finds expression through a human language, each of which, including mathematics (Boulding 1955), is subject to inherent conceptual and other limitations. This is certainly the case with English, the language of this dissertation. As noted before, one verb, ‘to know’, etymological veils four distinct meanings: to know by the senses, mind, doing and experience. In this sense, in English, knowledge is in fact a Monad. In German, by contrast, there are four separate and distinct verbs to express each of these meanings. A more detailed analysis of the English meaning of knowledge is provided below (see 7.1 Etymological WIT).
2. A word, of course, is part of a language that in turn is the foundation of the traditional ‘nation’ or ‘people’, e.g., the Chinese, English, French, German or Japanese language, nation and/or people. In addition to words or vocabularies, languages differ in their grammar including their syntax, i.e., the ordering of words, and, when reduced to writing, they differ in alphabet (phonetic) and/or script (ideographic), e.g., Cyrillic, Kanji, Mandarin, Roman, etc., and, arguably, mathematics.
3. Spoken and written language is a defining feature of our species. It is the primary but not exclusive means by which human knowledge is expressed and exchanged between individuals and across generations. Sometimes, however, as with the Logical Positivists, language is treated as synonymous with knowledge which leads to other forms being ignored. This has been called “semantic ascent” (Baird 2004, 8). Nonetheless, “if language-in-use is this all-embracing sort of activity, stylizing most of our other activities as human beings, then man is best defined, not simply as a rational animal but as animal symbolicum - the language-using animal” (Aldrich 1969, 389).
4. To cite an example: Kawasaki in his analysis of science education notes that in Japanese there are no proper nouns in the Platonic sense of ‘idealized forms’ (Kawasaki 2002). Hence abstract concepts such as ‘the computer’ or ‘acceleration’ have meaning in Japanese only as specific experiential cases, not as abstract idealized forms. He suggests this may explain why the Japanese have excelled in technological innovation but lagged in the pure sciences. In contrast, the presence of abstract idealized nouns in English may explain why there appears, in my survey of sixteen sub-disciplines, no etymology of the word ‘knowledge’. In effect, knowledge is treated in discussion of the knowledge-based economy as a universal, as a Monad, not a particular.
The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy