The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
2nd Draft March 2005
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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. To go further, one must split knowledge as a Monad, as the ancient Greek atom was split by modern physics, into smaller and smaller parts. Initial fissioning reveals knowledge as a Dyad, i.e., “the number two; a group of two; a couple” (OED, dyad). The Dyad may be used to constellate opposites, e.g., Market vs. Marxist economics. Alternatively, it can constellate complements as an interactive, mutually-determining couple. Metaphorically, their relationship can be likened to that of body and soul or, alternatively, mind and body. The Dyad is a single whole defined by the interaction of two differing halves. The classical image is the Chinese “t’ai chi t’u” or “the supreme ultimate” displayed as a circle curvilinearly divided into the light and dark of yang and yin (Wilhelm 1929, 249). In analytic psychology this relationship is expressed using the alchemistic phrase hieros gamos or ‘sacred marriage’. In a manner of speaking, while two distinct monads, e.g., body and mind, they express themselves as one – the individual human being. In analytic psychology, the Monad is androgynous, the Dyad feminine and the Triad masculine (Jung [1954] 1966, 46).
2. Ignoring the question of conscious and unconscious knowledge (Jung [1918] 1970), “the tradition that there is a non-rational kind of knowing that rivals or even surpasses rational knowledge is as old as philosophy itself” (Dorter 1990, 37). These two realms – the rational and the non-rational – have been at odds from the beginning of Western thought. And while the rational has become embodied in our contemporary concept of Science, the non-rational has remained a wraith taking many forms, assuming many names and evading systemic identification. To Plato it was Art; to the Church Fathers it was Revelation; to the Scholastics it was analogy; to Adam Smith, it was moral sentiments; to Thomas Kuhn, it was aesthetics (Kuhn [1962] 1996, 155) or gestalt switching (Kuhn [1962] 1996, 111-14) or intuition with “scales falling from the eyes”, “lightning flash” and “illumination” (Kuhn [1962] 1996, 123). To Erich Jantsch, after exploring technological forecasting and then systems philosophy, it was Design (Jantsch 1967, 1975).
3. Having scanned, collected, sorted, compiled and considered argument and evidence of ‘knowledge about knowledge’ from the event horizons of sixteen sub-disciplines, a common theme was induced: Science by Design. According to this induction there are two distinct yet intimately interrelated, interpenetrating and overlapping realms of human knowing. A realm is defined as “any sphere or region” subject to a ruling power or “the sphere… or province of some quality, state, or other abstract conception” (OED, realm, 2c). These two realms are:
· Science (or more broadly, reductive reasoning) that finds highest abstract expression in mathematics and highest concrete expression in instrumental science; and,
· Design which is a complex of human capabilities [A] that finds highest abstract expression in the aesthetic/spiritual experience and highest concrete expression in works of art, computer software, human customs and institutions, and “works of technological intelligence” (Aldrich 1969, 381). In summary, it involves pattern construction and recognition.
4. In any and all human activities - art, science, politics or religion – both realms, both ruling powers, are at play. Differences are in balance, concentration, degree, focus or priority.
5. I will first examine the concepts of
Science and Design and then reconcile them. In effect, I will argue that modern
Science emerged from, is the progeny of, or is by way of a more generic and
ancient realm of knowing called Design, hence, Science by Design.
1. Since the beginning of Western civilization, reason, or the Greek logos (from which ‘logic’ emerged), has been accepted as the preferred path to knowledge (Dorter 1990, 37). It distances us from our passions; it frees us from the distracting world of sensation and emotion. In the hands of the Romans logos became ‘reason’ derived from the Latin ‘ratio’ as in calculate (OED, reason, n 1). And from the Romans we also derive Science from the Latin scire “to know” which, in turn, derives from the Latin scindere “to split” (MWO). Science today is accepted as the epitome of reason deriving knowledge by splitting or reducing a question into smaller and smaller parts or elements and, at the extreme, instrumentally controlling them to generate specific phenomenon (Baird 2004). This pattern of behaviour is objective in that it is ideally conducted “without being influenced by personal feelings or opinions” (OED, objectivity, n). As will be demonstrated, this form of objectivity attains its apotheosis in the scientific instrument generating knowledge about the physical world without the intermediation of a human subject (Baird 2004; Idhe 1991; Mitcham 1994).
2. The reductionism of Science extends
beyond methodology to epistemology, i.e.,
the theory of knowledge. Knowledge
itself has been split into domains, disciplines, faculties and forms. Since adoption of the experimental method in
the 17th century, reductive experimental instrumental science has yielded
enormous material and intellectual benefits to humankind. It has, however, also contributed to
increasing incommensurability together with alienation and other social costs, e.g., the genetically modified food
controversy (Pollack & Schafer 2000).
Reductionism has, however, a significant advantage. It strips away secondary phenomena
distinguishing cause from effect revealing in the natural sciences the
underlying ‘laws of nature’ (Taylor
1929,
1930; Zilsel 1942), or
what alternatively may be called the Design of nature.
1. No generally accepted term contra Science has emerged to define the non-rational way of knowing. To the ancient Greeks it was techne roughly meaning the useful or mechanical arts. The distinction was based, however, upon class: nobles practiced the Liberal (or free) Arts; slaves practiced the Mechanical Arts. And it is from techne that, in 1859 the word ‘technology’, as we understand it, entered the English language (OED, technology, 1b). Ominously, Aldrich argues that this classicist attitude of studied indifference towards technology continues today but with the mechanical device cast in the role of slave (Aldrich 1969, 383). [B]
2. In the Renaissance, with the discovery (or re-discovery) of perspective in the visual arts, a new word entered the English language – design. The word derives from the Latin designare “to mark out, trace out, denote by some indication, contrive, devise, appoint to an office” (OED, designate, v). In Renaissance Italy ‘design’ assumed its contemporary artistic sense of geometric composition (Aldrich 1969) as distinct from its social sense of planning with a purpose. In French, these senses are expressed by two words “dessein meaning ‘purpose, plan’ and dessin meaning ‘design in art’” (OED, design, n, etymology). In English, however, both senses are combined in the single word ‘design’. What they share is intent specifically, the intent to shape, to make, as opposed to understand the world at the disinterested distance afforded by Science. [C] Design involves making patterns out of matter (and out of mind) and the spontaneous recognition that something has been designed, i.e., was intentionally made, even if it is a natural phenomenon like ships of clouds sailing across the living skies (Aldrich 1969, 381).
3. The word ‘design’ embraces the Renaissance sense of human progress residing in human hands. This Design revolution changed not just the concept of Western knowledge but also the concept of the ‘knower’. The artist/engineer/humanists of the Renaissance inaugurated, as will be explained below, the Western ‘cult of the genius’ that survives and thrives to this day (Smith 1996; Woodmansee 1984; Zilsel 1918). In fact, Western intellectual property rights – copyrights, patents, registered industrial designs, trademarks, etc. - are founded on the individual creative genius. The god-like ex nihilo, i.e., out of nothing (Nahm 1947), power of human creation were first assigned to the Renaissance masters of perspective (Nahm 1950). The word ‘design’ itself entered the English language in 1588 followed fifteen years later in 1603 by ‘causality’ (OED, causality, 1), a word that arguably lies at the conceptual heart of the Scientific Revolution and is the foundation stone of the experimental method.
4. With respect to the Arts, aesthetics as a separate branch of philosophy (generally but not exclusively associated with the Beaux Arts or Fine Arts) appeared in the late 18th century with the German philosopher Baumgarten. It is important to note that “the original meaning of the term aesthetics as coined by Baumgarten… is the theory of sensuous knowledge, as a counterpart to logic as a theory of intellectual knowledge” (Kristeller 1952, 34). In effect, Baumgarten philosophically separated Art from subordination to politics and religion a hundred years after the Scientific Revolution liberated experimental science from the same masters. As will be seen, however, formal aesthetics, like Science, distances itself from some human senses. In effect, sight and sound (the distant senses) are admitted while the contact senses of touch, taste and smell are excluded as disruptive to aesthetic contemplation. This distinguishes the sensuous (distancing) from the sensual (immediacy) (Berleant Winter 1964).
5. Where logic leads by reduction to Truth, aesthetics leads by composition or design to Beauty. In Pythagorean terms, Beauty is “…a certain unity of diverse elements, [and] … harmony can be understood as the relation of these parts to the whole, and rhythm as their relation to one another” (Dorter 1973, 74-75). And thus:
when we say that some work of art “works,” we are not
referring to its factual accuracy but to the crystallization of its facets into
a cogent harmonic and rhythmic unity.
This sense of beauty is the essential one in art, for it is certainly
possible to regard an art work as beautiful even if it is representationally
“inaccurate.” (Dorter 1973, 75-76)
6. The reference to ‘works’ as a verb catches the sense of knowledge as the result of successful design or ‘making’. This is true of the fine arts as well “works of technological intelligence” (Aldrich 1969, 381). Such artifacts are recognized or ‘known’ by their instrumental design or intent. In the philosophy of science, Michael Polanyi uses the hammer as an example (M.Polanyi 1962a, 175). In the philosophy of technology the concept is captured in terms such as ‘instrumental realism’ (Idhe 1991) and ‘instrumental epistemology’ (Baird 2004) that, in turn, derive from Heidegger’s own existential phenomenological hammer (Idhe 1991). And, in a narrower sense than I will use, Baird identifies the “design paradigm as the most promising recent development in the epistemology of technology” (Baird 2004, 149). [D]
7. The compositional unity identified
by aesthetics in the 18th century arguably led to the formation of a new school
of psychology in the 20th. Gestalt
psychology was founded by Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka
and Wolfgang Köhler in
8. In the last half of the 20th century
another incarnation of this non-rational way of knowing emerged, this time out
of cognitive psychology with the study of neural networks and out of computer
science with the study of artificial intelligence: pattern recognition. [E] Such research has led at least one observer
to conclude that Science “is just another aspect of a fundamental human
capability, that of pattern recognition and processing” (Sparkes 1972). [F]
9. In economics, Dasgupta and David identify the related concept of “technological knowledge” which they argue should not “be assigned a subordinate epistemological status” to scientific knowledge (Dasgupta & David 1994, 494). Brian Loasby (2003) places pattern recognition on the ‘the seat of consciousness’ (OED, wit, n, I.1) replacing the calculatory rationalism of the Standard Model of economics. Its inherent energy efficiency relative to continuous calculatory rationalism, has, in evolutionary terms, made it the dominant realm of human knowing. In the simplest terms, pattern recognition is dependent on the quality not the quantity of data. It is relational not reductive. According to Loasby, such patterns form ‘connections’ altering the physical structure of the brain. His concept is what I call ‘connective knowledge’ and which he derives from Adam Smith and Fredrick von Hayek (1952). Such patterns also characterize human behaviour which, when followed by many individuals, becomes what Loasby calls ‘routines’ and I call ‘institutions’, i.e., routinized patterns of collective behaviour. An example is the price system which emerged, and functions best, without conscious human planning yet is, nonetheless, a product of human intelligence (Hayek 1989) created perhaps through circular causality (Freeman 1999) or the related economic concept of cumulative causality (Myrdal 1939).
10. Similarly in the economics of Nathan Rosenberg, extensive use is made of design in his studies of innovation (1974, 1976, Rosenberg & Steinmueller 1988) and ‘the black box’ (1994). He also complains about “academic snobbery” regarding “matters involving ‘hardware,’ including techniques of instrumentation, [that] are often dismissed as constituting an inferior form of knowledge” (Rosenberg 1994, 156). Schlicht, in his turn, makes pattern recognition the means by which human institutions are structured according to “rule preference” which “is of an essentially aesthetic nature” (Schlicht 2000, 40). [G] Schilicht also notes that “customs, habits, and routines provide the bedrock for many economic and social formations yet our understanding of the processes that underlie the growth and decay of customs is very limited. The theory of social evolution has hardly commenced to evolve” (Schlicht 2000, 33). This runs, of course, completely contrary to the Benthamite underpinnings of the Standard Model in economics in which custom and tradition are excluded from consideration.
11. In the history and philosophy of technology Edwin Layton stresses design as a form of knowledge distinct from Science and highlights the central role it plays in engineering (Layton 1974). [H] Similarly Derek De Solla Price highlights the distinct cognitive impact and nature of scientific instruments compared to reason and theory. This is captured in his description of the impact of Galileo’s telescope as “artificial revelation” (Price 1984, 9). [I]
1. Whether it is called aesthetics, art, custom, design, function, gestalt, institutions, intuition, paradigm, pattern construction or recognition, revelation, symbolism or technological knowledge, there lurks behind the bright light of Science an amorphous non-rational way of knowing. Accordingly, the portmanteau term ‘Design’ is chosen because the notion is abstract and no unequivocal, clear-cut definition can be offered. [J]
2. This dark realm mints a coin with two sides: pattern construction and recognition. Both involve diverse pieces of knowledge expressed in matter (or mind) fitted together into a coherent whole. When this occurs a work of aesthetic or technological intelligence ‘works’, i.e., a gestalt awareness occurs in the mind or a physical device functions as designed. One connexion between works of aesthetic and technological intelligence is the Pythagorean cognate relationship or pattern between number and matter. Another is the ancient Greek word techne meaning, to the ancient Greeks, both the 'useful arts' as in technology and the ‘fine arts’.
3. This way of knowing, Design, I contend, plays a critical role in the competitiveness of nations in a global knowledge-based economy. But how can this duality be reconciled, or, in terms of the Ancients, how can we achieve enantiodromia – a resolution of opposites? One way is to simply accept their opposition and use each as appropriate. This is the solution in physics with respect to the particle/wave paradox of light. Alternatively, one may be considered a special case of, or descendent from, the other, e.g., Science as a special case of Design, or vice versa.
4, If Design is a special case of Science then resolution lies in the material world of DNA, neurons, lobes and brain stems. This leads us back, however, to circular causality (Freeman 1999). Thus while higher order states like consciousness may arise from matter, the mechanisms by which they arise, and how these complicated states once established sustain themselves is problematic at best. And another meta-methodological dilemma also arises. I know that I know and it is with this reality that I must deal no matter the epiphenomenal nature of my consciousness.
5. If, on the other hand, Science is a
special case of Design then we should be able to identify not just differences
but also commonalities. In many ways
Science, especially experimental instrumental science, is an organized and
collective pattern of human behaviour, i.e.,
a recognizable institution that has been called ‘The Republic of Science’ (M. Polany
1962b). This is a behavioural pattern that, in evolutionary terms, has been
laid down very recently, and remains very fragile: it is only about four
hundred years old (Kuhn [1962] 1996, 167-168). [K]
It is so recent, in fact, that Joseph Henderson in his analysis of psycho-cultural
attitudes - social, religious, aesthetic and philosophic – concludes: “we
cannot claim for science… the same epistemological authenticity that we can
demonstrate in the four basic cultural attitudes” (Henderson 1984, 77).
[L]
6. Another facet of being a special
case of a higher order is evidence of that higher order operating within the
special case. Sparkes
thus concludes: “pattern recognition is undoubtedly a deeply ingrained human
capability, and that it should be used for the kind of information processing
which goes on in science seems beyond reasonable doubt” (Sparkes 1972, 41). The repeated use of the terms aesthetics,
design, gestalt and intuition by Thomas Kuhn in explaining The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is also evidence of the
operation of Design within Science.
7. Even the media used by Reason and
Science – language and mathematics – can arguably be considered examples of Design.
It has thus been argued that the nature
of the Greek alphabet itself facilitated development of Western thought. Marshall McLuhan,
following the lead of his mentor, Harold Innis (1950,
1951) noted that we recognize the fundamental differences between the perception
of literate and preliterate peoples but we do not appreciate the impact of different
alphabets. McLuhan argues that only phonetically
literate man lives in a ‘rational’ or ‘pictorial’ space. The
discovery or invention of such a cognitive space that is uniform, continuous
and connected was an environmental effect of the phonetic alphabet in the
sensory life of ancient
8. And if a phonetic alphabet creates a rational space in the mind then mathematics surely creates a ‘surpra-rational’ one. In this extreme space only the most rational of hypotheses can be formulated if they are to be proved. Arguably it was this patterning, first recognized by Pythagoras as the cognate relationship between matter and number that led the Logical Positivists to restrict knowledge to purely propositional terms best expressed in the language of mathematics. From this perspective language and mathematics are advanced forms of Design with literacy and numeracy sophisticated forms of pattern recognition.
9. The distinction is between Science which
relies on words and numbers, i.e., semiotic
ciphers perceived mainly by sight, and Design which calls on a wider range of elements
of Mind and Matter acquired through all the senses - sight, sound, smell, touch
and taste. In turn, if Science is but a
special case of Design then the question arises as to the origins of Design
itself. Our first ancestor homo habilis or
the ‘handy man’ (
It is with our hands that,
fundamentally, we perform as artists in the technological operation. As such, our soul is in our hands. The eye may guide the hand but, in this
case, the seeing is for the sake of the handling. Technological intelligence does not come
to rest in the eye or the ear. Its
consummation is in the hand. (Aldrich 1969, 382)
10. Even as Science explores deeper into matter and farther out into space, it too uncovers patterns or Design. Fractal mathematics is a case in point. Discovered by Mandelbrot in 1975, a fractal denotes shapes that are the same from close and far away. Arguably, this form of mathematics confirms the old alchemistic adage: “As Above, So Below”. A fractal is a “mathematically conceived curve such that any small part of it, enlarged, has the same statistical character as the original” (OED, fractal, n, a). The term entered English through a Scientific American article in 1975:
It seems that mountain relief, islands, lakes, the
holes in Appenzeller and Ementhaler
cheeses, the craters of the moon, the distribution of stars close to us in the
galaxy and a good deal more can be described by the use of generalized Brownian
motions and the idea of the fractal dimension. (OED, fractal, n, a)
11. Thus the laws of nature are, in a sense, also examples of Design. The human tendency to make and see Design everywhere finds ultimate expression, rightly or wrongly, in ‘The Argument from Design’, an ancient argument for the existence of God:
In its most fresh and innocent form, it went something
like this: you can tell by observing the order in the universe that the
universe has been designed. This implies
the existence of the Designer, whom, as Aquinas said, men call God. According to the wonderful story that this
suggested, in the Beginning was the Designer with his Design or Purpose. (Aldrich 1969, 379)
12. This is, of course, the foundation of what is known in theological circles as ‘intelligent design’. On the much more prosaic level of the competition of nations in a global knowledge-based economy, Alfred Lord Marshall noted long ago that: “it is every day more true that it is the pattern which sells the things” (emphasis added, Marshall 1920; 178).
The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy